The Pippsywoggin Millie Roseanna and I have a lot in common as we both love animals, solitude and a good story.  We're both storytellers, you know.  Sometimes we get together just to try out stories on each other.  Sometimes we get together just to talk.  It was on one of those "just talk" days last week that the subject of imagination came up.

 

Millie, looking troubled, said, "I was eating dinner at my willow tree table one day last week when I overheard two human boys talking.  They were standing by the edge of the pond throwing stones in the water.  One started laughing and pointing at the other and saying, 'Oh, it's just in your imagination?'  What did he mean, Maureen?  He made it sound like imagination wasn't a very good place to be.  Since I'm from the edge of imagination, that bothers me.  Why would a human boy say such a thing?"

 

I looked at Millie for a bit, remembering the many times that someone had said to me, "Oh, it's just in your head", or "Get real!", or "Quit dwelling in a dream world."  All of these statements were efforts to get me to see the world in black and white and my days as ordered copies of the one before.  Yet, still, my imagination was a place in which I lived and dreamed and planted seeds that somehow made their way into the black and white world.

 

I passed Millie a cookie from the plate before me.  (A crumb was big enough for her.  It's very economical to entertain Pippsywoggins for tea.)  Don't worry about them, Millie.  They just don't know yet about the power of imagination.  They haven't read yet where the great human scientist Albert Schweitzer said, "Imagination is more powerful than knowledge."  They don't know yet that the world - and each person it it - is much bigger and fuller and more amazing than we can ever know by ordinary human senses.

 

Millie seemed satisfied, and settled herself into her seat - which perched comfortably on the edge of imagination. 

 

(To read more stories, see Pippsywoggin Stories )