Why do most of our stories for children start with once upon a time in a place far away. Do we think that putting good and bad things at a distance will somehow shelter them from life. Moving a story away from the source of its generation, which will be their own mind or body, to a place detached and remote - not here - not now - not you, will somehow protect them. It is so absurd. To teach imagination as usable only in passive and unreachable ways.

Imagination is perhaps one of our most powerful tools in the arsenal of living as creative and emotional beings. I wonder what it would be like if I had heard stories that started with - right around the corner... - or better yet - have you ever known someone who... - or even still - can you imagine yourself... I suppose it is right I was protected but I find myself wondering what I was protected from, or what the world was protected from by this limitation.

I have begun to wonder what and how we have learned to limit ourselves in order to "live" within this world. Even that statement "live within this world" makes me ask what world? All I can experience is given to me by my senses interpreted by my mind through a filter of rules that I learned as a child. Touch the red hot stove and you will experience pain. Drop something from your hand and it falls to the ground. These are, I have been told, the immutable laws of physics. I can not walk on air to reach as Icarus to fly to the sun, even if i plaster myself with wings. And I have to say that I have seen them all to be true.

I was taught early and often to believe in the rules that guard this realm. Gravity and falling, energy and cold, heat and burning, solid and impenetrable, I was taught as you likely were as well, these classics of our physical existance and then I was taught more subtle things about relationships and words and meaning. I was told stories about how people act and why we live together and how I might be a better person....

But I wonder what would have happened if I was told stories about myself that included magic - like Harry Potter. If radical acts of imagination might have come forth? What if we started contemplating the realm of possibility as much as we teach the realm of "reality." What if... what if we started to tell our children stories that let them make up the world instead of our imposing the rules we think we know upon them? What if we taught them that gravity and heat exist - yes they do, touch a red hot stove and your hand will burn, still what if we taught them that this is what we know now... and ask them what they know as well. Or better what they imagine.

Once upon a time In this world now, there lives a person just like you who ...