This week I came across the following fantastic quotation from William Blake, which could stand as an epigraph to this project:
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers.
Nature is Imagination itself. For Blake, of course, imagination is not ‘making things up.’ It is the vital generative matrix of perception and creativity that yields the world we live in. And when I climb the tree, I climb right up into the heart of that, because being in a tree alters experience, renders it more alert to this inner relation between human being and the natural world.
Nature is Imagination itself. This is why we meet ourselves in the world around us; why when we stretch out a hand, it finds and is taken by a hand reaching back. We are everywhere already, and come home to ourselves through fields, trees, streams, cliffs, stones, sky, enrichened. This thronging, this inner relation, is Spirit.
