What Happened to Icarus?

You are invited to imagine that your great-grandchildren have come to you in a dream. They want to know what you did when democracy was stolen, when the forests burned and the waters were poisoned, when dissidents and migrants were rounded up. 

They want to know how they can fall in love with such a flawed and sorrowful world. 

In this workshop, we will tell and re-tell the stories of our becoming through a deep inquiry into this moment in history. The truth is that we cannot solve our problems without first understanding the stories that got us here—and reimagining them. This requires something beyond mere ideas; it requires us to reimagine ourselves from the inside out. It requires not merely new technologies; we need new stories, new pedagogies, new poetics.

Drawing from the book What Happened to Icarus: Encountering the Unfathomable in a World in Crisis, we will begin with an honest confrontation with the despair of this apocalyptic moment, interweaving our personal stories with the cultural mythologies that have led us to the brink of apocalypse. In the second phase, we will engage in a process of collective reimagining, exploring new possibilities, new stories for a new worldview, and how to apply them to our systems and our work in the world.

This workshop is presented in collaboration and dialogue with the Imaginari Fellowship and the ReImagine: Self & World(view) program. Participants will be invited to continue to reimagine their work post-workshop through those networks.

Thursday, May 21, 6-8pm CST
Registration fee: $25 | Zoom

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Theodore Richards is an educator, writer, and philosopher. He is the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project and Co-founder of The Great Work Fellowship. His work is dedicated to re-imagining education and creating new narratives about our place in the world. He has received degrees from various institutions, including the University of Chicago and The California Institute of Integral Studies, but has learned just as much studying the martial art of Bagua; teaching in various settings and students; and as a traveler from the Far East to the Middle East, from southern Africa to the South Pacific. He is the author of nine books and numerous literary awards, including two Nautilus Book Awards and three Independent Publisher Awards. His latest book, What Happened to Icarus, is now available. He lives on the south side of Chicago with his wife and three daughters.