Week Nine: Imagination

I’m hyperaware these days of the powerful presence of my imagination.

Especially during this time when I’m able to slowly move unassisted again physically, it’s curious to be unearthing mercurial layers of my traumatized nervous system. It’s a good thing but it isn’t easy. These nine weeks keep teaching me about healing that is available as both embodied beings and spiritual souls.

In broad terms, my brain has a jacked-up capacity to live imaginally since this shocking experience.

A few thoughts and physical feelings can quickly irritate fears, soothe anxieties, or bathe me in bliss.

Which one emerges? It depends a lot on my level of conscious attunement. Phew - we are exceedingly complicated beings!

I’m aware that what is arising now has both healing energy for the fresh trauma of my injury and very importantly for long-standing patterns of personal, ancestral, and collective issues. The journey is to find a way gently into the dark morass of temperamental feelings as if there is ‘not enough.’

This morning, I read Thomas Hubl’s book – Attuned.

"Traumatic experience produces feelings of scarcity. Not enough time, not enough resources, not enough connection or support.”

In a healthy way, my body is telling me these days not to push forward, to slow down, and keep resting - a dreadfully hard concept for one who has kept her life active, pushing past difficulties, often producing internalized and externalized toxic stress. This is the way of my ancestral family - classically amazing caregivers for others! I could write volumes about how ‘responsibility’ has a dangerous dark side.

Imagination can only arise when we give that creative juice time; time to arise and squeeze her healing presence through our tightly woven old patterns of stressful anxiety. One of the less worked resources we have been given as humans is our gift of spiritual-imaginal connection. My plants teach me to grow toward the light, to gently reach beyond the present moment into spirit, into beauty. I’m still sitting with the clamshell and octopus image from my last post - DAY 59: HELD CLOSE IN - and letting myself be held in the dark. Look at it if you missed it - it’s a beauty!

I’ve been given oodles more time recently, and it sure has been hard to trust ‘this slow work of God’. Here’s a gift from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a radical thinker and imaginal genius who was almost excommunicated from the Church:

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown,

something new,

Yet it is the law of all progress that is made

by passing through some stages of instability,

and that may take a very long time.

And I think it is so with you.

Your ideas mature gradually.

Let them grow.

Let them shape themselves without undue haste.

Do not try to force them on

as though you could be today what time

- that is to say, grace –

and circumstances

acting on your own good will

will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new Spirit

gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God,

our loving vine-dresser. Amen.

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What is it like for you to feel the anxiety of being ‘in suspense and incomplete’?

What plant or creature from nature might offer you today a creative image for your impatience?

Back: Day 59

Next: Day 67