Compost and Stardust
Imagination Is The Fertile Ground For What Hasn't Yet Arrived
Somewhere in the dark, a seed is splitting open.
It doesn’t look like much from the outside. There’s no sound, no visible sign.
But in the hush beneath the surface, a thin root pushes down into the soil. A shoot twists toward a light it has never seen but knows is there.
The future does not arrive fully grown.
It germinates in silence, nourished by a faith older than reason.
Imagination moves the same way. Quiet at first, delicate, but carrying everything it needs to become a forest.
wide awake
Imagination begins with attention.
There is a way of seeing that resists numbness. It notices the edges of things. The faint shimmer of possibility just beneath the surface.
This kind of attention refuses to reduce the world to what has already been determined.
It holds space for complexity, contradiction, and change.
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To imagine is not to escape the world but to see it more clearly. To refuse the assumption that what is must always be.
It is the quiet, persistent act of looking at a broken system, or a scarred landscape and sensing that this is not the whole story.
It is the ability to stand inside the present and recognize that something else could emerge here.
It requires presence. A willingness to stay open to both what is painful and what is still possible.
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When we cultivate this attention, imagination becomes about staying in relationship with the universe and what it is revealing.
the body
Imagination does not live in the abstract.
It rises from the ground of the body, from intimacy with place, with texture, and with sensation.
It takes root in the small and familiar: a hand in the soil, the weight of water in a bowl, the hush of an old room.
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There is a kind of desire at the heart of imagination— not just for something new, but for connection, for wholeness, for belonging.
It is an ache for fullness, for life that is rich, felt, and alive in every fiber.
It moves through us as an impulse to create, to touch, to make meaning out of the raw materials of experience.
Imagination is fueled by intimacy. It is in the slow attention we give to small things that vastness opens up.
The shape of a home. The curve of a cup. The grain of wood beneath the hand. These are portals into other ways of knowing and being.
When we allow ourselves to dwell in this closeness, imagination begins to weave new patterns from the threads of what we already know.
the unknown
Imagination thrives where certainty dissolves.
It takes root in the places where old stories have unraveled and the new ones have not yet taken shape.
It is the courage to move without a map.
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There is something alive in the liminal spaces between what is ending and what has not yet begun.
Imagination is not a tool for control or prediction. It is a relationship with mystery, emergence, and the messy and unfinished.
It is trust that something is forming even if we cannot see it yet.
It is compost, turning over the soil of old ideas and systems, making room for something new to germinate in the dark.
It requires slowness. Patience. Wildness.
It is trust in the falling apart.
In decomposition, things rot, ferment, and become fertile soil for the unknown.
Were you listening in on my recent conversation with a friend? 😂 In-between times can feel so dull and sometimes difficult yet you articulated so beautifully that these times are such a necessary part of the creative process. 🙏
ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE as always, Bri. This really moved me: "Imagination thrives where certainty dissolves." Certainty is something that seems to be proliferating. So much becomes possible when we let that tendency arise. You are truly gifted.