I’ve been facilitating a regular game of Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast since the beginning of the year. Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is a role-playing game, where each player takes on a particular character in the story. It’s basically an unscripted slice-of-life story, designed to play like lost episodes of your favorite Saturday morning childhood show. And it also equips us to do the important work of nurturing wholeness in the real world.

After a couple of sessions, I made an observation to the group. I suggested that they could imagine more expansively than what they were allowing of themselves. If the game has the characters face a mundane challenge like doing mountains of laundry because the robotic maid has to get its arm repaired, we can imagine success and failure being very narrowly defined. We succeed by getting the laundry in the washing machine. We fail by spilling detergent all over the floor. Very basic. Very realistic. And kind of boring.

But the game doesn’t insist on realistic. Failure could just as easily be defined as the laundry “falling” to the ceiling and staying there. Or the spilled laundry detergent could become sentient and start chasing people like in a Scooby-Doo cartoon. Or the lint from the dryer could have formed a giant tumbleweed that had to be corralled before it got loose in the upstairs hall. And the group’s successes could have been equally fantastic and imaginative. 

All of this may seem silly, and at a certain level it is. But after the group began to realize they could flex their imaginations a bit more broadly, one of the players looked at me with big eyes and said, “This expansive imagination thing seems really important for resistance work.” The threads of connection between play and what we need to effect real world change became visceral, and there was a deeper sense of excitement about what we were co-creating.

I see the congregation doing some similar work of expansive imagination when it comes to our conversation about our space. The open and generative discussion on February 9 was rich, and you gave one another permission to imagine some incredible possibilities without judgment or rejection. Like a good improv troupe, you said “Yes, and” to one another’s ideas. 

Some of you imagined what sacred space could be, or how our natural space can be more a part of our internal space, or who else might find our space sacred. Our ideas weren’t all the same, but we existed together in a moment of “What if…?” And some of that expansive imagination continues as the conversation evolves.

This is important for more than just our building, or our localized decisions. Engaging our expansive imaginations and spending time in the space of “What if…?” helps us practice living into a vision of wholeness and well-being for the larger world, too. When we make space for everyone’s ideas to be part of the conversation, we cultivate the kind of trust we’ll need to co-create a future that embodies our deepest values.

May we keep exercising our imaginative muscles and considering what might be possible for a community committed to things like interdependence, generosity, justice, and transformation in our lives and in the world around us.  

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