"All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” - Octavia E. Butler
As a coach, I spend a lot of time using what I’ve learned to guide others. One of the things I encourage anyone in any profession to do, is to step outside of your professional space and bring in information from a broad space. It gives you breadth outside of the depth of your professional knowledge and comfort zone.
In Octavia. E. Butler’s book, Parable of the Sower, we experience a dystopian United States (specifically California), in which we could be living the prequel to. After all, Butler did state that she simply extrapolated a future based on the present time that she wrote this book.
I had read part of Parable of the Sower before leaving for Korea and it didn’t really hit me at the time. The story didn’t grab me and take me away as I had expected. I had heard an interview of Octavia Butler on NPR, and became intrigued by the notion that she was the first Black female science fiction writer, inspiring many to come after. As Black people, we never had time to dream about a science fictional future. Afro-futurism was yet to be born… The books that I had read by Black authors were often biographies, narratives, or commentary on social issues. Yet here this woman was, painting a picture of a possible future perspectives, centering a Black female lead character.
Time was something I had a lot of in those late summer and early fall days in Korea. I would sit in my room and do a Korean language lesson, then
