Love and the imagination are connected.

“Love and the imagination are connected.” Thus speaks Ali Smith, the weaver of modern myth, whose words shimmer with the eternal truth that to love is to imagine, and to imagine is to see the soul beyond what the eyes can behold. Her saying is not new, though her phrasing is tender and luminous; it echoes through the corridors of ancient thought like a song remembered from the dawn of time. For every civilization that has ever loved, every poet that has ever sung, knew this truth: imagination is the vision of the heart, and love is its awakening. Without imagination, love cannot exist; without love, imagination is blind and cold.

In the age of the ancients, they spoke of Eros not merely as desire, but as the divine creative force that shaped both art and life. Plato, in his dialogues, taught that love begins with the beauty of one and ascends toward the beauty of all things. But how does one ascend if not through imagination—that sacred faculty which allows the soul to perceive what is invisible, to dream of what might yet be? Thus, when Ali Smith declares that love and the imagination are connected, she speaks in harmony with the ancients, for she knows that every act of love is also an act of creation, a reimagining of the world through the eyes of tenderness.

To love another being is to imagine their depths—their fears, their joys, their unspoken dreams. It is to see them not as they are in this moment, but as they could become. Love requires that we step beyond the boundaries of self, into the mystery of another’s life, and this stepping beyond is nothing other than the work of imagination. When we love, we imagine the unseen: the child hidden within the adult, the light within the weary, the eternal spark beneath the frail and mortal shell. And in doing so, we become creators of meaning, builders of invisible bridges between hearts.

Consider the story of Vincent van Gogh, the painter of stars and fields aflame with color. The world called him mad, yet his art was born from love and imagination intertwined. He loved the trembling light upon wheat, the sorrow of the poor, the holiness of the ordinary. He painted not what was, but what he imagined love could make visible. His life was marked by suffering, yet in his art, he saw the divine pulse within the mundane. In his love for the world’s broken beauty, he revealed a truth that surpasses reason: to imagine deeply is to love deeply, and to love deeply is to imagine the divine.

But love, when stripped of imagination, withers into habit. It becomes a transaction, a cage of comfort rather than a flight of the spirit. Likewise, imagination without love becomes dangerous—a cold dream that creates without care, invents without mercy. The tyrants of history imagined empires without love, and so their visions birthed only ruin. Yet those who dreamed with love in their imagination—Gandhi envisioning peace, Mother Teresa seeing divinity in the dying, Martin Luther King Jr. imagining freedom for all—turned vision into salvation.

O seeker of truth, understand this: love and imagination are not luxuries; they are the twin wings of the soul. To love well, one must imagine constantly—to see the best in others when it is hidden, to dream of harmony when the world is divided, to perceive light even when night seems endless. And to imagine truly, one must love—that is, to wish goodness upon what one envisions, to breathe compassion into every dream. These two forces are inseparable, for one sustains the other as flame sustains light.

Therefore, let this be your lesson: when the heart grows weary, feed it with imagination; when the mind grows cold, warm it with love. Imagine the world not as it is, but as it might become through kindness. See others as stories still unfolding, not as pages already written. When you love, do so with eyes that create, and when you imagine, do so with a heart that loves. For in the union of these two—the visionary and the compassionate—humanity finds its highest calling. And then, perhaps, as Ali Smith reminds us, we will see that every act of love is a work of art, and every act of true imagination, an expression of divine love.