Let Down Your Hair
The Poetry of Imagination
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Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world.
Albert Einstein
Imagination bites the stiff upper lip of logic.
Blood throbs and aches into a life papered with the skin of time.
Bone quills dust and ash. Etched into the molten flesh of wonder.
What lies hidden in being? Imagination.
Balayaged in moon kissed streaks that sweep the fire of colour off its feet, imagination gives birth to creativity.
The tender lips of imagination taste a possibility that looks not through eyes.
It speaks not of hands. Yet to touch is to feel. To feel is to touch.
Something intimate is present in creativity. It can’t be seen. It yearns. It feels.
It moves through us.
Conception clouds perception in the black and white naivety of sensual reality. Reality reels. Knowledge struts. A performance? Our current lives may be far from a faithful representation of reality. Reality is a process often domesticated by the dissonance dance of an ego that needs to navigate, judge, defend and conquer the filtered camera lens of one view point. The perception of what we think we see depends on the perspective of where we are looking from. Ego seeks to affirm that reality with others that have the same view. The shape of our reality decides where we are. Seeing leads to believing. We see reality as we are.
What about imagination? Creativity transforms reality. The concrete rhythms of life may actually lean more towards the abstract. Not bound by the schematic scripts of the senses alone. Expression inhabits a place beyond the lived experience. Is there a space between what is and what can be?
Maybe believing leads to seeing?
The mystery of metaphor dives into the density of another dimension of presence. Metaphor transcends time and space. Poetry slows us down. The attending of a deeper noticing. Metaphor in poetry defies logic. It un-names knowledge. Poetry opens the door to the unconscious spirit of our depths. To the colours inside. Poetry creates feelings and images. Multiple images.
Metaphor and symbol weave a world where we see familiar things in different, new ways of connection. We say new things with old words. Metaphor surprises us. Underneath the flesh of those expanded connections, metaphor and symbol heighten our relationship with our self to alchemize a more profound narrative of meaning. It fosters a deeper engagement with empathy and perspective.
Poetry transforms reality.
On the wings of words poetry goes beyond lived experience to expand the boundaries of our reality, to allow an exploration into possibilities not chained to the walls of reason. In the flight of imagination, creativity is a feather. Poetry metabolizes emotional regulation, expression and transformative growth. Poetry is spiritual medicine. Far from escaping reality, poetry rescues us from reality.
As always Mary Oliver said it best, “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
Poetry can save lives.
Rescue
Let down your hair.
I’m trapped in a tower of words.
Flesh has become a book of pages.
Skin the paper
where I write in the margins of time.
A quiver of marrow
in a handful of earth.
Lost without these words.
Yet lost for words.
The way a mother holds a child.
The way light becomes a mirror.
The way truth arrives in the dark.
Stripping my life naked
to tenderly touch
the places
I forgot how
to love.
© Jamie MillardGenuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
TS Eliot
This one was a little bit of a deeper dive. I’ll happily call myself out at times for maybe layering too many words. Words on words. Words in-words. Maybe painting a picture with too many colours. Painting over top of a canvas that’s already been expressed.
With that said it’s a journey to the inside. Metaphor and symbol allow me to make deeper connections. To allow a different perspective to shape perception. To allow perception to shape a place of perspective. To step into the circle of that space between what is and what can be. Presence. It’s a place we always are- once we real-eyes that.
That place requires another language. The words I know cannot express what I feel. Lived experience or not. I meet that journey at poetry. I’ll meet you at the cross roads.
Thanks for Being - Here. In this flight of words. Words matter. Exploring into metaphor and symbol is a deeper conversation with emotional expression. It’s definitely not a monologue. Poetry is good for our health. A poem a day flexes the muscles of our imagination beyond a life of sensual lived experience alone.
Far from escaping reality, poetry rescues us from reality. Poetry reduces anxiety and depression. Poetry opens doors to the inside. Meet you there.
Resources:
Possible Worlds Theory: How the Imagination Transcends and Recreates Reality. Dacher Keltner and Eftychia Stamkou. The Annual Review of Psychology. 2025. 76:329-58
Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen. 2023
Lots of Love,
Jamie
Dear Jamie, this is a poem radiating with truth and beauty. Not too many words or layers, lost without words, yet lost for words. The words that allow us to transform this reality, from which we need to escape at times, on the wings of imagination because life can feel too unbearable at those times.
Thank you for reminding us that "Far from escaping reality, poetry rescues us from reality."
and that "metaphor un-names knowledge" ~ some things can only be said in metaphor, because the words describing the facts are simply not enough to capture the experience.
Thank you for letting your hair down from the tower of words, allowing us to climb up and join you in the trap, which may also be an inner sanctuary, inviting us to glimpse truth in the dark, which is where imagination lives, birthing metaphor, to shine a light on those forgotten places and bathe them in love.
Dear Poet, thank you so much for letting your hair down! For the beauty, wonder, surprise of your words this morning are naming something I’ve always known deep in the marrow of my bones … that poetry, imagination and metaphor aren’t just embellishments in my life, but the very language and tools my psyche turns to whenever factual words can’t hold what’s true. Art does the same for me, it touches something on the inside.
As a poet myself, I know that I've been rescued more than once by an image that arrived truer than any literal one … often it was the only way to name what my younger self/selves had no language for. Once, for me, ("Mother, How Dark the Night Is" p.81) it was my metaphorical neck on the chopping board beside the onions … a child’s terror translated into the only metaphor she could carry at the time.
What you write about imagination as medicine and metaphor as the rope we climb back up with, touches something so deep and true in me! That line in your poem … "let down your hair" … feels mythic in the best way, a "Rapunzel" moment where expression becomes the very bridge between isolation and connection. I recognise that instinctively … how a single image can become a lifeline, a way out of the tower of silence, a way back into one’s own life.
For poetry is how I rescue myself. How I let others in. How I too climb out of my tower.
Do you see what you've done here, Jamie? You put words around the unspeakable. Thank you again for spreading the word, the love and for firing our imaginations with such poetic wonder.
Love and gratitude always, your poet friend, Deborah 🙏💖✨🔥