Makey-up

Stace, ,

“That wasn’t a lie son, it was a makey-up”

From “Da” by Hugh Leonard

It started with a guided meditation by Sarah Blondin about accepting change. I had become increasingly frustrated with the bland descriptive writing I was producing in the weekly Imaginative Storm workshops compared to the soaring flights of imagination other participants continually produced. Was my personality so rigid that I couldn’t allow my imagination to flow in a similar way? Was I so conditioned from my working life as a computer manager that I couldn’t just let my mind go on a subject, even though a lot of that job required very lateral thinking to solve problems?

Then a eureka moment; was it perhaps to do with my daily meditation practice over the last ten years or so? The meditation teachers continually encourage one to live in the present moment, to work with the reality in front of us. To keep our focus and not let thoughts interrupt our concentration. They teach us to develop mindfulness as a way of life and to beware of the “monkey mind” where the mind dashes from thought to thought like a monkey jumping between branches of a tree. Was all this direction preventing me from letting my imagination “off the leash” as it were. Surely a philosophy as comprehensive as Buddhism would not stifle human imagination that has driven some of the most inspirational deeds that have enriched our culture?

Surely not I thought as I set out on a quest to explain this apparent anomaly in my understanding of the teachings. I soon found an article in the Buddhist magazine, Tricycle, which expounded the integral part that stories make in our lives, see my link below to the article “The World Is Made Of Stories”. Now this was more like it I thought. Then the clincher revealed itself. An article in the MindOwl website called “Meditation and Imagination – the main differences and how one fosters the other”, see the link below. It could have been written directly for me and the struggle I was going through. Of course there was a way for both and that letting the imagination go was a perfectly acceptable practice both inside and outside of sitting meditation. A time for everything in its place.

Then this word came to me, “makey-up”, from a marvellous play I was in some years ago called “Da” by Hugh Leonard in which I played Da, a role I enjoyed immensely., see the quote above. That was what I had to do, just let go and make it all up, out of imagination formed from the thousands of hours I had already experienced in my lifetime and perhaps stuff I just created from wherever. Don’t just look at the image and try to describe it but tell the story behind it whatever that was to me. This has now become my catch-phrase, it is just makey-up.

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