What's an Imaginarium? It's something I just learned about from Richard Rohr and I'm really taken with the idea. An Imaginarium is a place devoted to stimulating the imagination. Rohr uses it to describe an "inner" imaginarium, the one that we carry around with us whether we're conscious of it or not. He says:

Each of us has our own unique imaginarium, an unconscious worldview constructed by our individual and group’s experiences, symbols, archetypes, and memories. For example, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, and Protestants live in quite different imaginaria. God comes to us in images that we can trust and believe, that have the inherent power to open our hearts. Spirituality tries to move beyond words to evoke our imaginaria at the unconscious level, where real change must first happen.

If your inner imaginarium is rich, intelligent, and not overly defended, you will never stop growing spiritually. My advice? Read more poetry and literature; watch movies; listen to music; visit museums. The artist is a prophet, someone who helps us be self-critical and creative so we don’t stay stuck in the status quo. The prophet models and embodies a new way of thinking and being that allows us to imagine a larger, more inclusive way to live.

You cannot even imagine something or do something until you first have an image of it inside you, which is surely why Einstein said, “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. . . . [It] encircles the world.”

So this site is where my imaginarium becomes visible. This is where I will store the images, words, etc. that inspire me and it is where I will share the fruits of my imagination in the hopes that others might be inspired in turn.

As Shel Silverstein says,