“The world offers itself to your imagination, like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,” poet Mary Oliver says in her gorgeous poem called Wild Geese. The only failure in life is the failure of imagination, and of persistence and courage to follow it. Life lays banquets of possibilities before us and says, come, eat, talk with me, let’s create.

What is it that steals from us simple faith in the visions we are granted, saps our courage and will to persist? Sometimes it seems like “self-preservation” to draw back and protect the little fortress we have built rather than cast ourselves out into an unknown future. But what is that “self” we are “preserving”? Do we want to put it in a jar and keep it? When we open the jar, then what?

Life offers itself to our imagination. I want to accept it’s offering, to imagine freely. It takes faith and a capacity for joy to follow it. Whatever it is that steals these capabilities from us, banish them.