Harnessing Your "Inner Sun"
Becoming an Imagination Samurai: PART 2
In her poem, Rant, Diane di Prima calls the imagination our “inner sun.”
She understood that the imagination, like the sun, is the spark of our endlessly unfolding human creation story—both personally and collectively. An internal star radiating possibilities that help us grow, change, and reshape our world.
Imagination is the soul of empathy, invention, expression, exploration, and understanding.
It’s why we’re sitting in homes with central heat and drinking clean water out of a tap. It’s why almost anyone can drive a car or use a computer without knowing a thing about how they work. It’s why you’re not susceptible to small pox right now, and it might be why you didn’t die in childbirth.
It’s how Gandhi helped gain India’s independence. It’s the origins of the civil rights movement. It’s why women have the right to vote.
It’s why people still flock to see the Sistine Chapel; it’s why books are banned; and why we weep at the end of great movie.
And it’s also why our imaginations and creativity can be our superpowers in the fraught political days that lie before us.
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
From "Rant" by Diane di Prima (caps hers)The Limits of the Analytical Mind
I’m always eager and curious to deepen the ways I cultivate my imagination because I really believe it’s my path to freedom.
I say this as an extremely analytical person. Being analytical has it’s strengths, but it can only take you so far. Yes, the analytical side of my mind really helps me discern what is wrong with something, or why I’m in a difficult situation or what the parameters of a problem are.
It helps me understand what’s happening in the world and helps me get clear.
But analysis can’t get me out of a problem. That’s a job for my imagination.
The Power of Your Particular Life
In The Marginalian, Maria Popova quotes the actor Anna Deveare Smith speaking to a room of young artists:
“Start now, every day, becoming, in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.”
That’s imagination at work. That’s what we can all do starting right now—consciously imagining what we’d like to become going forward. What we’d like our communities to become. Our nation to become.
Because we can’t become what we don’t first imagine.
And THAT, I believe, is nothing less than a certified, honest-to-goodness, life-long hero’s journey: to nurture and expand what you can imagine for your life and for the life of the communities around you.
Because that’s all any of us has—our individual lives and the communities right around us. And can I just say, Yowsa, that’s actually A LOT.
In this era of celebrity, billionaires, and social media, it can feel like the only way you can make a real difference in the world is if you have huge followings or a massive reach. But that story is just a by-product of the learned helplessness of late stage capitalism and belies the history of all individual and social transformation.
So don’t think of your local, small, or personal actions as insignificant. Think of them as specific.
As any good artist will tell you, specific is better than broad. Too much vague blobbiness weakens a painting. Being specific in an artwork is what brings the big abstract ideas to life.
Imagination Samurai
Honing your imagination is a powerful creative act available to anyone who seeks it. It doesn’t require talent, ability, money or resources. All it requires is love and commitment.
Your imagination might be rusty. It might be small. It might be a sucker for your fear.
But all it needs is for you to consciously decide to cultivate, nurture, and expand it. To turn it into your ever-evolving ally that adapts and shifts and supports you as circumstances change and unfold.
To do this is to become an “Imagination Samurai.” Disciplined. Grounded. Free. Filled with loving purpose and empowered in your personal agency because your imagination is not filled with toxic rubbish, it’s sacred ground where you consciously choose who and what enters.
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant...
-From Rant, by Diane di Prima
Using My Imagination: A simple example
When we regularly utilize our imagination to feed our becoming—even in the smallest of ways—it can be powerful, yes, but it can also be fun and playful. I actually think this playfulness is a critical part of the imagination’s power.
For instance, in this time of political gas lighting, when up is down and in is out and black is white, I love to ‘take back’ words—like patriotism—and re-imagine their meaning.
What if loving my country, being “patriotic,” was literally loving my country—the physical land beneath my feet? The soil. My continent. And its waters, plants, insects and animals.
What if I loved it so much, that I would do anything for this land? My home.
What if I perceived this land, my home, as an actual extension of myself rather than simply the backdrop of my life?
How does that transform the meaning of “being patriotic?” Of wanting to “defend my country?”
An exploration like this might seem small, but it’s steeped in my values and it changes me. And then I tell you about it here and maybe you think, “huh, the land…I like that.” And it changes you a little bit too.
Or maybe you think, “Oh, a kindred spirit. I didn’t know other people imagined like me.” And your sense of yourself expands to include me, as well as the possibility of other people—strangers—all over this country, using their imaginations like you use yours.
But it also feels mischievous and joyful to expand the notion of a weaponized word like patriotism. It makes me feel like I’m personally giving the idea of patriotism a new lease on life.
I also love it because in these polarized times, it’s an expanded and expansive expression of tribal loyalty—but to the earth itself.
Gaia, the soul of the world, is my tribal leader.
Embodiment
When I imagine this kind of thing over and over again, it gets stronger. I internalize ideas that I have nurtured in my imagination and I embody them.
It’s no longer a mental idea, it’s a way of being. I’ve become it.
This becoming process—this embodiment—expands my life and is the reward I get from engaging with my imagination—my inner sun.
As my friend Rue Hass says,
The alchemy that happens inside of us as we engage with this idea is something that changes our energy field, changes the field around us, and changes the world. Everything we do is subtle activism. We radiate what we are.
Which is why the power of our imaginations matters so much. When we imagine what we love, it actually transmutes into a kind of joy.
And that makes me think of this quote from Albert Camus about his hopes for a weary and ravaged Europe after WWII:
“In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die… With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing.”
“We shall remake the soul of our time.” Oh my Gaia, I love that mission. It’s giant and beautiful and romantic as hell. I’m so in.
How about you? Would you like to be a part of “remaking the soul of our time,” here in your specific life living in your specific time and place?
To become an “Imagination Samurai?”
Thank you, as always, for reading all the way to the end. Below my picture is the Diane di Prima poem, “Rant,” in full. She was a poet, artist, activist and boundary crasher extraordinaire. You can read more about her here.
RANT
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not "make" it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create
every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky
w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire
history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
"find out for yourself"
history is the dream of what it can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum
of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely,
the ground of the imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy
the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.
the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination
it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else's world
the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way to avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman's life / a man's life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can't sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant
intellectus means "light of the mind"
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun
the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central
by Diane di Prima
from "Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems"
This was very inspirational, Sarah. I gained a global consciousness that was not there before Covid, when Italy was the first to experience the hospital overwhelm of this pandemic. Since that time, I have felt so connected to everyone else in the world, and this will be my starting point for being an imagination samurai!
Beautiful Sara. Thank you.