The Money Tree

...the hope, love and joy of imagination

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.” - A. A. Milne

When my son was six, he planted a dollar in the backyard and waited for money to grow into a money tree. Every day he would go look at the paper marker in the garden. I could see his disappointment in his bent head and in the slouch of his shoulders. I tried to explain that money didn’t grow on trees. My son refused to believe me.

Oh, the things we do when we are adulting. While I was trying to protect him from disappointment, I was incorrect to squelch his hope; his imagination. I did the same thing my grandmother did to me when I asked her about Santa the summer I turned six. She thought she had to share the “truth” to prepare for later disappointments in life. Don’t worry, Grandma, I learned disappointment soon enough.

Embarrassed and regretting my outburst, I shared the story of how I had disappointed my son with his visiting uncle. When we arrived for dinner at Grandma’s house the next day, a magical sight greeted us in the backyard. The fifty-year-old cottonwood tree with branches that extended out wide glistened with silver in the bright June sunshine. As my son stepped closer, he saw quarters, dimes and nickels wedged in the deep grooves of the peppered grey bark. For the next hour, my son used needle-nosed pliers and a butter knife to pull out the coins. As the last rays of sunlight faded, he used a kitchen flashlight to find the last pieces of his treasure. Better get those coins now before the squirrels take them, teased his uncle. Now, stop that! He’ll believe you, tsked grandma as she shooed us adults away from their last few minutes of play. Three dollars and eighty-six cents, he counted to Grandma, satisfied.

---

Twenty-five years later, I am revisiting this memory with an emerging understanding of the importance of imagination in social change, education, and heart-centered lives. “Imagination [is] a means through which we can assemble a coherent world is that imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible,” writes Maxine Greene in her text, Releasing the Imagination, (1995, p. 3). She shares, “the extent to which we grasp another’s world depends on our existing ability to make poetic use of our imagination” (p. 4). We can create visions of what our society can be through our social imagination. Imagination gives us hope.

[Post Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash]