A GyroCompass for Our Times: Five Essential Practices
This post was written collaboratively by Alan Briskin and Amy Lenzo.
When thinking something through it helps to think in images, as that can offer a unique approach to clarifying thoughts and seeing the relationship among ideas. It’s like translating between languages – conceptual ideas becoming representational, and images and symbols acting as a counterpart to abstract thought.
The reason for this lies in the very definition of image, literally an optical counterpart for an object. Similarly, imagination (from the Latin imaginari, meaning “to picture to oneself”) is an extension of this way of understanding. To the Romantic poets, for example, it was a way, through poetic expression , to picture something that was very real to them at the level of Soul, or Spirit. They weren’t making something up, as in our more common understanding of the word. They were making something visible that would otherwise be ephemeral but no less real. Images help us picture for ourselves ideas that can be elusive and difficult to capture in words alone.
We recently had a wonderful creative session with our colleague and visual maestro David Sibbet to create the above image (here’s a link to David’s description of our collaborative process). We wanted to represent practices of collective wisdom that we’ll be exploring in our upcoming six-session online course Activating Collective Wisdom: Five Essential Practices.