Imagination will feed me
“Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” Louisa May Alcott
Blue lovers float high above a bright yellow sky studded with red stars above a flower-pot filled windowsill. Painter Chagall’s paintings have inspired people to say they must have been his sleeping dreams. They were his dreams; his waking dreams — the ripe fruits of his fertile imagination.
America’s number one film, according to the American Film Institute, is “The Wizard of Oz”, a fantasy wrought by the imagination of L. Frank Baum, father of four. Legend says that Mr. Baum, whose equally fertile imagination created 14 OZ books, is said to have named this wondrous land for the letters on his filing cabinet: O-Z. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, one of the many stories he told his children, was published in 1900.
When musical protégé Ludwig van Beethoven begin to go deaf in his 20s, he had a choice. He could give up music, or create without hearing. This passionate young man, whose childhood had been blighted by his father’s insistence that he become the next Mozart, determined that he would overcome his disability. He used his imagination to “hear” his work. We all know his story’s ending: Beethoven went on to leave us some of the greatest music we will ever hear.
Not all imaginations are tied to the need for greatness. Young parents often fill a box with “dress up clothes” or odds and ends of household items safe for children to play with in their imaginative lands and places and identities. These lucky children’s parents know that imagination fills our sails with winds that take us to many lands.
Meditation for the Day
“I shut my eyes in order to see.” Paul Gauguin, French painter, printmaker, and sculptor
Action for the Day
If I haven’t done so already, I will allow myself to daydream; to see things in my head and heart that are different – richer, more colorful, newer, stranger, different — from my daily thought-bread. I will feed myself with imagination. These small moments of “imagination feasting” will add much more light to my life than I can perhaps now imagine.
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