One of my creative muses has always been William Blake. As a young child I loved his poems that spoke of such utter spiritual tranquility. As a teen, I tried to emulate his way of blending poems within paintings. In college, I wrote my senior thesis on a topic that was a sort of argument between Blake and Nietzche. More recently, I’ve been playing with one of my favorite tarot decks: Ed Buryn’s The William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. And this morning I awoke acutely aware of something Blake spoke of so fiercely: the power of our imagination. In a letter he writes to one of his critics, he describes how it is our imagination that creates the world around us: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity…; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.”
What do you see when you see a tree? When you read a story? When you meet a friend?
In this epic time of shift, we are all being called upon to see things differently. What matters more, however, is not what we see, but how we are. If we are imaginative, compassionate, friendly beings, we’ll experience nature, and news, and distance with imagination, compassion, and friendliness. It is in our imagination that we can be truly free to create and to be whatever and whoever we wish!
Here’s one of the first poems I learned by heart:
The sun descending in the west
The evening star doth shine
The birds are silent in their nest
And I must seek for mine.
The moon like a flower
In heaven’s high bower
With silent delight
Sits and smiles on the night.
This is also what Blake says: “I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision.” Compassion, friendliness, and happiness are all children of Imagination.
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