Hole in My Imagination

I have two big brothers, but they're 8 and 9 years older. Because of that gap, I have the traits of a youngest, an oldest, and an only child. All three are right-brain thinkers in a left-brain world. That has blessed me with an ability to observe, to see patterns, and to imagine futures.

I can conceive ideas, simple and elegant, that people are drawn to. I can draw beautiful, compelling pictures with words. If I still myself and actively listen, I can touch the words people need to explain what they're feeling. When the stars are just so, I can take on their feelings. I can know how they'll respond to the tiniest breeze even when they don't know that they've felt it.

I can imagine. I can envision. I can see inside of me and outside of me at the same time while I sit out in the universe.

I've traveled around the world 7 times. Yet this week I found that I am a small town girl with a hole in my imagination.

When I was in college my nephew was born. When he finished college, he traveled to South America. When he went, I asked myself, "Why didn't I ever consider that? Why didn't I ever think about going to an Ivy League school? Why didn't so many things ever cross my mind as possible?"

I started imagining bigger things from that day forward. I lived with the biggest imagination of anyone I knew. I scanned the universe constantly for possibilities.

Still I can't imagine what I can't imagine.

If I never encountered anything close to the ideas of kestrel, kaleidoscope, or kingdom, how would I come to imagine them? How do I imagine what I imagine? All things come from the bits that my experience, my curiosity, and my teachers have shown me.

Most of my teachers didn't know what to do with me. They let me learn on my own. Someitmes they let me teach them. My dad was my only mentor. It wasn't from lack of looking, that I never found another. I was late connecting my head, heart, and feet.

Now a teacher tells me of something I've never imagined, wouldn't know the first thing about, and don't have the method or means, I don't think, by which to make it happen. Yet she sets it in front of me as if it is the next step in a natrual progression.

Few things have so completely captured my attention, as this puzzle.

Oh, but for that small-town hole in my imagination, I would know what to do now.

--me strauss Letting me be