On Imagination | Part 2
Cultivating our imaginations as "labors of gratitude"
Happy Friday, all!
Two weeks ago, I wrote part one of a two part post on the imagination. I devoted that post to a short “what” and “why” of imagination: what it does, and why we ought to nurture it. You can read that post here.
This week I will attempt the “how.” How do we cultivate our imagination?
This “how” has become a funny thing. When I ended my last post, I thought I would share a list of ideas, maybe some resources. But, after two weeks of considering, reading, and looking for said resources, I found myself swimming deeper into mystery. My quaint ideas began to smell faintly of hubris. In the end, I had to step back, take a more humble approach, give imagination my better attention.
In the end, I realized I needed to view the imagination through a different lens: the lens of gift.
Imagination is a gift. We didn’t invent it. We didn’t ask to be born with it. And yet, each of us has one.
Imagination also isn’t any sort of gift. It is a gift meant to be a transformative agent in our lives.
In his book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde says that when a person recognizes a transformative gift in his or her life, it propels that person toward a gratitude that manifests as a “labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after the gift has been received.” (60)
Hyde then makes a critical distinction between labor and work. “Work,” says Hyde, “is what we do by the hour. It begins and ends at a specific time and, if possible, we do it for money. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify…. Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labors.” (64)
We work for that which we feel an obligation. We labor over that which stirs us, awakens our souls, moves us toward love.
Hyde continues…
When I speak of labor, then, I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior, than work. The labor of gratitude is the middle term in the passage of the gift. It is wholly different from the “obligation” we feel when we accept something we really don’t want…. A gift that has the power to change us awakens a part of the soul…. We therefore submit ourselves to the labor of becoming like the gift. (65)
If we first recognize that imagination is a gift meant to have a transformative purpose in our lives, then we will submit to this “labor of gratitude” for cultivating our imagination. I would argue that a “labor of gratitude” is the only way to cultivate our imaginations. This is especially the case for those of us who believe our imaginations are given us by a loving God, in order that we might more and more “image” out into the world the light and love of our God in whose image we are made (see #4 below).
What does this “labor of gratitude” look like?
This is the part where I could offer my resources and ideas: Ten Ways to Grow a Healthy Imagination! Oomph.
Instead, I thought I’d offer some postures to assume as you—we—labor:
Attention: “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of being into existence.”
—Iain McGilchrist.
In his book, How to Know a Person, David Brooks offers the above quote form psychiatrist, Iain McGilchrist. He then describes an illustration to this truth: an exchange he witnessed of a pastor greeting an older “stern drill sergent type” woman Brooks was interviewing but felt intimidated by. But this pastor, upon seeing the woman, approached her with joy and gave her his full attentive gaze. Brooks called the man an “Illuminator.” By his attention, this woman transformed from hardened stoic to a joyfully alive, child-like version of her self.
When Jimmy greets a person, he is trying to see that person the way Jesus would see that person. He is trying to see them with Jesus’s eyes—eyes that lavish love on the meek and the lowly, the marginalized and those in pain, and on every living person. —David Brooks (How to Know a Person, 31)
Seek to Know: “You have searched me and you know me, LORD, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. Before a word is on my tongue, you, LORD, know it completely.” —Psalm 139:1-4
Brooks also points out that since the Enlightenment, we are a people who separate reason from emotion. We assume that to know something is an intellectual exercise. We “know” something by studying it, collecting data, and dissecting it down to its minutia.
Brooks pushes back on this head-space only way of knowing:
But many cultures and traditions never fell for this nonsense about the separation between reason and emotion, and so they never conceived of knowing as a brain-only, disembodied activity. In the biblical world, for example, “knowing’ is also a whole-body experience. In the Bible, “knowing” an involve studying, having sex with, showing concern for, entering into a covenant with, being familiar with, understanding the reputation of. God is described as the perfect knower, the seer of all things, the one who sees not only with the objective eye of a scientist, but with the grace-filled eye of perfect love. —David Brooks (How to Know a Person, 34)
Membership: “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” —Wendell Berry, from: The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership
If there were one “practical” way I could offer for cultivating the imagination, I think it would be this: follow the example of poet-author-farmer, Wendell Berry. In saying this, I am not suggesting we must all become homesteaders, plowing our fields with mules, and raising free roving hogs. (I would love that, but it’s not feasible) What I do mean is: live a life fully invested in the particulars of your affections and your place. This may involve growing a garden. Or, it may be growing your involvement in the local community. Or both.
In his essay, “Imagination in Place,” Wendell Berry explores how his farming has informed his writing—particularly his fiction—and vice versa. It is those places, both real and imagined where, as he says, “I have taken my stand and done my work.” (15) For Berry, place and writing are bound together with the life of membership: the idea that people belong to one another and to their community—their place in the fullest sense of the word.
“It is the complexity of the life of a place uncompromisingly itself, which is at the same time the life of the world, of all Creation. One meets not only weather and the wildness of the world, but also the limits of one’s knowledge, intelligence, character, and bodily strength. To do this, of course, is to accept the place as an influence…. One accepts the place, that is, not just as a circumstance, but as a part of the informing ambience of one’s mind and imagination.” —Wendell Berry, Imagination in Place (12)
Consider your image: Imagination contains within it the word image. Image comes from the Latin root: imitari which means “to copy or imitate.” In the biblical creation account, God made humans in his own image. Our imaginations are central to “picturing ourselves” (Latin imaginari: to picture oneself): “imaging” the image of God in us out to others.
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. —Genesis 1:26-27
These offerings only scratch the surface, of course. I would to hear how you nurture your imagination. What are some postures you assume and labors of gratitude you undertake? Leave a comment; let’s have a conversation.
Have a beautiful weekend, everyone! Thank you for journeying along with Rhea and I here on the Reader & the Writer!
Much Love,
Shari