Imagining Ourselves Into...
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Dear friends,
A couple of days ago I had the joy of being a guest speaker for a class at Bellarmine University entitled "Faith and Imagination."
Wanting to spark the imagination of students, I pulled out an excerpt from adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy (you can find the excerpt at the end of this blog post). We read the excerpt aloud and then I guided students through a group writing experiment. I invited students to begin to write a stream-of-consciousness response to what they had just read and heard. After writing for a couple of minutes, they passed their paper to another student to continue writing. And then another, and another. I told them that they could respond to the previous writer, continue along the same vein, or take the writing in a totally different direction. I had no idea how it would go or what would happen on their pages.
At the end of the experiment, students received the papers they had begun and read all that had transpired. One student said the writing time was too short to get her thoughts in order. I replied that the purpose wasn't to get thoughts in order, but to get the thoughts on paper, which are not always the same. We had a little time to discuss what did find its way to paper: questions about imagination and reality, what they are, and how they interact; dismay that imagination is often encouraged in children, but discouraged as we move to and through adulthood; comments about how imagination can both lead us toward contruction and healing or destruction and harm. There was so much richness I wish we'd had more time to explore.
Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. Many people engage in Lenten pactices, often giving up something for the season (who among you Catholics or former Catholics has given up sweets or meat for Lent?) Three years ago, I decided that instead of giving something up, I wanted to engage my imagination and take something up. Each day I made a 4" x 6" watercolor painting with a reminder for myself. The first was "I am allowed to rest"; the last, "I trust in abundance." This daily practice helped ground me during the early days of the pandemic, when it felt like we were being uprooted and tossed about. I didn't know how much I needed the creative practice and I didn't know that these reminders would become Cards for Remembering. My imagination hadn't taken me that far. It was only as I took step after step into creative imagining that I discovered the messages and images weren't just for me.
I use the cards now regularly. They still ground me, affirm what I know, challenge me ("I am allowed not to know" has been appearing frequently of late), and invite me to imagine ("In challenging times I lean into cReaTivity"). As I type, I am considering what to take up this year for Lent. I don't yet know. I hope to find clarity soon. I'll take time later to allow my mind and heart to wander and imagine me into a practice.
What about you?
How do you engage your imagination?
What have you imagined into being?
I'd love to know.
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I imagine a world in which we are connected to our needs, our feelings, our body's wisdom (both individual and collective bodies) and, through that connection, we live into our core of love and we thrive. These imaginings fuel my work and I am excited to have a number of events and offerings coming up that I hope will take us a few steps closer to the world I imagine.
At 1:00 ET today, my interview with Michaela Daystar in her YouTube series Reiki Crossroads & Connections premiers. We talk about intersections of energy work, art, peacemaking, mysticism, and more! You can listen when it airs or later on.
I also have a number of Compassionate Communication offerings coming up. on Monday, February 27, join me for a 1-hour introductory workshop: What's Beneath Our Words? Starting March 9, we delve into the foundational pieces of Compassionate Communication with my Meeting in the Field of Connection class. Whether these are refreshers or your first time with these skills, come join me!
Finally, as my 50th birthday fast approaches, I've been imagining how I might celebrate with you! I'll soon be sharing special offers on my art- Cards for Remembering decks, prints, and original art!
Wondering about and imagining our next connection,
Cory
Excerpt from the introduction to adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy
A visionary exploration of humanity includes imagination…
Imagination is shaped by our entire life experience, our socialization, the concepts we are exposed to, where we fall in the global hierarchy of society.
Our ideas of right and wrong shift with time—right now it’s clear to me that something is wrong if it hurts this planet. But if we don’t claim the future, that sense of loyalty to earth, of environmentalism, could become outdated. Kenny Bailey helped me understand this—that justice, rights, things we take for granted, are not permanent. Once there were kings and queens all over the earth. Someday we might speak of presidents and CEOs in past tense only.
It is so important that we fight for the future, get into the game, get dirty, get experimental. How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material?
We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure, because it’s all data.
But first we imagine.
We are in an imagination battle.
Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many other are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, racialized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.
Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.
All of this imagining, in the poverty of our current system, is heightened because of scarcity economics. There isn’t enough, so we need to hoard, enclose, divide, fence up, and prioritize resources and people.
We have to imagine beyond those fears. We have to ideate—imagine and conceive—together.
We must imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms, so that no one sees Black people as murderers, or Brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as potential cultural and economic innovators. This is a time-travel exercise for the heart. This is collaborative ideation—what are the ideas that will liberate all of us?
The more people that collaborate on that ideation, the more that people will be served by the resulting world(s)…
It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.
What we pay attention to grown, so I’m thinking about how we grow what we are all imagining and creating into something large enough and solid enough that it becomes a tipping point...
As Toni Cade Bambara has taught us, we must make just and liberated futures irresistible. We are all the protagonists of what might be called the great turning, the change. The new economy, the new world.
And I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility of wholeness in it. That’s how I work as a healer: when a body is between my hands, I let wholeness pour through. We are all healers too—we are creating possibilities, because we are seeing a future full of wholeness.