Can You Imagine?
Yesterday, as I was walking home from dropping the kids at school, I waved at a sparrow.
I tipped my head, waved, and said, “Well, hello there, little one. Good to see you.”
And immediately, I looked behind me to see if anyone was watching me, alone and conversing with a hopping brown bird. I hoped no one driving with her windows down had caught me talking with no irony to a creature. For a moment, I imagined the bird understood my greeting, and a second later, I felt a little ashamed.
But why shouldn’t I think to acknowledge this type of neighbor?
Just this week, the kids and I heard on a podcast that prairie dogs have the most complex animal language ever recorded, sophisticated enough to chirp whole sentences like, “Yellow dog slow,” or “Here comes blue square.” They are communicating more than primates or dolphins, these ground squirrels disappearing by the thousands.
In the same episode, we learned that crows can hold grudges, remembering the faces of those who wronged them for up to seven! years and passing this information onto others.
In the last few weeks, I’ve learned about orchid bees that mix their own perfume from multiple forest sources, leaf-cutter ants that sustainably farm fungus, orangutans that trust vets enough to voluntarily present their babies’ bellies for check-ups, and cats who’ve learned to meow to their humans when those in the wild do not.
I’ve been feeling sheepish lately about fits of imagination, like my morning salute to my feathered friends. I’ve felt this way since I was a child who kissed each of her stuffed animals before placing them in a storage tub, grieving that they’d be without me for years.
Now, as an adult, imagination feels frivolous. After all, everyone I know is suffering somehow. Estranged family members, biopsies, cancer diagnoses, aging parents, kids who need break through, long mental health challenges, custody battles, weeks of sicknesses, insomnia, loneliness and unforeseen changes in circumstances. Imagination seems silly, irresponsibly optimistic, escapist, a pastime of the privilege or best left to our kids. If not frivolous, at least not a priority.
Or, we feel jaded. How can we believe in something that couldn’t be true?
I would argue that we live each day facing terrible things that defy comprehension.
In a week alone, 15,000 people have been displaced from Port-Au-Prince while jails burst open— not from the singing of hymns.
Can you imagine?
Can you imagine?
If these horrors exist and persist, why not animals who hear our greetings or speak in sentences? Why not beggars who are actually princes? Why not trees that giggle when they’re tickled?
Why not whole families, repaired relationships, healthy communication among our conferences or communities, systemic changes, warfare ceasing?
Can you imagine?
Jesus gives us more than enough fodder for our imagination in his words on earth:
The kingdom of Heaven is like sown seeds, like weeds and wheat, like mustard branches full of birds, like a woman baking bread for a whole community, like rubies buried underground, like a net filled with flapping fish, like a “great big beautiful pearl.”
Women stand with burning lamps outside a wedding while others run out. A father comes running toward a degenerate son. God of the Universe weeps and parties and falls asleep, exhausted from living.
Can you imagine?
Maybe it makes no difference in the world that this morning, I stroked the first blooms on my forsythia bush and told them I was so glad to see them again. I’d like to imagine something in this other created thing responded. This time, I didn’t look over my shoulder.
I will keep on foolishly imagining that things are not as they seem, that things could have more weight than their frames suggest, that horrors can be equally matched by compelling visions of the world God still dares to dream into existence.
Can you imagine?
