How do you furnish your imagination?

How do you furnish your imagination?

I asked this question of myself a few weeks ago. Turns out the brain can get pretty exhausted when you’re relying on it to regularly produce billable, creative content. Thinkers, dreamers, wonderers, questioners, challengers—if you’re one of these, you probably put a lot of pressure on your brain. Especially the imagination, that function which allows us to take an outside approach to something we consider to be familiar…  and see it in a completely new light. Imaginations are powerful. They are quite a big responsibility. But pretty often, we just set our imaginations loose and then expect them to show up when we need them.

Athletes care for their bodies, singers care for their voices. Your work is ideas; how do you care for your imagination?

This is question I’m exploring. Athletes, singers, and dancers are committed to caring for their bodies. Yet how intentional am I when it comes to my imagination? How seriously do we take imagination?

What discipline are you practicing? What freedom do you allow?

Discipline and freedom are two sides of the same coin. Creativity lives somewhere in the tension between the two. Discipline acts inside of creativity – once an idea is birthed, discipline rolls up the sleeves to get it done. But it also acts outside of creativity – providing a structure to unmotivated, colourless moments. Discipline keeps a slow build of resources which are then ready when creativity DOES hit again (reading books when you don’t feel like it, organizing ideas you brainstormed in a better moment, focusing critical energy into some ruthless energy, cleaning up work spaces, practicing the same brushstroke a thousand times).

Is the trick to build structured discipline into your life with an understanding that you have the freedom to ditch it when the idea comes to life and you’re all in? And when that desire wanes, you pick up the discipline again?

How do you merge discipline with freedom?

Do you furnish your imagination through physical spaces? and beautiful places? Do you let colour speak to you?

What new connections did you make today? Chart a new form in the stars…. we’re all connecting dots.

That’s what imagination is about: drawing connections. Drawing ever new connections between the billions of shifting ideas, places, faces, objects, names that life circulates. It is a field with limitless possibilities. There are actual, physical places and actual, concrete actions that make those connections happen way faster than normal. Do you/I actively seek those out?

How do you detox?

As Rabbi Forhman says, stopping is vital to the creativity process. Keep going and you ruin everything. Stop – cease – settle back and enjoy what you’ve done. It is written into our human history since the beginning, when God Himself created earth and heaven and then ceased from all he had done to settle into the goodness of what he had made. He gave Israel the gift of the Sabbath – a day to remember this rest and to join it. This is why acts of creating, or bringing things together in a new way, are forbidden on the Sabbath.

How often do you put the brakes on making new things, thinking new thoughts, drawing new connections, and just sit back and enjoy what is already done? Enjoy God’s good creation. Marvel at it. Enjoy looking back at projects you’ve done in the past. Enjoy the art of other people – no critiquing, no curating ideas for yourself, just enjoy.

I try to do this every Saturday, turning off all devices, not looking at the time, and stopping all creative work (and even thoughts). It is HARD. It is a very, very strange spiritual discipline (and by the time Sunday comes I am so ready to paint or brainstorm or write again!). Creativity is a “good thing”…. so it feels weird to stop. But the Sabbath also brings many treasures: it reminds me that while I live in the future during the week, at least once a week I am required to live in the present. It reminds me that the “work of the imagination” is not the most valuable thing I bring to the table: it’s our own selves that matter to God (and to others). Just presence, not moving on to the next thing. It requires that I take time to enjoy what other people have created, to celebrate their accomplishments without “appropriating” their work for my own mental processes. Of course, since my computer and phone are shut down, I can only appreciate the work of others that I have at hand – photo books, creative journals, printed poetry.

So, how do you do it? How do you detox from the clutter in your mind brought on by your own creative processes? How do you detox your imagination from busyness, worry, envy, and stress?

If you have any answers to these questions, I’d be happy to hear them!

RUSH! RUSH! RUSH!

As I sort through thousands of files of land surveyor field notes from the 1950’s and beyond, I see the same word over and over and over again: RUSH. It is on almost every single file. It is almost always written in red.

An agitated refrain, she (the unknown secretary) distrusted a single use of that word. Rush! Rush! Rush! – is her most common exhortation; all in red, all in exclamations, all underlined.

Sometimes “Urgent Rush!”, sometimes “extra rush!”, it is always rush.

During my first week, as I wore off jet-lag and learnt the laws of scanning in a windowless office, I found the secretary’s rushing amusing. I chuckled often. “Gracious me, m’am,” I’d think, “but if you’re always rushing than you never are.”

The walls of the office are bland slates of gray-blue.  It is the colour of clouds that haven’t decided whether to rain or to go pouting home. The carpet echoes this indecisive colour, until the very air feels like a liquid grayish blue. Sometimes I think we’re in a century-old robin’s egg, whence some musty giant will one day hatch; sometimes it makes me think of a tomb.

I thought how nice it would be to splurge a bit of another colour somewhere. On a whimsical impulse, I decide to paint the word RUSH. I will paint it in bright colours, I decide. In a style that’s anything but rushing.

I take each letter and freestyle it. I am not a painter. Colours are still an enticing mystery.

As I push the bright, thick paint, blending primary colours, lingering over the word “RUSH” with a paintbrush, thoughts come.

I see that word elsewhere…. It is written in the red ink of tail-lights that stream past me on my daily walk to and from work; the cars peeling themselves constantly off the road, over the ramp, onto the highway. It’s a river of rushing. The morning’s mantra is: get to work, get to work, get to work. The evening echoes, get home, get home, get home. Everyone is rushing.

I revel in my pedestrian independence to stop in centre sidewalk and stare at geese winging their migratory “V”s until they pierce the blazing sunset of winter pinks and gold. They are going somewhere, as we all are. Do they call “rush” to each other?

Rush beats in the blood cursing through my generation of caffeine addicts, of incorrigible activists. Eyes never stop roving, fingers never pause in scrolling.

When will it be enough? When can we stop rushing?

I wonder if the field workers ever complained about having every single assignment marked RUSH. When “rush” is everyday language, how on earth do you move any faster? Rush! Rush! Rush! screams red ink, as if that secretary spoke Hebrew and knew that repeating it three times brings it to its fullest completion of meaning.

Mockingly I elongate and round out her favourite word, intentionally losing each letter in abstract randomness, in colourful playfulness.

I think I want to fill the planet of my “U” with writing. I start writing a portion from the Little Prince. I pen it with a metal nib and liquid ink, and each time metal scratches paper a window opens a bit further.

“Oh, no!” I cried. “No, no, no! I don’t believe anything. I answered you with the first thing that came into my head. Don’t you see–I am very busy with matters of consequence!”

He stared at me, thunderstruck.

“Matters of consequence!”

He looked at me there, with my hammer in my hand, my fingers black with engine-grease, bending down over an object which seemed to him extremely ugly . . .

“You talk just like the grown-ups!”

….He was really very angry. He tossed his golden curls in the breeze.

“I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: ‘I am busy with matters of consequence!’ And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man–he is a mushroom!”

“A what?”

“A mushroom!”

The little prince was now white with rage.

“The flowers have been growing thorns for millions of years. For millions of years the sheep have been eating them just the same. And is it not a matter of consequence to try to understand why the flowers go to so much trouble to grow thorns which are never of any use to them? Is the warfare between the sheep and the flowers not important? Is this not of more consequence than a fat red-faced gentleman’s sums? And if I know–I, myself–one flower which is unique in the world, which grows nowhere but on my planet, but which one little sheep can destroy in a single bite some morning, without even noticing what he is doing–Oh! You think that is not important!”

His face turned from white to red as he continued:

“If some one loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars. He can say to himself, ‘Somewhere, my flower is there . . .’ But if the sheep eats the flower, in one moment all his stars will be darkened . . . And you think that is not important!”

He could not say anything more. His words were choked by sobbing.

And I continue, with a later section of the story:

“Please–tame me!” he said.

“I want to, very much,” the little prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”

“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me . . .”

I move ink over the absorbent rough white paper absently. Matters of consequence! Did the secretary of red ink and rushing understand matters of consequence? Do I?

Men have no time anymore to understand things, said the fox. Because they do not see the importance of taming a thing.

“It is the time that you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” the fox tells the Little Prince.

I wonder if the gray-blue air of my gray-blue office will be the atmosphere that seeds of caring about matters of consequence will grow in, or if they will die there.

I wonder how I waste my time, and on whom. The answer comes with a sting: I waste my time on myself. I am preoccupied with myself, and I miss the chance of true friendship.

How does one replace RUSH with REST? How do you work from a place of rest? How does one resist the urge to rush through life? How do you weigh matters of consequence?

Maybe now that I’m back in this culture that is mine by birthright; where agendas rule and adrenaline rages and action reigns; maybe now I’ll discover more this groundedness in rest that is mine by birthright in Christ.

But for now, at least I have bright colour behind my desk.

 

{glimpses}

I went to Europe

(to visit dear people)

and

saw many things.

Here’s a few of them (randomly).

I saw a man carrying a large canvas and a lady eating Chipotle in the Philadelphia airport.

I saw Russian musicians in downtown Stuttgart; my friend and I bought pretzels in a plaza there.

I saw October in Neubrandenburg.

I saw the entire process of setting up a Mongolian yurt (and helped).

I saw a beautiful wedding.

I saw friends who are my family (but we don’t share ethnicity or nationality).

In Berlin, my friends and I ate doner at dusk. Outside the window I saw a man pause to pick up a smoking bit of cigarette from the lip of a garbage can.

I saw chocolate in Germany. (My Mom has always taught me to eat whatever I find in abundance locally. Usually this means caterpillars or squash. But in Germany, I found …schokolade.)

I saw lovers in London passionately kissing under a red traffic light (were they afraid of it turning to green?).

I saw a store in London just for umbrellas and down the street an antique store that has sold antique books since antique times.

I saw tea shops.

I saw Richmond Park, sunlight, and a choice between two paths.

I saw Trafalgar Square. There I found a Canadian juggling knives, and a chalk artist who drew the face of a lonely girl.

In a wide office window of downtown London, I saw a big man. He was bald and wearing a gray business suit. In one hand, he held a small yellow chick and his eyes were closed.

I saw an old door, a brick wall, and red leaves that don’t know about boundaries.

I saw the river Thames as the sun went down on it, and sat there to watch the people scurrying by it.

I saw a man who could make an old piano sing to us sitting in a dark cathedral. I saw some of the most reliable ancient New Testaments; I saw Egyptian mummies and Ethiopian paintings and the Rosetta Stone; I tasted higgidy pies and bargained for a hand-drawn magnet from the story of Le Petit Prince.

On the underbelly of downtown London, I found colour.

I heard bells chime the hours and watched the pastoral landscape of Belgium slip past my train windows. I saw the postmen in Germany ride on large yellow bikes, and found that some milk in England still comes in glass bottles.

Many things. Bizarre, colourful, odd (to me), delicious.

(I saw – and heard – and tasted – but.

it’s what my heart saw that still remains on my mind and in my memory.)

 

 

 

Butterflies and Black-and-White Martyrs

It was on a whim that I entered the gardens.

Did memories beckon me? As a 7-year-old I had toured the McLaughlin estate and mansion. Between that little girl and who I am today there have been many countries, many gardens, and many flowers.

But if I have changed, the high green wooden fences have not. So I entered.

I found the bark and the bushes. The same rose garden and fountain.  I found a bed of bright coloured flowers rising above their cheerful marigold companions. That one riot of colour was an immediate hearkening back to Uganda.

I could see it: those exact same flowers. But this time in four raised beds, clouded with butterflies.

It was the day my family drove far on bumpy red roads to the home of a German missionary. Memory blurs: was it that same day that we saw where our friends had been killed? I remember the gutted charcoal shells of brick homes. They had belonged to a missionary couple and some Ugandan Christians. People – rebels? – had murdered them and burned their homes.

Mom had shown me a small, black-and-white newspaper clipping of the faces of the couple. The tiny print underneath strung a description of their brutal death to a testimony to the goodness of God. Mom told me they had been our friends.

I saw the blackened walls and the black-and-white faces. The walls were dishevelled. The faces were smiling.

Then we arrived at the home of flowers and butterflies, haloed by a golden dying sun.

The German missionary had been told to leave. It wasn’t safe. She didn’t budge. She stayed because of a stream of people who came, under the mango trees. Was she a teacher? a doctor? I don’t remember. But she stayed, her home a riot of floral and butterfly colour, for those people. Soldiers slept on her front porch every night, as a measure of protection.

We were told to conserve water. I remember how triumphant I was to discover I could have a full-body bath with less than one cup. The water was a deep, deep red from the dust of the road.

That lady – whose name is lost in my mind – she offered us homemade food and her limited water. She offered hospitality, joking about the armed men under our windows.

Walking in downtown Oshawa on a Summer day, among flowers, I remember her. I remember the bricks, the burning, the black-and-white, the butterflies. In my memory the German missionary merges with the dead couple. They had died for their friends and for Christ, and she was living for the people around her and for Christ.

I knew that if she died she too would be announced in monotonal newspaper print. But in my mind she still lives at the end of a long dusty road, surrounded by people and butterflies.

Images taken from Google.