The Daily: 14 March 2026

Today is Pi Day, 3.14… (The date sort of breaks down after the first two decimal points. It was fun in 2015 though…) Most people ignore this date. It’s really only noted among nerds… But in the last few years, I’ve turned it into a whole new thing — Pie in the Sky Day. This is my day to dream big. For one day, I don’t bother with pragmatism…

I think we all need a day to dream, to imagine, to immerse ourselves in visions of where we’d like to go. I think this is more needful now than ever. Because while there are things we can’t imagine away — like biophysical breakdown and gravity and death — we can certainly imagine better ways to cope, perhaps even to thrive. We are facing so many crises, it’s hard to think about one more. But many of the barriers to action, or even thought, are bound up with a root crisis that isn’t much discussed — a crisis of imagination. We haven’t been using our imaginations and we’ve largely forgotten how. In fact, there is substantial evidence that many of us simply can’t dream anymore, can’t create, can’t see any other path than the one we are plodding along in despair. (Or the paths of fake images we see on screens… which is not unrelated…)

As in all things, a good way to reclaim this basic human skill is to use it, to flex our imagination muscles, to turn off the messaging that steals our dreams and remember how to dream for ourselves. So I’ve set a day where I ask myself what I want, and then I imagine ways to get there. Usually around Imbolg, the Enkindling, I begin to figure out what I’d like in my life and in the world. Then on Pie in the Sky Day, I sit down and see myself in the world that I want. I write down those visions, noting as many details as possible, paying close attention to how happy I am in these dreams. If I don’t feel it, then it’s probably not worth pursuing… I don’t allow defeatism to limit the possibilities, though this is not fantasy. I’m not imagining flying broomsticks or an end to illness or a world without climate change. That’s just reality and if my dreams don’t fit, then they aren’t very good dreams. (No matter how lovely…) But I distinguish between real material obstacles and the ideological blocks on possibility.

Because despair rarely comes from the limits of reality. It comes from the limits imposed on us by a culture with an agenda. That agenda is not reality; it is the dogmatic framework built by the people who benefit from it. They do everything they can to make us believe that their agenda is fact, to make us forget that these are just human ideas, their ideas, not even ours. And that project has worked. We don’t remember that things like hierarchy and gratuitous violence and money and homelessness are nothing more than figments of our cultural imagination, no more real than flying broomsticks. In fact, it takes a good deal more work to get us to believe in these cultural artifacts that harm us than it does to convince us that magic is real. If they stopped the gaslighting for just a few minutes, we’d all soon see that none of these ideas are real or necessary — or desired.

And that is what Pie in the Sky Day is for. To help us penetrate the agenda smoke-screen and blow it all away. A day to proclaim that my ideas are just as valid as those of the parasite class. My ideas are just as real. And they benefit me. Imagine that! Also… because I am a pagan animist, they benefit everyone else as well. And I like to think that they are far more practical than a credo that is dependent upon monumental atrocities such as war and institutional racism and ecocide — which are all extremely expensive in every way…

In Finding Our Niche: Toward a Restorative Human Ecology, anthropologist Philip A Loring reminds us that most foundational principles in EuroWestern cultural thought were nothing more than speculation. He points out that authors like Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith were working in a state of near complete ignorance of most human history and development. They had no more accurate idea of human nature than they knew of subatomic particles or cosmic microwave background radiation — because they had little information on humans other than the ones in their immediate lives. They didn’t even know that humans have been around for a long time and that we have ancestry stretching back to the beginning of life on this planet — which they also knew nothing about…

And let me expand on that… we still don’t have a clear picture of what it is to be a human. We are only beginning to understand our roots and our paths through the world. We have only begun to tease out the matter of mind within matter. We are only now learning that we are a small part of a much greater story. And we may never be able to comprehend that subject — because ultimately we are the subject. Everything we think on the human place in the world is, by definition, subjective. But we know a hell of a lot more than the “great minds” of the Enlightenment. And it’s time to use our knowledge to dream big, to dream better than they did!

Have you noticed how much of the propaganda in this culture is directed at falsifying our lived experience, our histories, our personalities, our desires, even the real facts of day to day life? They don’t want us to know what is real, what actually happened, what is actually happening — and who is benefitting from all of it. It is particularly stark in the screen promotion of the current US regime. To advertise their agenda of power aggrandizemet, they’re using movie clips and video game imagery, pictures that are patently false, unreal, fake. With this image bombardment, they’re trying to convince our eyes that this imagined violence is their strength, trying to make us see heroism in murderous DHS thugs and dropping bombs on school-children, trying to alter our perception so that we accept these harmful acts that benefit them as normal. And that normalizing is crucial… not least because if you don’t support the atrocities, the mirror of the message is that you will suffer under them. If you do not believe their false images are good and true, then you are meant to fear and stay quiet… because, they say, this is just how humans are. And we’re just better than you.

But if you turn off the screens you know that’s not true… The real camera footage shows us standing up for our neighbors. It shows us coming together. It shows the care we give to the world. It also shows just how bizarrely deranged and small and impotent our elite class has become. The real images show us unhinged lunatics flailing about with spittle and lies flying, people who are clearly unable to comprehend anything or effect anything but useless destruction. These people are not normal. The things they do are not normal. Their ideas about the world are about as abnormal as it is possible to be. If this were normal, there would be no humanity by now… though they seem to be working hard to effect just that. These are sick people with demented dreams… and we can all see that…. when we clear our heads of their insidious lies and brutal propaganda.

So, today, take a few hours to think of a better world. You might not be in the mood to dream up ways to dethrone a false king. Maybe you’d just like to see ways to improve your own life, make your own path in this world healthier for you and your place. But if you’re like me, then one thing leads to the next (because everything is relationship, after all…). Something as simple as an idea for a new job, one more in line with your priorities, can quickly snowball into questioning the reasons we even have jobs at all — especially with most of the work we need done in our own lives either done by someone else for hire or shoved into the corners of our days.

Don’t limit your ideas to the ideology. Let your creative mind break free and soar, as is your birthright. Imagine beauty and abundance and serenity. Imagine what you want to see in the world. Write down your visions. If you like, share your ideas. Who knows, maybe you’ll find that many people share your dreams — which is the best path to making dreams real and bringing that pie down from the sky.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2026