“To Imagination” by Emily Brontë

When weary with the long day’s care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While thou canst speak with such a tone! 

So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty.

What matters it, that, all around,
Danger, and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom’s bound
We hold a bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?

Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For Nature’s sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart, how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:

But, thou art ever there, to bring
The hovering vision back, and breathe
New glories o’er the blighted spring,
And call a lovelier Life from Death,
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.

I trust not to thy phantom bliss,
Yet, still, in evening’s quiet hour,
With never-failing thankfulness,
I welcome thee, Benignant Power;
Sure solacer of human cares,
And sweeter hope, when hope despairs!

The power of imagination can easily be missed if you are constantly caught up in the cares of the day. Life is not meant to be a game of whack-a-mole! Life is meant to progress by means of a rhythmic oscillation between imagining and doing, or put differently, being and achieving.

Imagination is the child of meditative contemplation; it is the intercourse of heaven and earth, the invisible and the visible. Imagination is the process by which all things new and wonderful are born.

Take time each day to contemplate or to meditate on the most central matters of living: love, truth, and life. Exercise your imagination as you would your body. See the connection between the pure, powerful spirits to the details of your life. Consolidate your most sacred, inner thoughts so that the times of expansion, of doing, are backed by the substance of your soul.

Photo by Frank McKenna on Unsplash.