Imagination is in fact one of the traits that makes us most human. Whenever I hike up to Arthur's Rock - just a few miles from my home - I love seeing the face of "Arthur" gazing intently up at the western sky. This face encourages me to be spacious in my awareness, and to maintain the sense of optimism I've felt ever since I was a kid whenever I look toward the west. Similarly, when I photographed golden Willow trees the other day next to the Big Thompson River, I imagined the water as Mother Earth's hair flowing down ceaselessly from the mountains.

And when I hiked up to Emerald Lake later that afternoon, the contorted Limber Pines appeared to me as wise elders who've weathered the storms of life, encouraging me to do likewise.

Imagination is actually a form of perception, as indigenous peoples have always known. Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us that "The feat of imagination is in showing the convertability of every thing into every other thing." Thus, imagination is a a major way of actualizing the innate oneness of all things. However, imagining is not simply an activity that WE engage in. Rather, it is a living presence who visits us. As Joy Harjo - a poet and musician from the Muskogee Nation - reminds us: "The imagining needs praise as does any living thing. Stories are evidence of this praise." Our Euro-American culture views this awareness of both the imagination and of Nature as personal as a naive "anthropomorphizing," as though human beings are the only creature that is innately personal. However, Thomas Moore reminds us that "When a psychologist says that we are projecting personality in the world when we talk to it, that psychologist is speaking NARCISSISTICALLY, as though personality and soul belong only to the human subject."

In our era, people in our society have given up their own imaginative capacities, relying instead on the imaginings of the so-called "professionals"; that is, of movie and TV producers, to do the imagining FOR them. This shirking of one's human responsibility to creatively re-imagine the world is one of the reasons for the massive epidemic of depression that afflicts our culture. For indigenous peoples, our imagining gives us a participation in the life and action of the Creator. In the absence of this kind of imagining, people in our current society have begun to feel passive and disconnected from the life around them. It is no wonder, then, that depression is so prevalent!

May all of us discover the unique ways in which WE are called to participate in the Creator's work by exercising OUR OWN imaginative capacities!

Photos: (Top) The "face" of Arthur's Rock gazes up at the western sky, Lory State Park, CO, November 15, 2014; (Middle) The Big Thompson River is Mother's Earth's hair flowing down from the mountains between golden Willow trees, west of Loveland, CO, November 14, 2014; (Bottom) A gnarly Limber Pine is a wise elder encouraging us to weather the storms of life, Dream Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, November 14, 2014.  The Thomas Moore quote is from Care of the Soul, p. 61.