ABSTRACT
In this chapter, staying with our creative nature leads us into the world as an imaginal landscape where things are alive. An imaginative mode of engagement recollects the world as the native dwelling of the source of our creativity. The hegemony of literalizing is a collective repression of the imaginal that alienates us from our creative nature, in part by covertly imagining a world bereft of soul. A dead world constitutes us as alienated. To heal this alienation, we attend the literalized metaphors that sustain a dead world, including projection, interiority, inanimate matter and nature as resource. This opens the way to engaging the world bodily as image and remembering that nature’s creativity is our creativity.
Living the world as inspiring embodies a radical reimagining of the world from which we and our creativity arise and of the created work. The implications of the interiority of things for creativity and created works are developed. The world as imaginal landscape opens to a number of implications for the relationship between creative spaces and creative processes. Staying with a mystic’s a mode of engagement with the world deepens further our connection to our creative nature.
