THE STORY BENEATH THE WORK

      Maria Carlson • Founder & Mythmaker

I can honestly say that I am consumed with the human condition-all of its peculiarities, joys, sorrows, strangeness, love and pain, and the strange magnificence that somehow holds all of it. I have spent much of my life fascinated by the hidden interior world — the place where memory, imagination, music, intuition, longing, the divine, symbolism, emotion, and mystery seem to meet.

I have looked for pieces of it in all kinds of places: charismatic Christianity, contemplative prayer, depth psychology, altered states, pop-culture, shamanic journeying, ritual, integrated wellness and trauma informed-care, collective effervencse and the kinds of conversations people tend to have late at night when the ordinary social mask finally drops. Again and again, I have found myself returning to the same question: what happens when we create enough space for the inner world to become visible?

That question eventually became something I began guiding other people into. Across years of gathering people- in spiritual communities, celebrations, intergenerational care settings, creative circles and movement, I found myself continually inviting people toward deeper participation, expression, and connection. Sometimes that meant turning inward and following what appeared rather than forcing an answer; other times it meant music, movement, laughter, ritual or simply creating enough permission for people to loosen up and become more fully present.

The Imagination Congregation began to take shape as a creative community for people who want to feel more alive: a place where joy and sorrow can sit beside one another, where curiosity matters more than having the right answer, and where people are invited to bring more of themselves than they usually get to bring into ordinary life.

Then my own body complicated the story. Deep emotion, connection to something beyond myself and music has always affected me intensely, but at different points in my life it began to move through me in ways I could not fully explain. I can turn toward the experience intentionally, but once I do, the movements themselves seemed to arrive on their own - waves, jolts, reaching, collapsing, bracing, dance, surrendering to its pull and effect on me. Like a siren calling me into it's unknown mystery. I remain completely aware, but the experience felt less like deciding to move and more like being moved. I began searching across dance, religion, neuroscience, anthropology, ecstatic practice, somatics, trance, and performance, trying to find a close visual or experiential analogue. I found cousins, but never quite the thing itself.

That mystery now sits near the center of what I am creating. It has led to The Movement and the Muse, an emerging workshop exploring music, embodied attention, spontaneity, and surrender, and to Ceremony, a larger participatory performance project exploring the joys, sorrows, strangeness, and magnificence of being human. Both grew from the same desire that started the Imagination Congregation in the first place: to create spaces where people can encounter something real in themselves, and others, something difficult to manufacture or explain, and perhaps leave feeling a little more awake to their own lives.

And beneath all of it, there was a question that followed me for years:

Where does this strange body belong?

I have found a true home in myself, truly loved and accepted by all of my quirky yet powerful characters that inhabit my Aquarium of the Mind. I no longer need to apologize for being my own unique human self. I deeply deisre to help facilitate a space where others who have often felt unknown- in all their weirdness and glory- can experience that same sense of coming home.