“Use your imagination". I never understood what was being asked, when I heard this in my young years – what it meant I was supposed to do. I suspected that I didn't actually have one - or else I would certainly know what it was and what to do with it. So I fumbled and bumbled about, stalling and evading, ever-fearful more questions be asked of me, and reveal the extent of my ineptitude.
Imagination as a term is applied in order to suggest a certain freedom: the power to conjure and the ability to create from within the vacuum of one's own brain. But its context, (and my feeling of the word) seems often to evoke instead a kind of conventional myopia. Despite my heroic efforts, it seems to suggest something effortful and contrived – a stylistic heave toward uniqueness and worthiness that always falls short. The tedious words 'imagination' and 'creativity' too often feel contrary to inspiration.
For now I'll suggest the word 'communion,' which is at least as tarnished a word, (perhaps all words must be laundered before use). Communion: a joining-with, a partaking-of, an intimate conversation, immersed in exchange or else ensconced in a scintillating waiting that is alive with a sense of potentiality, undaunted by the sometimes glacial unfolding of a process, free from the drive toward a goal. This is when I forget myself in a dance with the 'other' (that mystery which i usually erroneously perceive is outside of myself). I am a co-union. Inspired, I receive and offer in a boundlessly unfolding landscape that is the unfolding universe. I humm along and my thoughts are a distant radio static, if I notice them at all.
The collaboration, the conversation: to speak with life, with creation, (noun) with what is larger than myself, necessitates unknowing, requires humbleness and surrender to the stuff of my being. For this reason the practice of art is both radical and essential. The artist is a medium for that which is larger than herself. And this necessarily includes a struggle with the urge and impulse to manipulate. But let us not condemn the reason for being human in the first place, which is of course, to err. Perhaps then, the tedium I feel in the words 'imagination' and 'creativity' is simply my familiarity with the effort it takes a self-conscious mind to shove the editing, critiquing, survival-oriented 'left brain' aside for a minute so as to simply proceed with the work, (play) at hand.