Reading As A Conversation With Ourselves
Author Maryanne Wolf champions deep reading as an invitation into conversation with ourselves. She focuses on three brain activities inherent in our thinking capacity as humans.
Empathy
Empathize With Others’ Experiences
“What each of us does in our deepest most immersive forms of reading - welcome the other as a guest within ourselves, sometimes become the other. For a moment in time, we leave ourselves and return expanded, strengthened and changed.”
Growth and Expansion
Open to New Awareness
“There is a final moment in the reading act when an ‘arms-wide’ expanse in the reader’s mind opens up and all our cognitive and affective processes become the stuff of pure attention and reflection.”
Imagination
Imagine New Ways of Being
“Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypothesis about how life is to be understood.”
why imagination?
Who Am I? Imagination and Creative Growth
You can only dream of what you can imagine ~ Trevor Noah
Imagination is about seeing beyond what we know. Imagination is not just for creative types or people with their heads in the clouds. Imagination is a survival skill embedded in our psyche to lead us into new possibilities. Possibilities for loving our way into the world.
Story sparks imagination to make new connections and move beyond perceived limitation.
Imagination as the Fertile Soil of Creativity
Neil Gaiman writes and speaks a great deal about imagination. I have especially enjoyed his essay Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming: The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013. It’s in his book The View from the Cheap Seats, or you can watch it here.
Who Am I? Imagination and Spiritual Healing
Spark your imagination. See new possibilities for your life. If. imagination feeds our dreams, story gives us the material to feed our imagination. Storie inspires us to use our imagination as a vehicle toward healing, growth and transformation.
We must exercise our imagination as if our lives depend upon it, for they do. ~ Ann Bedford Ulanov
Imagination as Expansion
Ann and Barry Ulanov write about imagination and healing the wounded psyche in The Healing Imagination: The meting of Psyche and Soul.
“As the circle of our awareness widens, the perimeters of our unconsciousness also increase. The larger the scope of knowing, the larger the circumference of unknowing. The more we hone our skills the closer we come to the borders of the wilderness where there are not markers, no skills. Either we go on, into that place beyond the boundaries, or we burn out. But going into the unknown places poses a great risk, the risk of consciousness of self.”
Prefer a novel? Explore The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman