Saturday 9 July 2011

I'm reading 'The Art of James Christenson - The Art of Imagination, as told to Renwick St James', and right at the beginning of the book he writes of meeting up with an old friend whom he discovers never takes his 30 minute drive home from work in the same way.

'That resonated in my own life. Like many people in this age of getting there faster, I sometimes lose sight of the journey in the light of the goal.  What my friend had done with a simple change in his routine was to leave space for the unexpected within the bounds of ordinary life.......My friend Ralph found a simple way to keep his evening drive from becoming routine.  I like that idea , that within an ordinary life you can leave space for noticing the world around you and keeping alive the inner universe of imagination.'
The Art of James Christenson - The Art of Imagination, as told to Renwick St James

I was suddenly taken back to a memory of walking to and from school aged about six or seven. Remembering how I used to pretend I was a foreign person, who had never been that way before, so everything I encountered I was meeting for the first time.  The small red-brick houses with their walled or hedged gardens contained plants I'd never seen before, the tall green trees, waved their leaves in patterns on the pavements in a sunlight I had never walked into before.  The small side-streets led away right and left to hidden pathways I'd never trodden before.

'In the universe of the mind lie treasures and surprises, fertile soils and elegant creations, new angels and old dragons, visions of other worlds and the quiet contemplation of death.'
The Art of James Christenson- The Art of Imagination, as told to Renwick St James.