Imagination and Depth
I am musing on imagination right now. How do we access the deepest reaches of it? How do we strengthen imagination around realities that we have not yet seen? How do we imagine the unknown?
Pathwork lecture 241 says:
“Everything that is within and without is the richest stuff of life. Every particle contains every conceivable possibility of the richest experience you can imagine or much much more than you can imagine. Even your imagination must grow on your journey, as everything grows and moves, so your capacity for imagination must also grow. What you cannot perceive as a possibility you can not experience.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer says “How can we begin to move towards an ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?”
Megan Watterson shares “If I could write the beginning it wouldn't be in the light, it would be in the womb in the dark, in a cave, in an egg, in the body.
I wrote this poem in 2020, and shared it last year in this newsletter. I feel compelled to share it again, there may be come clues in it about strengthening this muscle of imagining the unknown.
“I fantasize of falling into my own darkness,
Stripping my days of even the most pleasurable of plans
Watching the tendrils of life slip around me.
I dream of an empty space,
Of warm dirt i can sleep in
Of sand that forms along the edges of my body
Cradling me
While the ocean repeats her crashing lullaby again and again
I dream of a fertile imagination scape
Where the guides can whisper in my ears
The ones that lie at the dissolved edge of my knowing, singing the advances of night.
Can we disappear into our darkness and complete this depth of transformation?
The wind will answer-
how can this (not) be
Nothing is solid.
The water will answer
I will fall and you will too.
The sun will answer
I stay here burning but disappear on my journey somethings.
The earth will answer
Drop into me and i will hold you
The space will answer
I am what you are looking for what you are afraid of-
I am unmanifested and I am potential
I Am the night
BODY PRACTICE:
Take a moment or several moments
To really feel your body in this moment,
right now
Check in with the surfaces you are resting on..
The places where your sitz bones are touching a surface,
Your back, your feet
Somewhere you are in contact with something else,
and let your awareness rest in
To those points
Feel the force of gravity as it moves through you all the time
You have been in relationship with gravity since before you were born
And your body will be in relationship with gravity after you die
You are of this earth and this moment
Let everything you have been doing before this moment and everything that you most certainly and assuredly will do later, any tendrils of those thoughts and ideas and actions that are moving out from you like strings, let them come back into you and land in this moment. Land in your body, curl back into you.
and if there is resistance feel that as well. Full permission right now to… be in your beingness.
Continue to feel your body in the room.
You’re breathing and notice you’re breathing. Take a moment now to sit firmly in the seat of observation and notice that you are breathing because you are alive.
Breath is movement.
What parts of you are moving as you breathe?
Does the expanding, filling movement have a different quality than the breathing out?
Do you have an attachment to one or the other?
Does one feel better, do you like one, or does one feel safer than the other?
And what about the places in between? The pregnant pause of when the inhale arcs towards the exhale and that quiet decomposed space where the inhale releases before the exhale.
Indulge in the in between. The space between breathes, the stillness between movement, the quiet between sounds. Rest here, enlivening the awareness of the undoing.
Take another moment here in breathing, sensing, being in this moment. As best you can.