60 Seconds for Thoughts on Thursday: Imagination Is Fire From the Gods!

<p>Hello to you listening in <a href="https://www.visitdublin.com/" target="_blank">Dublin, Ireland</a>!</p><p>Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds for Thoughts on Thursday and your host, Diane Wyzga.</p><p>I’m the singular RN, JD, Storyteller. My work thrives on imagination. But imagination, like storytelling, has been conscripted and co-opted by business. It’s time to reclaim imagination as the storytelling fire bestowed on us mortals by the heavenly gods. This is altogether too important to short-change.</p><p>In her book, Words Are My Matter, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “<i>In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don’t work. Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples. Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination</i>.</p><p><i>I hear voices agreeing with me. “Yes, yes!” they cry. “The creative imagination is a tremendous plus in business! We value creativity, we reward it!” In the marketplace, the word creativity has come to mean the generation of ideas applicable to practical strategies to make larger profits. This reduction has gone on so long that the word creative can hardly be degraded further. I don’t use it any more, yielding it to capitalists and academics to abuse as they like. But they can’t have imagination</i>.</p><p><i>Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaini