on imagination

Dearest, 

You may not yet know me, but my name is ayla and I believe in you. I believe in your endless capacity for curiosity, connection, compassion, and creation. I believe in your ability to change. I believe that you, as I do, just want to leave your side of the street a bit cleaner and kinder for your neighbour. I believe that you, as I do, aren’t sure how we got to this point of hopelessness/despair/loneliness but there’s got to be something, anything, better than this. 

I believe in you because someone (to be honest, quite a few someones) believed in me. And I believe in you because at the end of the day, all we have is each other. 

Dearest, you may not yet know me but I’ve spent the majority of my life making art. Most of the time, the art looks like writing. It takes shape in different forms: poetry, songs, raps, plays, stand up, sketches, short films, music videos, feature length film, television shows, pitch documents, mission statements, academic theory, spiritual questions, and a lot of automatic writing to help process what I’m thinking and dreaming. My most favourite form of writing I am coming to realise is letter writing. I spent a lot of my adolescent life writing online (who remembers tumblr 2012? Ayoooo) and making friendships online that lead to letter writing people all over the world (despite that one Smart Guy episode being seared into my brain, IFYKYK and sorry IFYK cuz BWTFWAT ). 

Because I’ve been writing for a long time and because my big ass cancer moon self is romantic and nostalgic, my work has been referred to as “love letters”. It’s in all my artist bios. I’m a person and not a brand, but for the sake of ease let’s just say love letters are sort of “my brand”. 

If you’re still with me, Dearest (and I sincerely hope you are), I’d like to try something new with you. I’d like to share my dreams and concerns with you not metaphorically as a love letter, but literally. 

Today, Dearest, I’d love to share some fears I have with you. These fears are not for you to hold, but to observe and be curious about. I’d like to ask you to read these fears from a distance, almost as if you’re peering down a wishing well and the words themselves are simply floating on top of still, dark water. From where you are, looking down, the words are familiar, but they can’t enter your realm. You’re just peering down and getting curious about why there are so many ideas floating on top of the water of the well. They don’t have to enter your sphere at all and in fact, the distance helps you see the fears for what they are, thoughts at a particular time that will pass, as all thoughts do. 

I’ve been noticing, Dearest, that my community, neighbours, students (youth and adults), fellow activists, fellow healing practitioners, my city, and the country in which I am a resident and citizen are experiencing an Imagination Deficit. 

The Imagination Deficit is something I’ve seen a lot of writers/theorists/thought leaders point to and I’m not quite sure if anyone has explicitly called it this (if they have, could you point me in their direction?). 

When I say we are experiencing an Imagination Deficit, I mean that I’m noticing a lack of imagination, even a plateau of innovation or thoughts outside the realm of what we can see, feel, and touch. From where and how I move through the world, it seems Imagination has been in an exponential decline. 

The Imagination Deficit comes from a series of cumulative events. The slow, but steady, chipping away of free, quality, public arts education. The late stage capitalism of it all. The bloodthirst of the marketplace that prides itself as a platform to witness violence and conflict in a seemingly never ending symphony where horror and paranoia are sung, confusingly, as both hyperlocal and national threats and we don’t realise that we, our attention specifically, are its instruments. The moral failings of our political, faith, and school leaders. Our culture obsessed with death, defying death, defying age, and the denial of unprecedented grief impacting every aspect of our lives. 

Bitch, the litany goes on. 

When we are in the eye of this storm, it actually makes a lot of sense why it would be difficult to conceive of any other alternative. Fear is powerful because we feel it, we see it, we sense it deeply in our bones. Our bodies can anticipate, exceptionally well, how to brace for impact. It makes a lot of sense to me why Fear feels so true. 

amerikkkan culture is a fear based culture at its core. It was created from fear of religious persecution, fear of the consequences of rising against monarchy, fear of who they met on the other side of throwing themselves into the ocean, fear that Indigenous people must be as afraid and as scarce as they are, fear that Indigenous people would do to them what they were willing to do out of fear, fear that if they don’t maintain a position of superiority they will have to face what they had done, fear that led to enslaving people and convincing others to enslave people in exchange for superiority and a system of humanity they created, unifying a country based on the fear that you are either one of us or one of them, fear that this country is so young, so fragile that it is always on the verge of being taken, fear that if you ever talk about the blood, the death, the carnage, the assault, the violence, if you ever see the ghosts, if you ever understand the ancestry and the history, you will have to see yourself. 

americans, myself included, are terrified of seeing who we are. americans are always searching to feel safe, to stay safe, to be saved and arm ourselves with language or literal weapons (despite the fact that the more we arm ourselves, we become no more safer and have never allowed ourselves to experience the safety so many of the world do not get to experience because they are not american).  

Despite being incredibly un-natural, amerikkka is a deeply intertwined root system and network that operates similarly to trees. Our Mother Tree of this country began as a seed of Fear and for a long time has taught all of her children to create other networks of fear. For all the oppressed peoples brought here against their will (through enslavement and/or the impacts of U.S. backed wars/imperialism) and especially for the peoples who made homes here before Fear was planted, the networks affect us in substantial, material ways and physical ways. 

Our fear is intertwined. Our destinies, too. 

When we operate and are forced to operate in bodies that do not know true safety and cannot understand it, of course it would be challenging to have a sense of clarity, a sense of purpose, a sense of wayfinding. Fear shows up differently in our bodies based on how we have to move through this world, but we have to acknowledge even our adversaries, even those we deem worthy of the highest judgement and ridicule, even they, Dearest, are afraid—perhaps, the most afraid of us, of love, of connection. 

Dearest, I am afraid, as we all are. And, I am grateful to have the privilege of being an artist. I am grateful I nurtured, often against the will of those around me, a passionate, disciplined dedication to creating and imagining. As a young, ambitious artist, I thought all I was doing was working to one day own a theatre company and play 8 shows a week on Broadway. I put my health and my life on the line for decades just to find a way out. Out of abuse. Out of control. Out of state sanctioned violence. And most importantly, out of Denver, Colorado and into Harlem, in New York City. I didn’t realise that my creative practice, one that was molded because I had access to free, public arts education, was a survival strategy. My obsession with my art was also an obsession with imagining freedom for myself. Even when facing and experiencing trauma as a young person, I didn’t notice the storm or violence because I put all my energy into imagining. I refused to accept reality as a fixed point and that forced me to get curious, to dream. 

I didn’t get this from myself, it was gifted to me. It came from watching my grandfathers pour love into each other regardless if the state or country recognised they were a “real” “married” couple. It came from watching my mother, as a single parent, work over 40 hours a week and gain a 4 year Bachelor’s degree in 2 years all at the same time. It came from watching her husband, who only had a high school education and no community behind him, craft a life with my mother that is completely opposite to what they were told they could achieve, and how my childhood began. It came from watching the countless aunties who were part of the village who raised me run small businesses, teach themselves English, all while raising children. 

My family is made up of people who would not consider themselves “creative’ or “artists” but they are unabashed, deep Dreamers. They are wayfinders. They are navigators. And even in their dreams, I am noticing a shift and a plateau. 

When people are not given opportunities to exercise the muscle that is Imagination, they begin to assume life is a fixed point. A curiosity diminishes. The Fear sets in. The body, used to survival and scarcity, begins to turn its coping tools into weapons. It arms itself against loved ones, against opportunity, against friendships, against strangers, against neighbours. It buys into the easiest belief system (the amerikkan dream), it assumes Fear is default because it is seen and felt so physically, so strongly that surely, it must be true. 

Fear rarely affords us true, critical thinking. And my greatest fear is that the Imagination Deficit works in tandem with the decline of a real intelligence: the capacity to hold multiple ideas to be true. If we can’t imagine, then we begin to only desire the dangerous pursuit of Certainty. 

I completely understand why we want and desire certainty, especially when it’s hard to know what is true. We’re living in an age where we’re beginning to question if seeing is the one true metric of knowledge. Because, if images can be altered and generated to an eerie degree, what does it mean to trust our own eyes?  What does it mean to know anything if we can’t be “certain”? 

So, naturally, we would want hardline facts. Exactitude. But, Dearest, if there is only One truth then we oversimplify the complexities of being alive. We lose the poetry of life. We lose connection and compassion. We lose empathy. 

We imagine not because we are certain, but precisely because we are uncertain. We engage imagination as a revolutionary tool because our intuitive way of knowing tells us, if only there was another way to do things, if only i could change, if only i could leave, and if i could leave…anywhere has got to be better than staying put. 

The Divine Mystery of Life tells us that Death is the limitless thing,  just as our unconscious mind, just as the expanse of our observable universe; Death is the greatest Unknown and therefore beyond the limit of human understanding. There is not One answer to Death that every single human being can agree on. 

And even if we did have One answer, if we had the certainty, it would not suddenly solve our problems. It’s much more beautiful and expansive to notice what happened because we’ve never been able to answer, definitively, what happens to us when we die. 

We share. 

We share our belief systems. We share our thoughts. We share our poetry. We share our awe. We share our dreams. We share our fears. We create in service to our beliefs. We engage our faith and our doubt. We build communities. 

I think it would be insane to say I always knew who I was, from the moment I was born. We forget and remember who we are often, it’s the joy of creating and living a life. But I do know, at least in one point in time, my mother believed I was more than any other child. At least one point in time, my mother imagined a future for me that had to be better than hers and fought exceptionally hard to get me a full ride scholarship at a Gifted & Talented school. 

I was three years old. Respectfully, ain’t no fucking way I did anything but what my mother expected of me. And she dreamed and expected a lot for me. It was her imagination that poured a core belief that I deserved to be at this rich people school (to make money) , that I had to be gifted (in making money), even if she didn’t know how (but she knew it was something to do with money), and something good would come from it (doctor, lawyer, president, definitely not fucking art school).

My mother was taught  to view education as a surefire way out of poverty and though she was an accomplished dancer and stunning violinist, she came from art not as the driver but as the conduit. She would not describe herself as a creative person, but still look at the power of her imagination. It carved a new reality for her and this imagination seed of hers came from her parents, their parents, and connects to me today. As much as it saddens me so many of my elder’s dreams were forced to exist inside the container of white supremacy and the specifics of amerikkkan-ness/capitalism, I cannot deny that seed is pure in and of itself in its truest form. I also cannot deny that the gift of dreaming and creation came to me because of them. All things, Dearest, can and should be true. 

Dearest, as you read my fears I wish for you to hold my dreams. I’ve taken you to a wishing well, after all. And in return, I hold your dreams and fight for them. I commit to rage against the Imagination Deficit and plant in its place. 

I dream for a shared imagination reset. I dream and yearn for a garden, where we plant and sow the seeds of Imagination. I dream for a place where Imagination is nurtured and nourished not only in children or youth, but in adults and elders alike. I dream for a place where Imagination is limitless, is expansive, and free. For when our imagination is regenerative and cultivated, our future prospers and is protected. 

When we have a gathering place to practice Imagination and experience it with one another, we not only get to engage in rehearsals for revolution but can seek what comes after we win (because, Dearest, it is inevitable we win). Imagination promises us not only solutions to the problems we face today, but gives us opportunities to dream up futures where we can delight in one another and delight that we cannot even fathom the problems we have today. 

I cannot write about Imagination without referencing Harriet Tubman. Our beloved elder saw what others could not (or maybe were too afraid to see) and it was her active dreaming and relationship to Imagination that built pathways for more dreaming in both the material and metaphysical sense. I also want to highlight that it’s because Harriet already existed outside an able-bodied framework and had a resting/dreaming practice that she could afford herself (and our ancestral lineage as Black americans) safety. There are accounts that because of her epilepsy, she would have to rest and in the resting, related to the stars and allowed her dreams to inform her next steps in leading others to freedom. 

When we hear rest is our birthright, it is in part because our rest quite literally ensured our safety and survival as Black people as we escaped. 

I live and move through the world in the intersections of peoples who had to seek escape through exceptional journeys. My paternal enslaved ancestors journeyed across the South and through oral tradition, only have a North Carolina plantation to point to as our beginning and Pittsburgh, PA as our most recent destination. My mother and her parents fled Vietnam as refugees, stacked onto a small fishing boat with thousands of people, and before that were imprisoned multiple times for their escape attempts. My mother and her parents’ journey led them from Saigon to Malaysian refugee camps to Southern California and still, my grandfather could not truly feel free to be his full, gay self with his partner (now husband) until journeying to Denver, Colorado. 

When you inherit escape and survival, a deep sense of scarcity becomes the default of the body. And evenso, I know my grandfather and grandmother dreamed in their prison cells. They dreamed among the 40 days and nights their boat was attacked by Thai pirates. They dreamed, alone in the hut they built on the sands of a Malaysian beach. They dreamed, inside the first nail salon they built in LA. I know this because their imagination pulled them into being as much as their deep desire to live. 

I dream of a future we built because of our love of this life, this planet, and one another. In this future, we do not succumb to despair and the violent belief children are not worth seeing in the world (because, Dearest, if we give into the fear that this Earth is not viable for future generations, then we are allowing it to die, allowing each other to hoard resources as we brace for death, and giving the world over to gerontocracy). 

My dreams, though inherent within me as a human, need a lot more nurturing the older I get. Again, I’m a cancer moon, I feel most comfortable engaging the verb that is mothering, And it’s taken me a long time to move from the dynamism of early career ambition and sacrificing myself at the altar of my dreams to building a sustainable, slow, wide capacity for dreams and rest. The lie of amerikkkanism is that you may have the dream, but you must sacrifice the rest required to dream. 

The ways in which I choose to mother myself lately are delicate and disciplined. I’m writing to you on the other side of quitting a steady job because it was life threatening. This unfortunately is the second time in less than two years. The first time this happened, my commute to work was literally life threatening because a man tried to stab me in the face at 7 o’clock in the morning on the 2 train. I still went to work that day and worked the full shift because I chose to take care of my students before myself. 

This most recent time I was working in a corporate environment (one I reluctantly chose to try to find a safer environment) where working 50+ hours a week was normalised and expected, abuse was rampant, and the stress caused my body to alert me into slowing down by giving me migraines that were so debilitating they mimicked strokes. Besides the indescribable pain that would affect my head and lower back, I would lose ability to speak, I would get paralysed either in totality or from the waist down, and the right side of my face stopped moving while I was working. Mind you, this is all occurring virtually, so the work was harming me in the confines of my own home. 

My brilliant body was teaching me again that dreams require rest and not sacrifice. And now that I am working towards and often now experience true communion with it, I move with gentleness in support of stewarding my physical form. Even in the face of unemployment, I put faith in the belief that when I tend to my inner world, my outer world tends back to me. I’ve developed a practice at my neighbourhood YMCA where I go for long, gentle bike rides that show me beautiful tropical landscapes, long hikes on the ellipticals that show me stunning waterfall views, and engage a cycle with the sauna/steam room/cold showers while being in community with my neighbours (who tend to be the kind, courteous elders I dream of becoming). 

The stillness I experience in saunas and steam rooms is a stillness I once never thought I could experience. It’s a complete surrender to an outside pressure of heat that, when I rest into or submit to, allows a deep detox, a place where I can see myself and my dreams clearly, and only requires 15 minutes of engagement at a time. It reminds me that when we slow and rest into outside pressures or forces, we can hear our own wisdom much more clearly and that wisdom is always in concert with our body. 

Of course, saunas and steam rooms are not accessible for everyone. It’s a wonder that my local YMCA has them, as many don’t, and it took many years for me to have access to any facility I can go to daily as part of my practice. Before I had this, I would strive to do face steams in my house for a similar effect and if you’d like recipes on how to do this, I would love to share them with you! 

Now that I commit to a rest practice that is small and achievable (at least 15 minutes daily) and am gentle with myself if I don’t go, I notice a sense of self I’ve never had before. I feel connected to life, to myself, my body, my partner, my neighbourhood, my dreams. Discipline is not harm, it’s the act of showing up. And we should show up for our dreams, meaning both the individual and collective—the true Our behind our dreams. 

My current imagination has led me to a deep longing for a mycelial network of centers where we practice Imagination. The current incarnation of this dream is a place where no matter who you are or where you are, you can walk into a building that will offer you free, comprehensive arts education that involves all fields under the performing arts, visual arts, literary arts, and healing arts. These are both physical and virtual locations. The point of these centers is to offer us a way to practice what was systematically taken away from us and to experiment with what it means to be in relationship to one another as we do so. That is the goal of our cooperative Shift23 Media, which you may have seen some of the beginning steps in our long journey towards this dream. 

I would love to know your dreams and hope you share them with me, especially because I’ve asked you to hold so much in your reading today. 

You mean the world to me and I love you so dearly. I wouldn’t’ve written this to you otherwise. 

In solidarity/imagination/love,

ayla