A Spring Cleaning For Your Imagination
Who decides what is possible for you and me to imagine?
Happy Spring in the Northern Hemisphere!
Reclaiming our collective imagination
In honor of this season of growth and change, I propose a Spring Cleaning for your Imagination. I’ve started with my own, and have been moodling over what this means for me a bit, and I’ve come up with a few things I want to share with you.
“So you see, the imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering. ” - Brenda Ueland, “If You Want To Write”
Your imagination needs play, time off to not have to do a whole lot, and just general mucking about with whatever you feel like doing. Or not doing.
Imagination is how our spirits create. We imagine, visualize, see, create a new image. If we are already packed to the gills with demands to Do this or that, never having time to sit and be, walk in nature, just look at the world around us with new eyes - we will be limited with what we can imagine.
Late stage capitalism has created a system that leads to a lack of imagination. The blind pursuit of money and profit is truly unimaginative, especially while there are so many other worthwhile ways to spend one’s energy. Creativity is often relegated to the back burner, if it even makes the cut at all. A system in which making money is more important than joy, peace, health, and love cannot value those activities that make people happy, well, and create peace among people.
For example: art, music, dance, movies, performance of all kinds. The arts are the first budget cuts across the board, for a reason. Meanwhile, there’s always money for the military, and for war.
Art speaks to the spirit. When the spirit of the people is alive and well and creating, the people lead.
It is really difficult to control anyone who has the energy, space and time to imagine a new and different way of doing things, and the ability to act on those dreams.
Over-working leads to a lowered ability to dream, hope, and have the energy to even imagine something different. Worrying about making ends meet destroys the will to create a new picture. This is intended. It’s easier to control people who are limited in their ability to imagine a new and different way of being. Many of our politicians and leaders suffer from a real lack of imagination.
Except of course, when the human ability to imagine is turned against us: zombie plagues, actual pandemics, who gets to have housing, healthcare, food, clean water, and the underfunded, undervalued and abused education system in the USA.
There are those who seemingly have nothing better to do than write laws to control the freedom, creativity, and expression that bursts out of each human spirit when given the space, time, and freedom to allow it to do so. So books are banned, drag shows are outlawed and maligned, laws governing women’s bodies are mandated - while liars and insane people have bully pulpits available for their toxic messages 24/7. Meanwhile, others start their own little empires on their YouTube and TikTok channels, capturing the imagination of millions.
Your imagination can be captured by someone or something.
Maybe the thing you allow to capture your imagination is the latest magical realist novel you read, maybe it’s a fun film or documentary you saw (check out The Elephant Whisperers - I’m still captured by it!). Perhaps you write, garden, paint, read, make music, spend time in nature, go see live theatre and music, have fun conversations with friends. How do you play?
Your imagination affects your ability to create your own reality. When you choose to feed your imagination with the things and people who validate creativity, imagination, invention, curiosity, it becomes easier for you to exercise these muscles for yourself.
This begins in your spirit, and you might need to do some spiritual work on yourself to have access to this part of you. Especially if you find yourself taken over by negative and hopeless images, or energies that insist you don’t have anything worth sharing or contributing, or anyone who is a complete pessimist - you might need a Spring Cleaning for your imagination.
Pessimism will kill your imagination if you allow it to do so. If this is something you find yourself caught up in, you can change it if you wish.
Pessimism, contrary to how some see it, is not reality.
Imagination, and where we each focus our vision - is how we create reality.
Imagination is a form of planning. - Gloria Steinem
Who or what has captured your imagination? Capture your own imagination, and use it!
Listening to others predict the future gets in the way of imagining your own future. Do you need a prediction so that you can imagine around it?
Here’s a few ways to use and stimulate your imagination: read fiction; go out in nature; travel; seek out new experiences; make art; listen to music and dance; exercise; hang out with people who can imagine and dream; practice meditation.
Readings and Healings by Kris Cahill
Clairvoyant readings and healings are very helpful for you as you grow and create in your life. A reading or healing can help you to get stuck energy moving again.
A hello to your spirit is a beautiful gift to give yourself.
New podcast episode
Resources for your imagination:
Why Reading Fiction is Good For you
Pronoia by Rob Brezsny
The Art of the Seer Foundation Class
“At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing thinking - whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.” -Octavia E. Butler
We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars - Oscar Wilde
I loved the Elephant Whisperers!! Such a beautiful movie!