I think the imagination is committed to the justice of wholesomeness. It's not interested in one dimensional stuff, or reductionism, or one side over against another side. It's interested in where the sides meet, and what they can bring to birth when they cross-fertilize with each other.
And I think that brightness in a poem, in a painting or a piece of music, usually has to sweat its way through underlayers and undercaverns of darkness to come to the top. And when it comes to the top, and when you see it, you can see in it the beautifully sculpted shadow of the darkness of the journey it has made.
And I think that's the heart of creativity. Creativity is listening in to the places where opposites are already dancing with each other.
- John O'Donohue
