Companion on the Journey
Let your imagination inform your intellect. Instead of letting them fight each other, as we so often do, let them make love. That’s how art is born.”
Madeleine L’Engle folded her hands and gazed around the room at us, 30-odd writers who had come to Mount Calvary, an Episcopal monastery and retreat house in the mountains above Santa Barbara, for a five-day writers’ workshop. Her 78 years of pain, love, birth, death, and writing had rendered her as strong and deeply rooted as the live oaks in the canyon nearby.
I pondered what she said. In my life, my intellect is usually in control: I pride myself on being organized. When my imagination takes over, I feel in danger – in danger of making a fool of myself, of losing myself in a flood of emotion, of ending up someplace unexplored and dangerous.
My imagination had certainly been scaring me in the days leading up to the retreat. Ever since reading “A Wrinkle in Time” at age 11, I had idolized Madeleine L’Engle and her books, full of truth about life and God. In imagining meeting her, I had been swept away by my emotions: hoping to be noticed, afraid of disgracing myself, desperate for her guidance, quivering with nervous anticipation.
L’Engle said, “A retreat is a gift of being time. You can do whatever you like with it: go write in your journal, go write poetry, go speak with God, have a conversation with an angel, swim in the ocean of your soul.”
Over the next few days of regular prayers, sessions with L’Engle, reading, writing, and hiking in the canyon, I tried to be. I kept finding unexpected scraps of time, a half-hour between Matins and breakfast, for example, or between L’Engle’s talk and Vespers.
These odd bits of time were only just enough for little things. I took a walk and discovered a wildflower that smelled exactly like maple syrup. I wrote in my journal why I disliked the cactus in the monastery garden, and realized I disliked myself for similar reasons. I sat very still in the sunlight on top of a stone wall and felt the wind blow through me. When I was completely in the moment, I lost myself in it, and found myself in it, too.
I escaped from my intellect’s control – instead, I used my intellect to think and to write. I also was no longer overcome by my imagination, but just used that imagination to experience fully the “being time.” Perhaps my imagination and my intellect were starting to “make love.” I don’t know whether art was born, but I know that a new peace was born: in me.
Passarelli is an active member of Christ Church Episcopal in Los Altos.
