It’s mid-summer. Let’s check in.
Here’s something I’ve learned over the years of helping folks connect to their innate creativity, whether it’s related to career paths, research projects, writing endeavors, or living a more alive life.
Using your imagination isn’t just something you do when you’re being “creative.” It’s a resilience skill you can cultivate.
(And it might be exactly what you need right now.)
As I wrap up the Summer of Resilient Joy Creativity Lab workshop series with my clients this week, summer reaches its peak. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to trust imagination, not just as playful daydreaming, but as a real practice for momentum, clarity, and creative resilience. How do we stretch our imagination skills out of the scarcity stories we’re surrounded by? Especially in a time of genuine scarcity and harm being inflicted all around us.
Part of the external scarcity is meant to make sure we exploit ourselves for the profit of others. We’re so often told to push harder. To squeeze more productivity out of the season. To be ready with answers.
But what if you let your imagination do the leading instead?
What if you let this mid-summer be a threshold? Where you gather up all you’ve felt, rested into, and dreamed about, and let that carry you forward with slow, intentional momentum? As a form of resilient resistance.
Our focus this week on Imagination isn’t just a quiet wrap-up. It could be your turning point. This is the moment you get to decide what comes with you as you move toward autumn and the back-to-school season.
When you tune into your imagination–those recurring images, dream symbols, or gut feelings–you’re building a bridge between what’s sparked inside you and what wants to grow next. This is how we gather momentum that feels regenerative, not exhausting. And we will need regenerative resilience skills in the coming days.
Right now, Nature around you is bursting at its peak: flowers wide open, gardens growing full, heat thick and alive. Your creative life can match that. Not through force, but through rhythm. Not through pressure, but through trusting your ideas and desires to keep opening.
Peak Summer Imagination Check-In
Take a breath. Slow down. And ask: “What’s alive in my imagination right now that wants to come with me into the next season?”
Try this:
Bring to mind an image, dream, or daydream that keeps returning lately.
What’s the energy or feeling of it?
What does it ask of you? If you were to take just one small step toward it, no performance required?
Where does that step feel good in your body, not forced, but true?
Let This Be Your Invitation
This is how you build resilient joy at the height of summer:
You don’t shut the door on your ideas, you invite them in. Keep a journal or place in your phone where you keep a list of them. I guarantee you that the priority ones will continue to come up in various ways, time and time again.
You let your imagination remind you that you’re allowed to want more than just survival.
You let your nervous system settle enough that you can hear your own curiosity. Our imaginations need to be primed in order to create new ways of working and living in the coming days. We need to stretch our imagination muscles.
So here’s to your back-half of summer:
May you ride the wave of creative momentum.
May you trust the spark that wants to grow. And know how to protect it.
May you remember you don’t have to have it all figured out to begin again.
Your imagination knows the way.