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In the spring of 1971, after a series of albums that hadn’t performed quite as well as he’d hoped, David Bowie stood in front of a mirror and wrote himself a way out. With the song ‘Changes’, he urged himself to “turn and face the strange” – lyrics that many biographers have since read as an artistic manifesto for the reinventions that defined his career.
In the July/August issue of Resurgence & Ecologist, we explored the inner work of liberation. This September/October issue turns to other questions: what does change actually ask of us? And how does it happen?
It is easy to imagine change as something that begins somewhere else. It’s harder to recognise that it also asks something of us: that we loosen our grip on familiar ways of living. As writer Sophie Strand observed in the May/June issue, perhaps the strange is not some distant future, but sobriety itself – the clear-eyed recognition of how deeply our lives have become entangled in systems of extraction and separation.
To face the strange, then, is not simply to embrace the new. It is to rediscover what has always been real: our dependence on this animate Earth, with whom we share our every breath. As we link hands with one another and the other-than-human, we begin to imagine and inhabit different ways of living and being. That is the journey this issue sets out to explore.
The pieces that follow explore how systems change, how stories shape transformation, how power can be reclaimed through citizenship and participation, and how new futures begin long before they become the norm. Together they remind us that while change is inevitable, the form it takes remains an open question – one that asks each of us, like Bowie before the mirror, to turn and face the strange.
After all, the strange isn’t the difficult choice – staying put is.
