15 Dec Manifesting a Vision

If there is one thing I’ve come to know throughout my career, one essential element in manifesting a vision in the world is the very powerful act of clearly writing down one’s goals and intentions in great detail. Stating one’s intention is not some psycho-spiritual woo-woo concept, but a very real way to move from idea to manifestation. Identifying a specific goal forces you to clarify where you are going and how you want to get there. Writing it down situates an idea outside of your mind and into the world. With a new level of clarity, and with work and projects that are well grounded and go beyond personal benefit, you also open up possibilities for help to arrive in many ways and from many directions. This has been my experience over and over.

My practice of establishing goals, and writing them down, is itself grounded in a quotation I often return to, one typically attributed to Goethe despite scant evidence it actually comes from him. Still, I love the line: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

Excerpted from “Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier”  (Chelsea Green, 2016) by Michael Ableman

Street Farm is the inspirational account of residents in the notorious Low Track in Vancouver, British Columbia―one of the worst urban slums in North America―who joined together to create an urban farm as a means of addressing the chronic problems in their neighborhood. It is a story of recovery, of land and food, of people, and of the power of farming and nourishing others as a way to heal our world and ourselves.

Michael Ableman is a farmer, author, photographer and urban and local food systems advocate. Michael has been farming organically since the 1970′s and is considered one of the pioneers of the organic farming and urban agriculture movements. Ableman is a frequent lecturer to audiences all over the world, and the winner of numerous awards for his work.