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My son is in kindergarten. Every morning before we leave for school, I check his backpack for the essentials—a sweater, a snack packed neatly in his Star Wars lunch box, an empty water bottle to be filled up at school, some toy cars in case he gets bored on the bus ride home, and one blue, plastic folder, standard issue for every kindergartener. It gets put into the back pack empty each morning and in the afternoon it returns filled with papers. Sometimes there are flash cards with new sight words or a note from the school about an upcoming assembly.

But every day, without exception, there’s paper colored with crayons or glitter or something else to give it flare. Which means that in class every day, without exception, each six-year-old has a reason to draw something, to paint something, to cut shapes from colored paper and paste it onto something. And every day that blue folder is filled with treasures of the day’s lessons and adventures—pictures of butterflies emerging from a cocoon, of the Earth rotating around the sun, or maybe of horses flying in a jungle made of lollipops.

If you ask my son what he can draw, he’ll say, “Anything. What do you want? Want to see me riding my bicycle over an ocean? Or Grandma learning ninja moves from her cats? Or how about daddy playing soccer against a team of tigers in space?” He can do it all. And, at six years old, he’s encouraged to do it. It’s part of the day’s curriculum. They learn math and reading and science and they play outdoors and they color and paint and glue things. Hanging in every cubby is a smock ready on a moment’s notice.

In kindergarten, everything you need is in one room. There’s paint and music and room to dance, there are science experiments and lab equipment and materials to read and write and sing and build. Those things are also available in middle school and high school and college, but they are in different rooms, maybe different buildings, and as we get older, we limit who has access to them. The older we get, the more specialized and focused our learning. This room is for painting and that room is for singing, and science experiments are done over there.

And, with each passing year, we discern—generally for ourselves but sometimes for each other—who belongs in which room. Are you a singer? Can you dance? Can you act? Can you draw? That’s your room over there. Or, maybe you need to find another building. Our birthright as artists and dreamers is drained away from us.

Daydreaming is part of the creative process. I spend a lot of time daydreaming. I imagine beautiful old houses and I decorate them in my mind. Ceilings, walls, windows, floors, furniture. I imagine textures and colors and scents in each room. The other direction my daydreams take is imagining the perfect community. It’s always attached to a farm where animals are safe, a place people can work and be cared for, a place everyone is getting what they need. I create this beloved community in my mind over and over again.

Daydreaming is a critical part of the creative process and a key to how we survive a world that can be cold and lonely and frightening. It’s how we know where we want to go and how we’re going to get there. It’s the door into whatever’s next.

The other day I called a man I know. This man is at the top of his game, well known and respected in his field. He’s met with the pope and the Dalai Lama and recently turned down an invitation to the White House because he had something more important to do. When I called his cell phone, he answered but sounded a little dazed. He then confessed he’d been daydreaming. I laughed and apologized for interrupting the most important thing he’d do all day. He didn’t get it and responded by saying, “I hope not,” but I actually meant it.

I think that for this man to do all he does, to imagine the world a better place, to build the world we all dream about, he’s going to need to do a whole lot of daydreaming. He got thousands of people to St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican for a massive demonstration of support for the Pope’s recent encyclical “Laudato Si: On Care For Our Common Home.” You might have seen it on TV or read about it. The only way for that to happen is to be willing to dream big, to let your imagination run free.

Daydreaming isn’t a waste of time; it’s the mandatory preliminary action without which nothing else can be done. First, we dream. First, we imagine Beloved Community. First, we let ourselves believe that what we wish can be.

Trusting our creativity and indulging our imagination is our only option if we want transformation, if we want to build the new world that exists in our dreams.

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Rev. Peggy Clarke

Minister at First Unitarian Society of Westchester, New York

Rev. Peggy Clarke is a Unitarian Universalist minister currently serving the First Unitarian Society of Westchester in Hastings on Hudson, NY.  She is also the Racial and Social Justice Consultant for the NY Metro District and the chair of the national UU Food Justice Ministry. Rev. Clarke sits on the Steering Committees for both UU Environmental Justice Collaboratory and Commit2Respond and chairs our UU Food Justice Ministry. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and Peace Studies and a Master’s in Historical Theology with a concentration in Medieval Mysticism from Boston College.  Her doctoral work was in American Religious History.  Rev. Clarke was the college Chaplain at Iona College where she also served as Adjunct Professor in the Religious Studies Department and Co-Directed the Iona Spirituality Institute for 12 years.  She is a GreenFaith Fellow and the co-founder of InterGenerate, an organization dedicated to food justice, thus creating the possibility in Westchester County for equal access to food that’s good, clean and fair.  Peggy lives in the woods with her husband, son and two dogs.

Latest posts by Rev. Peggy Clarke (see all)

• Silence as a Spiritual Tool - December 1, 2020
• On Love and Death - October 1, 2020
• The Creative Spirit - April 1, 2017