It doesn’t take the perfect image, the most provocative drive-to-a-mountain and search-for-the-holy-grail image.
The image is right in front of us, all the time, any time, right now. It is the leftover crust on a raspberry stained paper towel. It is the collection of 30-something mica stones splayed across the unpolished black granite counter top. It is the squeaky stuffed skunk dog toy minus the squeaker and stuffing.
Inside each of these images is magic. And they are never the same twice, because we aren’t.
Our feeling of light and dark is constantly shifting. Our ability to make sense of our experience is constantly changing. Monet painted the same water lilies, the same haystacks over and over because they and he were never the same.
If we look at any image with fresh eyes and ask it what it has to offer us, we are answered.
If we are willing to wait long enough, our unconscious sends us a message. This message can’t be accessed by thinking or therapy. Access is granted by imagination—by drawing or writing, singing or dancing our way into it.
Take any image and imagine within it is the gift to your freedom.
Take writing. All you have to do is uncap your pen and begin describing what you see. This descriptive process allows you to creatively bypass your conscious sense-making mind and access the deeper truth of your unconscious through metaphor.
Metaphors rise out of the descriptive details.
What you see will be totally different from what anyone else sees. So by unwrapping the image according to your vision, you unwrap a one-of-kind gift from yourself.
By imagining into the image, you have the power to transform yourself.
Imagining into the image offers the observational calmness of meditation, the passionate beauty-making of art, the inner dialectic of dreaming and the reignited realization that there really is magic in every mundane image.
In small ways, in big ways, we exit the image differently than we entered.
And most importantly, we exit more deeply grounded in who we are, because the image, the imagining and the message have been chosen and created by us.
We begin to feel like we matter.
Beyond the agreeable husband, the smiling wife, the diligent parent, the dedicated worker bee—we matter. We belong. We begin to feel, like the Velveteen rabbit, that we are real.
