Box or Soul?

Empty Table © 2013 Daniel Hewes

Robbed!  I mean really, robbed!  Three years ago the most important thing I ever owned was stolen from me.  It seems impossible that anyone would want it, but there you go.  Imagination.  Something so important and yet not so important at all.  Well, unless you are a painter or actor or writer or something.  But, honestly?   Who walks into a person's home dressed in black and steals a personalized imagination out of it's box on the table?  

Well, it happened.  And since?  Nothing.  Blank pages, blank canvas, blank mind.  No flow, no new worlds, not a drop of any creativity whatsoever.  I've got to get it back.  Life is so boring without imagination, cut and dry.  I didn't realize before how colorful you make life, but baby, I want you back.

Turns out, you can't get it back.  You have to build a new one.  Well, at least according to my creative therapist.  Theft of a person's imagination seems to be more common than I thought.  It happens to a lot of people.  So, as a way to build it back up and get a new one, my therapist has suggested little exercises.  First is to take a handful of crayons and mark up a page.  Let me tell you, it did not turn out so well.  Black and white can make for a very boring piece.  So my therapist took away the black crayon.  It felt so fulfilling to cover a page in red.  It made me want to use orange and yellow.  So, I did.  Call that progress!

It took me a few weeks to color with the entire rainbow and another after that to use all the crayons in a box of thirty-six.  It feels so good and I've used up all the space in my coloring books.  Rebuilding my imagination makes me happy.  I've missed that feeling.  So we moved on to more difficult things.

Discover the uses of colorful words and reinvent this sentence my therapist instructed.  It took a week to transform "the dog ran" to "The brown dog ran quickly."  Again, progress.  A few more weeks and I was writing paragraphs that were more than instructions in a manual.  The flow was creeping back into my blood.  It felt like I was being filled back up with air after a violent deflation.

It was more than words and colors.  I began to notice things in the streets, on my way to work, on my way home, at home, while I was sleeping.  My life was coming back to me.  Comparisons were flying through my mind, little things you don't realize you think about even when you are thinking them.  How green a shrub is, how little a dog is, how annoying the cars honking are.  You catalogue them away in your brain and store them in your creative center (just in case a day arises when you need them.)  The process my therapist was encouraging was the recreation of my storage space.

With wobbly legs I stepped back out into the world of creativity.  Before, I had been a dabbling poet and an artist.  Then, nothing.  Now, I began to make a comeback.  My first painting, while draining and feeble, was the best thing I'd ever done.  I was exhilarated and proud that I'd forced my way back into being.  Take that! person who stole my creativity.  I have beaten you!  No more dark drab corners of society for me!  I'll take the tree lined streets of magical unicorns and fog horns!  Color coated skies and white sheets in the breeze on the line.  Rainbows in the rainforest, sunsets in the dessert, aliens in outer space drinking tea on Christmas.  The most fantastic things I could imagine were the very things I lived on.

Call me crazy and paranoid, but I changed where I kept my imagination.  It isn't carelessly in a box on the table now.  I rarely part with it.  It's weird, I feel more connected with my new imagination than I ever did with the old one.  My therapist says it’s a proximity thing.  Keeping it closer to me allows it to affect me more deeply.  I'm thinking about keeping it in my soul.  A nice cushioning place for such an important object.  Maybe this is what I should have done from the start but, live and let live, am I right?

My therapist says that this idea I've had might revolutionize the way the human race interacts with its creative center, that some people will really latch on to their new, intimate creativity or that some people will forget it’s there altogether and never use it.  I find that exciting and sad all in one.  My therapist also said that creativity may bleed through into our subconscious once it’s been submerged in the cushions of the soul for a long time.  But no one can be sure as of yet.  It's still a new idea.  All I can say is that I like it.  Colors mean more to me, words sound sweeter, softer, harsher.  It’s a heightened sense of living for me, like it was always meant to feel like this.

So really, what I'm saying is . . . having my imagination stolen was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

Box or Soul? © 2013 Katherine Kovanda