
I am just about finished with the flooring of my new library, aka office. The closet will become the holders of the bookshelves packed with my books. My computer desk and client chair will fit nicely, and provide for a more intimate space for my work as a writer and as a mental-health counsellor.
I am also again writing, and it feels good, very good. I have slowed down the pace as I re-read what I have written in the second novel so that I can make the changes that are needed. And, in the process, I am adding more, allowing my imagination freer reign. I have this sense that the story will be much better for the deepening of imagination.
I am learning to trust my “active imagination.” A few days ago, I turned to a book in my library, Jung on Active Imagination, and have been re-reading this old friend, a book I got in 1998. This morning, these words caught my attention:
Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination, and have their source in what one is pleased to call infantile fantasy. Not the artist alone, but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy … without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. [Jung, 1921]
These were words I needed to hear, words that confirm my present journey with words, the telling of a story that is quintessentially human. That the characters in the story come to embrace naturism, is fitting as humanity is not defined by clothing. Even the stripping off of clothing doesn’t quite get to the foundation of what it is that is our essence as humans, a shared essence that is contained in everyone from saint to the most evil.
And so, I have become more accepting of myself and others, less judgemental. Notice the use of “less” – I am far from perfect and still respond from the complexities of my own history in ways that are far from an all-loving-kindness. But that, too, is part of what makes us all human. And so, I return to the story with hopes that the tale to be told, though a work of fiction and fantasy, will reflect an honesty about the human condition.