The Pushkin Trust has become synonymous with creativity, inspiration and expression, encouraging both children and teachers to find their ‘Voice’. Its founder, The Duchess of Abercorn, discusses what role ‘imagination’ plays in this.
James Harpur is an interior poet with a fascination for spirituality. Angels and Harvesters is taken from his published collection of the same name, a collection that displays both human tenderness and an otherworldly wonder. Set Text: Philoctetes is a new poem. This is its first publication.
Murray Hunter explores imagination as a multidimensional concept which encompasses a number of different modes that may overlap, work in tandem, be functional, or even dysfunctional.
Metaphorical thinking — our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other — shapes our view of the world and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. Brain Pickings founder and author, Maria Popova, discusses how children have an instinctive metaphor-making ability.
This article is a personal tribute to John Moat, where Patrick Harpur discusses, among others things, the transforming power of imagination in alchemy and ‘seeing’ the world through myth… “To see with the eye alone is to see the world as it appears; to see through the eye is to see the world as it is.”
Exploring the connection between memory, archetypal imagery and imagination, Jules Cashford suggests that we cannot simply ‘remember’ archetypal images in the way we remember a personal event in our past, but we can approach them only as symbols for which we need Imagination.
Is the Imagination a formative force, universally inclusive, whose failure to grasp it’s guiding and unfolding in the lives and ventures of every individual, and their society, and above all their education, amounts to a serious ‘missing of the mark’?
What do we imagine we are talking about when we speak of the imagination? Or, to put it another way, can we imagine the imagination? Lindsay Clarke explores imagination as an energetic process of negotiation between the inner world and outer world.
On a bright, still December day author, artist and poet, John Moat, meditates on the connection sea, streams and fountain have with the Imagination and the Sacred… and much more.
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives. Eco-poet, Helen Moore, provides a glimpse of a change of thinking that points to us visioning a new ecological age… to be continued in a future issue.