Discovering Fire for a Second Time

Love is the soil.

“But I am the Fire” 30” x 40” Mixed Media on Aluminum. ©Sarah Bush. Sold.

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, (hu)man(s) will have discovered fire.”
-Teilhard de Chardin (parentheses mine.)

I talk a lot about the importance of the human imagination. But honestly, why does it really matter?

Why should you bother understanding and developing your own imagination? Sure, it would probably increase your creative ability. But for most people, that sounds very nice, but doesn’t feel all that critical.

Especially considering the dumpster fire of political and environmental emergencies we are all facing at this juncture in human existence. Emergencies that are global and structural in nature, and the solutions for which feel out of reach for the average person.

But that dumpster fire is exactly why developing our imaginations matters so much.

Love is the Soil

The human imagination is nothing less than the interior doorway to the divine spark that lives inside each of us.

It is also one of our primary tools for expanding our capacity to love—to see beyond our own experience, to feel into other lives, to envision what we cannot yet see.

This matters because even when we figure out how to recapture our democracy, or manage to develop alternative economies or new governance structures that are inclusive and more balanced, or even if a handful of people create regenerative agricultural technologies that help the rest of us survive the 6th extinction, we’re going to limp along as a species until we learn to truly love at scale.

Because love is the soil that all the social change we hope to make must grow in.

The good news is that each of us has been equipped with an imagination that can serve as a portal into that capacity to love at scale. Which means that each of us can contribute to the success of any real global structural change just by committing to the project of love.

And you don’t need money, resources, or any kind of privilege to do it.

You just need willingness.

We can, each of us, use our imaginations to help shape what comes next—by developing our capacities to love more deeply, more widely, more fully.

How it Can Work

One of the most powerful ways our imaginations expand our capacity to love is through connection—imagining as another.

Another word for this use of the imagination is, of course, empathy. We put ourselves in another’s shoes and we imagine ourselves as them. We see someone fall, for instance, and we literally wince.

This is a simple but powerful example of love and imagination working in tandem—something most of us have done since we were very small children.

But empathy is just the beginning of imagining connection. The empathy we feel for another is imagination’s ground zero invitation to explore how the giant capacity of connection works, the first turn of the doorknob on the portal to our oneness.

All we have to do is start with ourselves and move out in any direction.

We can, for instance, imagine our own hearts as radiant, generous, and accepting. And we can imagine this radiance as an offering to the world right around us.

We can then use our imaginations to consciously expand that sense of connection—our empathy—to our family, friends, and local community. And from there, to whole hosts of people we might never know.

We can then expand that empathy we feel for humans to our fellow animals. We can then extend beyond other animals to insects and plants. To rocks and soil. Fungus and microbes.

To the elements like water, fire, and air.

To stars.

We can use our imaginations to expand our empathy across time to our yet-to-be born human descendants and our long-gone ancestors. We can expand our imaginations to consider all futures and all ancestries—including the ancestral past of the desks in our offices, or the trees in our neighborhoods, or the rocks we unearth when we dig the soil.

We can do this anywhere. For however long. Whenever we think of it.

The more we use our imaginations like this, the more deeply we re-connect ourselves to nature and the web of life. The more we connect ourselves to the web of life, the more we remember who we are, where we come from, and how vast our “immediate family” actually is.

And that in turn, changes the baseline for how we’ll start to imagine everything else—our perception of what safety looks like. Or freedom. Or equality. Any and all of it.

This is what the human imagination is capable of.

This is what your human imagination is capable of. And mine.

Each of us was born with a powerful imagination that connects us to the world around us so easily and naturally, that many of us think we don’t even have one. Our imaginations are like a hidden talent or gift we don’t recognize, so it lies mostly dormant inside us, atrophying.

But what if we each decided to acknowledge that gift and treat it like a precious musical instrument we used to know how to play—maybe way back before we were born—and start tuning it?

Believing that every time we choose to use our imaginations to expand our capacity to connect and love ourselves and others, we are part of helping all of humanity heal itself—even a little bit.

Because when humanity learns to, in the words of de Chardin, “harness the energies of love and discover fire for a second time,” we’ll stop wounding everything else around us.

And it’s as simple as starting with the idea of imagining as. Imagining into. Imagining with.

That’s why I’m always inviting you to take the power of your imagination seriously.

To marvel at your own potential to be a part of something big.

Civilizationally big.

To step into your unique, imaginal power and say, “I’m in.”