Chapter Five –
Before I Had Language for It

Before I ever had words for any of it, imagination was real to me.

Not as pretend. Not as something to outgrow. It was simply how the world worked.

Some of my earliest memories live on the floor of my grandmother’s apartment. We would spread one of her quilts out and sit cross-legged with oyster crackers between us, having picnics indoors. The quilt wasn’t just a blanket — it was a landscape. Trees rose up from its patterns. Animals climbed and leapt from square to square. Birds flew overhead. Entire scenes unfolded while we sat there, perfectly content, fully absorbed.

My grandmother was a maker. A baker. A home-creator. She recycled old clothing and turned it into quilt squares, laying them out on the floor to see how they wanted to live together before sewing them into something whole. I loved helping her decide which pieces belonged side by side. I still have a suitcase full of those fabric squares. Someday, I’ll learn to quilt and finish something with them.

There was something else about her, too. A quiet knowing. She would sense things before they happened. Say things that didn’t make sense until later. Nothing dramatic. Nothing announced. Just moments that lingered.

My uncle Larry had that quality as well. He always felt a little magical to me — not in a storybook way, but in a way that made you pay closer attention when he spoke. Both of them passed away when I was young, but their presence never really left. They stayed with me in memory, in instinct, in the way certain moments seemed to arrive already carrying meaning.

At the same time, I was growing up in the church.

I was raised Lutheran. I went to services. I attended Bible study. I listened carefully. And I asked questions — a lot of them. I wasn’t trying to dismantle anything. I was trying to understand it.

I wanted the beliefs I was being taught to connect to how the world actually felt to me. I wanted explanations that could hold imagination, intuition, timing, connection — all the things I had already experienced as real.

So I challenged my pastor. Purposefully.

I asked why. I asked how. I asked what about this. And when the answers didn’t quite line up, I asked again. Part of me was genuinely searching. Part of me was probably being difficult. But it wasn’t careless difficulty. It was insistence. The belief that if something was true, it should be able to withstand being examined.

Bible study was rarely quiet for me. Many of the friends I sat beside were pastors’ kids — people who had grown up fluent in the language of belief. Over time, a surprising number of them would walk away from religion entirely, at least for a while. At the time, none of us were trying to reject anything outright. We were trying to understand it deeply enough to stay.

But the answers we were given often felt rehearsed. Complete in form, but incomplete in substance. They explained belief as a system, but not belief as something lived — something felt in the body, the imagination, the quiet moments that didn’t announce themselves as lessons.

I kept asking anyway.

I didn’t yet have language for what I was sensing. I didn’t know what framework would eventually help me hold it. I only knew that something mattered there — something worth paying attention to — and that I wasn’t willing to pretend it didn’t exist just because it didn’t fit neatly inside the explanations I’d been offered.

So I carried the questions forward.
Not to resolve them.
Not to prove anything.
Just to keep them alive.