As a woman who came back to Italy after years spent in other beloved places, trying to salvage what feels lost, buried and forgotten, I identify as a “pagana,” from the Latin “pagus:” an inhabitant of the countryside, one of those who were outside the bounds of city jurisdiction and administrative power, at the fringes, and therefore not easy to control.

Living about an hour away from the city feels exactly that way, refusing all that Rome, with its long history, came to represent (empire, patriarchy, domination, religious dogma and influence, coercion, grandeur and decadence) while being still mischievously close.

I was born in Rome from a non-Roman family; a family still able to remember the old times of simple and difficult living in the countryside. And yet, in this very native village, the cultural amnesia brought about by Church influence and national pop culture feels very tangible, especially in summer, when the crowds flee the hot city, looking for some ease on the hills, carrying with them their penchant for noise.

I have chosen to come back and take refuge here because this is the way I can retrieve an interrupted connection, by listening to the land, both her beauty and grief. I can’t identify with the modern narrative of what an Italian is supposed to be like. I am delving deeper, through and beyond layers of erasure, denial, dispossession and sorrow.

In Italy, there’s such a huge cultural variance among regions, and even provinces, that experiences and perceptions are bound to be very different. The narrative of the unitary national state has not been enough to mend the fractured alliances, the rivalries and prejudices, not to speak of profoundly different histories and heritages.

Dwellers of the countryside have been the first to become “others” under the rule of the powerful, the state, and the Church, which have exercised their disciplining influences, while forgetting, breaking and homologizing by various means.

On a deep level, this national state I was born in doesn’t feel aligned with the longing in my soul. I have felt the depths of belonging in the Scottish Highlands, and in the Baltic forests, and now, in this half-forgotten corner of the Italian countryside, even though here my belonging is more frayed with friction.

My way of dealing with this is through deep attuning and listening to what I can observe and experience in my surroundings and in the interwoven lands of the imagination. Both crossings are passages into subtler perception: thus, flowers, plants, trees, birds, insects, animals, features of the land, mountains, lakes, rivers, people, and emergent feelings and stories, theirs and my own. Wherever I am, I listen, also when it is difficult to make out feeble voices and inarticulate emotions.

I offer one-to-one guided poetic and narrative journeys. You can book or contact me here.

I started this publication to offer creative engagement with plants and flowers, as a way to reclaim and retrieve what was lost, forgotten or overlooked, plunge into the imaginal dimension, and deepen my relationship to the land I inhabit.

I am a poet and writer trained in creative arts therapies, literature and anthropology. I care about the imagination, as that wild, fertile, pathless land where everything originates and takes root first.

How can you walk into a pathless land?

You make way. This is how the imagination acts: subtle perceiving walks you there. And it doesn’t happen on a linear, already laid-out path.

I am drawn to what is not immediately evident, the unknown and subtle, the mysterious and unstated. As someone who considers writing her medium, I see my task as listening, bringing back and “translating” insight into story and poetry, in a way that tends the dream and deepens intuition and the capacity for vision.

This is why in my creative practice I explore the field of story as something alive and responsive and also facilitate imaginal pathfinding through poetic and narrative journeys that enable you to tap into a relational imaginative space.

Imagination comes before creative output. Imagination is the underlying, generative ground that nourishes everything, including creativity.

It is a force that enables you to sense and dream possibilities into being, and to listen to what already is.

The words, sounds and images that arise from this hidden force are qualitatively different. They are not mere creative products. They are ways of being in relation and holding the tension between the manifest and the un-manifest.

To take an alternative poetic or narrative journey with me, contact me or book here.

Beyond the neat distinction between reason and common sense on one hand, and fantasy and wishful thinking on the other, we enter the vast expanse of the imagination, a dimension tapped into by creative artists of all times, but not acknowledged enough in common parlance.

Analytical philosophy and cognitive psychology have given both abstract and empirical accounts of this “image-making faculty.”

These approaches are not wrong, but partial and reductive, because they rely on a bidimensional anthropology that contemplates a human being composed of mind and body only, functioning in a mechanical way.

As already pointed out, humans are multidimensional beings.

The imagination is more than an individual faculty; it is an elemental force field, the most direct pointer to our multidimensionality, and the existence of psyche and spirit.

Psyche, or soul, is the relational element of the human being embedded in a complex web of relations and interactions. Spirit is the fire, the vital spark in us.

Emotions and intuition are the tools of the imagination, in that they provide energetic information about the way something affects us.

In fact, when we visualize or construct a sensory picture of a situation, our emotions shift and change, and our neural activity is affected too. MRI scans prove that the body-mind does not distinguish between a simulation and an experience of something. In both cases, we feel emotions and register them as “real.” Thus, working with the imagination through sensory detail arousing emotions is effective. The reverse is also true: spontaneous intuition and emotions give us access to the imagination and to the multidimensional body of the human constitution.

Paying attention to the intuitive feelings and emotions we feel in our bodies is a gateway that enables us to retrieve the alphabet of the imagination, as the main language of our whole being.

When we imagine a situation, our physical body is involved too through the experience of emotions. In the same way, embodiment can affect and enhance our ability to tap into the imagination, as in the case of acting out a scenario, for example.

The embodied imagination can help us access new concepts and understandings through veritable shifts, insights that are signalled by a change in the way we describe and inhabit a situation.

In other words, language itself signals these shifts in intuitive understanding through heightened metaphors.

According to Greek etymology, “metaphor” means “to carry across.” This is usually interpreted as transferring a quality from an object to another to stress their common attributes. However, in this light, metaphor is also what carries us across, over and beyond our current ways of understanding and processing experience, into the next.

In this sense, metaphor can signal a shift in the way we come to experience, know and register situations and events.

We can feed the imagination to evolve or manipulate. We can also cultivate imagination as a portal to living with what is from moment to moment: to awaken and abide by the mystery of existence, and become stewards in service to life, in its multiple relationships.

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Martin Ruland’s Lexicon of Alchemy, a book published in 1622, contains the following definition of imagination:

Imagination is the star (astrum) in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.

Carl Gustav Jung noticed this definition with exhilaration, as it opened up his own perspective regarding the parallels between Depth Psychology and the Great Work of alchemy.1

To his eyes, suddenly imagination appeared as the ‘subtle body’ between dense body and abstract mind, the very stuff of the Unconscious. Jung was a psychiatrist, and wanted to secure the status of the theory of archetypes within the domain of materialistic science; yet, on a deeper level, he was tapping into something else altogether.

These enigmatic declarations become clearer when considered from the point of view of the multidimensionality of the human being.

In other words, despite materialist accounts that only recognize the existence of matter, or mind and matter at best, according to mystics from Western and Eastern traditions, the human body is made up of seven “bodies”, or dimensions of consciousness. The physical body is only the densest and the one directly visible. The others are subtle energy bodies interconnected, and nested within one another, which we can observe only indirectly, through their actions and effects. Here is a synthetic list, to be considered as a “map” to the territory:

1. Physical body

2. Etheric or vital body

3. Astral or emotional body

4. Mental or rational body

5. Causal body

6. Spiritual body

7. Monadic body

The third body, the astral, is the one that registers all the emotions and emotional effects of external stimuli, turning them into internal ones, and conversely, generates internal emotions and images that influence our perception and ideation.

It is the subtle body that is affected by, and at the same time affects, emotions, dreams, images, symbols, ideas: it is the substance of imagination itself, acting as a bridge linking the physical and the emotional on one hand, and the emotional and mental dimensions on the other.

This action is well visible in the dream state, which is capable of creating images without receiving sense impressions, but also of recreating impressions and emotions received during waking time.

Throughout Western history of philosophy, imagination has been seen as either recreative or productive, capable of receiving and replicating, or producing and creating internal images. At the same time, the multidimensionality of the human being has been progressively reduced to one dimensionality: mind and matter, or matter only.

For the alchemists, imagination is key:

Ruland’s definition of imagination is a constitutional metaphor, if we take metaphor to be much more than a mere rhetorical device to embellish language, as something that is wired in the human being as the way we imagine, think, embody and make meaning every day, and therefore “we live by.”2

We cannot understand imagination fully if we divorce it from the multidimensional constitution of the human being on one hand, and the embodied character of metaphor on the other. We are metaphorical beings, in that we think, feel, and act in metaphors and all we create and ideate is an “image” of something else, going deeper and deeper, in the attempt of making meaning, and finding a way of sharing it.

Behind even the clearest and most “neutral” statement and image, there are other images, and the assumptions connected to them: imagination is constitutive, not derivative, and our realities are constructed. Creative imagination is what makes them possible in the first place.

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I have been circling over the topic of this piece for a couple of days, in the attempt to pinpoint and convey a strong existential stance, through a seemingly counterintuitive take on the beauty of plants, imagination and well… everything else.

Albert Einstein said it best:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

We live in a world saturated with information and knowledge, not always of the best and most trustworthy kind; however, knowledge is more readily available and accessible than in any previous era. And yet, thinking, knowing, feeling, have become flattened and more superficial in the continuous hustle and bustle of life run on the cogs of a giant, global machine-like system of life.

I was reading a lyrical essay by David George Haskell describing his interaction with four different wildflowers in Atalanta, his hometown, when I came across this statement:

Celebrating wildflowers is not an anaesthetic — attentiveness reveals loss as well as beauty — but a grounding in the world as it is. Because flowers so entrance our senses, they offer memorable lessons reorienting us back to the living Earth.1

Indeed, this is what I feel and write about in Writing with Plants and Flowers: the sense of weaving our existence in the tapestry of the plants living on the land we share, as an antidote to the sense of disconnection induced by current news and lifestyles, and a pathway to the joy of belonging and sharing here on Earth.

I would add that communing with plants and flowers through observation, engagement, and stillness enhances our imagination, in a way many philosophers and thinkers of old already knew.

I will reserve to expand on this in other posts; here, I intend to draw attention to the imagination itself, even if grouping plants, flowers and imagination may seem somewhat arbitrary. Please, bear with me.

Globalized culture has a pendant for categorization typical of western thought. Thus, we mostly think of the imagination as a cognitive faculty, an ability that enables us to “form mental images, sensations, or concepts of things not currently perceived by the senses, including creative, fantastical, or remembered scenes.”2 More specifically, according to the definition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

1. the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality

2. a) a creative ability

b) ability to confront and deal with a problem

c) the thinking or active mind

3. a) a creative product of the mind

b) a fanciful or empty assumption

c) something that only exists in one’s mind

What jumps to the eye in this definition is its abstract, disembodied quality, proceeding from the most inclusive to the most exclusive, or even pejorative, case.

Imagination is considered an attribute of mind, which is not the whole story.

There are other frameworks such as Dr Murray Hunter’s 8 types of imagination, which define imagination depending on its most emphasized function in any given endeavour. Thus, imagination can be combinatory, constructive, imaginative fantasy, empathetic, strategic, emotional, dream, and memory reconstruction.3

I could go on and on, quoting philosophers and psychologists, and showing that there are also other functions attributed to imagination, such as pretence, surmise, filling in the gaps, projection, etc.

However, this is not the direction I am going in here. It is enough to point out that imagination has had an ambiguous or subordinate status in Western rationalist thought.

What I intend to reclaim here is imagination as a specific mode of knowledge that is not located primarily “in the head” of a subject, but is a diffuse, sensory and embodied power. Passing though feeling, it is a gateway to intuition, according to a participatory logic where there is no hard split between knowing subject and known object.

This was the way imagination was conceived of in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and beyond, in esoteric circles.

Our skins are permeable membranes. There is no such thing as a hard separation, as the late Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn articulated in his work on Interbeing.4

Imagination creates everything in human culture, from ways of life, to religious and political institutions, social forms and norms, entertainment, and more, as the work of Cornelius Castoriadis on the imaginary considers in depth.5

In both of these ways, imagination transcends the illusory boundary of the skin, the isolated mind of the monad. Imagination becomes a connective, fluid dimension we can tune into to bring forth creations, and to live our lives in communication with and in connection to the lives of others, including the non-human, i.e. plants and flowers, and animals.

Imagination is a living force. It enables envisioning the future, embodying the present, and illuminating the past on individual and collective levels, and shapes human cultures, worlds, habitats, and spheres of interest and action.

The challenge is to reclaim this deeper current of agency we can all partake of, once we stop giving up our power to imbibe narratives that have been shaped with the precise intent of disconnecting us from the living current of the imagination, and from one another.