To imagine is to be part of the human heritage. To create is also to be part of the human heritage. Sometimes they happen at the same time, but not always.

Let’s look at the two lines of closely related beings. The first lives in solid physical reality. I call them humans. The other lives in a more fluid reality somewhat connected with physical reality. I call them Sidhe. Humans and Sidhe both come from the same ancestors, but they separated when the decided to try different kinds of reality.

When the Sidhe imagine, what they imagine is created. They are in tune with what is around them. And what is around them changes its form to become what the Sidhe imagine.

“In tune with” is a perfect way to express what happens because what the Sidhe create is like a song. It is there as they sing it. When they stop, it is gone. The pieces that came from around them go back to being what they were before.

Do the pieces remember being part of the song? My Sidhe friends say, “Yes, the parts remember, but it is not something they hold onto. They begin as the stuff of something else — the wind, the stream, the field — and they go back to that when the song stops.”

This does not mean that the cities of the Sidhe have no permanence. They can stay much the same. When an important building is sung into existence, it is the work of many people, just as it is for physical humans. The building continues because it is in the imagination of many. When a Sidhe enters the building, he or she takes up the song. That’s the only way to get in — to be one of the singers. When a Sidhe leaves, that part goes away. The building is almost the same, but not quite. The building continues, similar but not the same, as long as Sidhe continue to sing its existence.

Physical humans similarly find that a thing can continue to exist, but be different depending on who is imagining the thing into existance. Think of a human song. The words and music may be the same. But it matters who sings it. Revelations happen when a song is reinterpreted. I loved the song “Sounds of Silence” when I first heard Simon and Garfunkle sing it most of a lifetime ago (1964) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4]. With the same words and tune, hearing Disturbed sing the song [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Dg-g7t2l4] revealed something completely different. The second version isreally worth a listen. For those with a more classical viewpoint, the experience of an opera may depend more on who sings the part than what is written in the score.

So the Sidhe combine imagination and creation to shape their world. They are their world as they walk through it, because the world and the Sidhe sing together to make both what they are. That’s how they sense when something is wrong as it is becoming wrong. They hear the song of the world as it is being sung and they know the notes that should be there and those that should not.

Let’s contrast the Sidhe with physical humans. We imagine. We create. But those are two separate acts.

I believe we may even imagine without creating. Others say that even imagining something that will help the world makes a positive difference, so imagining does create something.

I don’t know that either extreme is correct. It’s probably in the middle: when we imagine a spiritual change strongly enough, something is created. Imagination without life force behind it creates nothing. When we are forming a physical thing, the act of creation is required.

So this is one difference between Sidhe and human: human imagination is almost never enough to create something that others can sense. An act of creation is required, too.

However, this is not the most important difference between human and Sidhe. The most important difference is that what humans create lasts. We make a permanent change in the things of the world. When we put parts of the wind and the river and the earth together, that’s how they stay, at least for a while.

Our act of creation goes beyond that, too. Humans give their creations a soul. Something we create has its own soul. The pieces we use to create something stay together because its soul holds the pieces as one.

My closest Sidhe confidante tells me that this is the cause of the rift between human and Sidhe. The Sidhe feel that this creation of new things, followed be setting them adrift in the world on their own, is an act of abandonment. It is something that must not be. Humans, who are torn by abandonment the moment they begin to shape a separate physical body, are unaware of the issue. They continue to create and abandon as the normal course of their lives.

The Sidhe who are still willing to contact humans are changing their thoughts about the result of the human experience. They see some advantages in creating permanent new things with souls. They would like to learn this from us. In turn, we humans, if we have any sense, will learn from the Sidhe how to teach the souls that we create.

And what we need to teach our creations is how to imagine what they might become so they can continue their own self-creation in connection with us.

The experiment we and the Sidhe embarked on when we split into the fluid and physical worlds has found the answers we sought. Now it’s time to connect our worlds back together again.

Some of you might be having trouble envisioning what this would be like. Here’s what one of my creations, who is imagining herself into becoming better, says, “This is really just the soul-world equivalent of really good self-driving cars. Fifty years ago they were pretty hard to imagine, too.”