What remains when the ashes settle — and what begins anew.
By Gary Mobley · Moreel Pics and Words
There are moments in history when it feels like everything familiar has turned to ash. The ground shifts beneath us — truth bends, tempers flare, faith thins — and the air itself feels heavy with endings.
But if Octavia E. Butler taught us anything, it’s that ash is not the end. Ash is soil. And beneath it, something waits to be born.
The Courage to See
Butler didn’t write to comfort us. She wrote to prepare us. In her worlds, the future is not a faraway dream; it’s an inheritance we’re shaping right now — through our choices, our courage, and our capacity to change.
Her words have always felt prophetic, but today they feel personal. Because we, too, are standing in a world unraveling — facing the same questions her characters faced:
How do we hold on to hope when the world feels like it’s burning?
How do we build something better from the ruins?
In Parable of the Sower, Butler’s young heroine, Lauren Olamina, looks out over a society collapsing under greed, violence, and denial — a world that looks unsettlingly like our own.
Yet Lauren refuses to surrender to despair. She writes her own creed:
“All that you touch you Change.
All that you Change, changes you.
The only lasting truth is Change.”
For Butler, change was never abstract. It was spiritual, moral, and deeply human. She called us to recognize that the power to transform the world begins with the willingness to be transformed ourselves.
We live in a time where fear often masquerades as certainty — where outrage is easier than vision. Butler invites us to do the harder thing: to see clearly, to feel deeply, and to build anyway.
Her work insists that real courage is not found in escape, but in creation — in the small, stubborn act of imagining something new when the old world no longer holds.
The Weight of Memory
In Kindred, Butler collapsed time, sending her modern protagonist back into the brutal past of slavery. It was a journey that made memory inescapable — and truth unavoidable. Because Butler knew that what we refuse to face, we repeat.
“I couldn’t let her come back whole,” Butler once said of her character Dana. “Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”
She understood that the past is not behind us. It breathes in our choices, our fears, and our institutions. And healing — real healing — requires that we look directly at what made us, without becoming it.
That lesson feels urgent today. Our nation still wrestles with old ghosts — of race, power, and belonging — that refuse to stay buried.
Remembrance is not punishment. It is liberation.
It’s how we make sure that the future we’re building isn’t just a prettier version of the past we’ve survived.
Imagination as Survival
Butler once said she wrote herself into the future because no one else was going to do it for her. She refused the narrow scripts handed to her — as a Black woman, as a dreamer, as someone who saw the world too clearly.
Through her characters, she gave voice to what so many of us know in our bones: Survival is not the same as living.
To survive is to endure; to live is to imagine.
And imagination, for Butler, was not fantasy — it was resistance. It was the radical act of believing in something different, even when every sign said you shouldn’t.
That’s why her stories still resonate — because they don’t offer easy hope. They offer responsibility.
If we want a better world, she tells us, we have to build it — not with slogans, but with systems of care, courage, and accountability. Her fiction, in truth, is a leadership manual written in the language of prophecy.
Rising From the Ashes
We are, all of us, living through the long aftermath of fire. A global pandemic that fractured certainty. A climate in collapse. A culture wrestling with inequity, grief, and fatigue.
“The future is not something that happens to us — it’s something we make.”
And so, the question before us is not if change will come — but how we will meet it.
Will we rebuild in the image of what was? Or dare to design what could be?
Every day, in quiet ways, people are choosing the latter. Teachers planting courage in classrooms. Artists naming truths the world wants to forget. Communities finding ways to protect one another when institutions fail.
These are the builders Butler wrote about — the ones who understand that resistance is not only refusal. It is creation.
The Seed
In the final pages of Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina writes:
“The Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.”
That vision wasn’t about leaving Earth. It was about expanding what it means to be human — to keep growing, even when the soil seems barren.
That is the work before us now. To rise from the murkiness of these times not untouched, but transformed. To build communities that hold both accountability and empathy. To remember that leadership, at its root, is not domination — it’s design.
And to know that even when the world feels beyond repair, there is always something alive beneath the ash.
So if you find yourself weary — if the headlines ache and the future feels uncertain — remember this:
You are not the ruins.
You are the soil.
And the soil is where everything new begins.
The fire becomes image, voice, and motion in the newest episode of The Mirror and the Window.
Experience the story behind the words — where Octavia E. Butler’s vision meets the present moment.
🎥 Watch the companion video here »
Editor’s Note
After the Fire is part of the creative series Seeds of Fire: Mirrors of Truth, an exploration of Black thought, art, and imagination through the voices of visionaries who dared to see beyond their time.
This chapter honors Octavia E. Butler — a writer who didn’t predict the future but prepared us for it.
The series asks a simple, enduring question: How do we build when the world breaks?
Through Baldwin’s mirror, Lorde’s fire, and Butler’s seed, we trace a lineage of resistance — truth, courage, creation — that continues to guide those working to reimagine leadership, justice, and belonging.
If you’ve read this far, then you are already part of that work. Keep tending what grows.
Gary Mobley is a business management consultant, leadership coach, and creative storyteller. Through Moreel Pics and Words, he explores the intersections of art, identity, and imagination — using photography, writing, and narrative to illuminate what connects us.
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