Can You Imagine...?

“If you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.”
―Alice Walker

I talk to trees a lot. In winter I imagine them being ancient women clustered together for warmth and chattering amongst themselves. They talk about what I am thinking, what everyone passing by is thinking and how silly we are to be so preoccupied with our hurt feelings and shortcomings. These Tree Women are not unkind; just realistic. I imagine the Tree Women as guardians of a portal to some Divine Knowing and so they see everything and know everything. When I walk the dog, I talk with the Tree Women and try to listen. It's hard to hear them above the incessant ping-ponging of my mind, but I try.

Today the Tree Women reminded me to use my Imagination. Imagine this, they said: What if your Imagination is the repository of ideas of the wildest delight streaming constantly from only-God-knows- where, like fish into a magic lake. You are mesmerized by the glittery flow-y fish tails and startling blue stripes and iridescent yellow spots and frilly lavender fins as the fish swim around looking for nourishment. Admiring from afar, like a scene in Fern Gulley, you are positively taken by LOVE for these fish. Normally, your mind with its steel jaws of destruction, says 'that's nice', and then impels you to answer a text on your phone. But this time, imagine you didn't do that, the Tree Women say, and instead you jumped into the lake with the amazing technicolor fish and started swimming and breathing with them? What would happen if you gave these magical beings some food and oxygen? What are the Fantastic Fish saying to you?

Well, I'll tell you, at first all I heard was “this is a flashback from those mushrooms back in 1978.” But I let that pass, and then I heard: If you love it, do it. You MUST do it.

Perhaps, just maybe, the Tree Women were saying that all there IS, is Love, and all there is to do is follow what and who you love wherever Love takes you. How you know what you love is by allowing your Imagination to have its way with you. If you love reading, and you'd love to be a writer, imagine being a writer. If over and over you are tantalized and drawn to making things and to people who make things, imagine being a maker. Allow your Imagination to place you smack dab in the middle of, swimming in, breathing in, what you love.

Years ago when my marriage was ending, I dared to imagine, to visualize, to conjure the state of being in love with a woman instead of my husband. My next thought was “this way lies madness.” People will be hurt; families will be destroyed; careers will crumble. I must kill this idea now. I could not imagine the situation turning out any other way.

But over time, I let Imagination provide a free space to explore myself, to nurture the truth of the matter. Imagination said, “What if this is not hopeless, what if this is true for you, and there is a way to take care of those you love?” Imagining there was a way, no matter how mysterious and impossible it seemed in the moment, helped me navigate the difficult journey to end the marriage with integrity and respect, to preserve my family, and to begin a new chapter, fully myself. We did not avoid pain, far from it, but we survived it together. What began as unimaginable-- to love truthfully with self-honesty-- became reality.

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.
Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” ―Gloria Steinem

When used for the highest good, Imagination can free the constraints of pragmatism and the ego's pull for safety and certainty. How can you use Imagination for Joy, for Love?