Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!”

-Saul Bellow

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Life simply happens – as we well know – in ways that can be unpredictable, sometimes good, sometimes bad and often somewhere in between. Although we can’t change all that occurs in our lives, we can design imaginatively many aspects of our unfolding journeys.

How do you design a life imaginatively?

How do you know if what you have imagined actually has merit, is workable and will be of value or aesthetically pleasing? How do you find the courage to bring an internal vision residing safely within your head to the fore and then share it with others? What has emanated from your imagination is part of who you are and deserves not to be sublimated. Plus, as Arthur Koestler said, “If the creator had a purpose in equipping us with a neck, he certainly meant for us to stick it out.”

You take chances because like Gumptious in THE WORLD OF GLIMPSE, you, too, are “The Best Bubble Blower of Imaginary.” Just like him, you “start with a tiny bubble of an idea, and then follow its unfolding potential”. And as Gumptious said:

Do you know…
I can bubbulate
anything!
I can create
everything…

I can create
bubble squares,
weighted and calibrated.
I can create
wedge-edge chairs,
innovatively created.

I can create
a bubble bed
designed entirely in my head.
I can create
lollipops–
for candy and bauble shops.

When I paint, my process begins with a blank canvas and a trust in my intuitions and in my imagination. Then, that marvelous feeling of complete absorption in the process ensues and I move into my world of complete creative freedom without any anxiety about what my painting will become. It really doesn’t matter because I am on a journey without any clear destination in mind. The paints, the canvas, the brushstrokes, and the combined energy that emanate from my tools and from me, propel the work into the unknown while I simply trust I will find my way to wherever I am supposed to go.

I really like not having a clear destination in mind. The unexpected is exciting and I am surprised by what I discover en route. In fact, I experience no consternation at all. Anything can be …it is all such a mystery. I trust the process and I suggest you do so, too. Allow yourself to be lead to wherever the creative process decides to go. The route is seldom direct but will deviate frequently. You don’t know in advance how long it will take but eventually, you will get there because your imagination is a reliable guide. Remember, always … Within your Imagination, Gardens Bloom.

There are many different canvases on which we create imaginatively. Let’s take as examples actual houses with bare rooms, restaurants, hotels or empty offices. These, like blank-yet-to-be-painted upon canvases or yet-to-be-written-on pages of a book, are in need of your imaginative contribution or of the ideas you value of others which synchronize with your own. Ideas will bloom with the doing. As Pablo Picasso said: I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

HOME

(From I TOUCHED A STAR IN MY DREAM LAST NIGHT) 

I can never leave an idea alone.

have to find a home for it.

if a painting isn’t right,

maybe there is a poem for it.

And so when I write or paint, I begin with a vague idea and then allow it to become – whatever it is meant to be. I always trust that within my imagination, gardens will bloom as long as I water, nurture, and tend to their intrinsic creative possibilities.

Your own unique spheres of possibilities start with your own invaluable imagination and then the exciting, hard work of realizing its potential begins…