Song for this post: Adeleine by Water From Your Eyes

Inspired greatly from our trip to the UK, visiting Edinburgh, Scotland and their most famous Loch Ness & Caledonia in the Highlands as well as a short stay in London, home of all of literature’s bests! From Shakespeare, to Peter Pan, to Harry Potter … the list goes on.

And while we were there, we couldn’t help but feel every bit of history – the royal lines, the battles – wars won and wars lost. We have yet in our country to have been humbled in such a way that would cause us to rely on the innermost beauties and appreciations of life. We do not know such a horror, and pray that we never do. Yet, somehow, we pray that our country does in deed discover for one’s self how to live in the most important reality of life, the one that comes from such destruction and rebuilding, despair and suffering, tragedy and death … the imagination.

“Genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains.” – The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It is the imagination … sheer wonder … that we lack greatly. We are too tied to the materialistic, and yet we do not even have a royal line. Hmm, how ironic. Which left my husband and I to go down the Alice In Wonderland “Rabbit Hole” if you will, to finally realizing how and why one can be of the New World and yet be limited in mind, body and soul. We are free, and yet that is an illusion, or better yet, a delusion for most.

To nail this in even further, beyond the daily facets of the human life, it takes great imagination to have genuine faith as well. Not the kind of faith that everyone tells you to have or teaches you to have, but the kind that comes from truly enduring life – being pummeled and knowing God for yourself. To believe in God, you must have a brave imagination. You must be able to dare to imagine and trust that you will recognize the line between true and false once you get there. You must be ready to experience beyond what you can understand. If one can believe in unicorns and folklore and witches and magic, then one can most definitely dare to believe in God – the Holy Spirit – Healing Graces and yes, Miracles (Milagros). Faith radiates in an inner knowing kind of way in places where the bigger picture of beauty and imagination are at the forefront.

“For to have faith is to have wings.” – Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens & Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie

It is in the imagination that Justin and I choose to live every single day. We learned at a young age how to feed this center of our soul. We feed the imagination with beauty, music, nature, peace, good food, love for one another, new creations, innovation, literature, reflecting, listening, silence, the sacraments, prayer, writing, superb whiskey, traveling, the beach, strangers, pubs, community, and discovering new things about each other every single day.

You ever wonder why it’s so easy to play pretend with children? To talk to children? To be in the world of a child? It’s the adult who struggles to value imagination, which then leads them down a treacherous death of a life, “living” according to things that simply do not matter.

Teaching was one of my most favorite chapters of life because I did not have to spend daily energy shielding myself from the negatively limited mind of the adult. It takes a great humility and ongoing realization for an adult to hand over the mind and heart to the imagination and to re-learning how it works. You have to choose this path amidst everything you thought you once knew or thought was important.

If we are living with an open heart to dare to imagine every day, then we have put ourselves in the right plane of vulnerability … not vulnerably a victim of life, but a genuine receiver of life. When living in this way, one can receive each page of life able to discern with the power of the Spirit that dwells within.

“Being normal is not necessarily a virtue, it rather denotes a lack of courage.” – Practical Magic

May we all dare to Fly like Peter Pan, clink glasses after a Battle won or lost, break the curses of our wounded pasts, and believe in a life where 9 and 3/4 is right in front of you .. waiting to be entered, taking us in to the most interior of castles we could ever imagine.

With Great Love & Joy,

Diane