FINDING ENERGY FOR DREAMING
pivot towards the future / honor the past
I ran to the woods this weekend with my pup, Sakhi. The urge to leave the city had turned desperate following weeks of consecutive burnouts. Or maybe just really one big long overwhelming exhaustion.
I went to the woods in Michigan, where the dune grass smells like middle school summers and last summer and space. Only for a second before leaving was I foolish enough to hope this weekend would bring clarity, would wash away the grief of the past year and leave me truly ready to start everything a new. Clean slates don’t exist and mercury is in retrograde after all.
So, I didn’t go to the woods looking for clarity but instead, ease and quiet. I didn't know at the time but I went for the levity that comes from seeing a pup’s nose covered in dirt after she reburied her bone for the fourth time that day. When I felt myself slipping into despair, I got up, laid a blanket on the grass, put on some music and shook my body until I felt it move through. When I looked over, my back pressed into the ground and my legs wiggling overhead, Sakhi was right there, on her back, paws to the sky, looking at me.
We took long walks in the woods until I felt different. If I walk long enough, there comes a time where my mind opens and my thoughts flow effortlessly like I’m listening to a podcast of my inner monologue. Only while walking, it seems, can I observe my thoughts from above, or beside, or whatever feels the most kind.
While walking I realized my inclination towards keywords, like themes, for eras in my life. These words seem to find me effortlessly. Like the law of attraction, the more I think about something the more I hear it everywhere. My thoughts circled around words I’ve been holding close lately.
Witnessing
Tenderness
Balance
Future
Honoring
Releasing
I spend, what I am believing to be, too much time analyzing the past and not enough time dreaming into the future. The backlog of things I have processed but not honored is throwing me off balance and making it difficult for me to do the things I truly enjoy. In an effort to create more energy for dreaming, I’m thinking it’s time to ‘make some things’ about it. Let them live like altars in the world.
I’ve been thinking a lot about people I know who make hyper personal work. Regardless of whether the details of their personal lives are present or not, the pieces they make are ‘for’ someone close to them, a specific experience they had, or have a message directed towards a small and personalized audience.
And isn’t that why we like books and tv shows and movies? Because in a fiction that delves deeply into the specifics of a character’s complex emotional world, we inevitably see ourselves. We can’t help but feel less alone in our humanness even if we feel a visceral difference from a life lived differently. We, or at least I, take great comfort when a storyteller can weave a story spanning many years where flashbacks and the present seem to be happening all at once. I take comfort in the evidence that time does not often feel linear. That something which happened five or ten years ago can surface suddenly with shocking clarity and not feel at all out of place.
As much as memories can surface, and for me, have been surfacing a lot lately, I am also thinking about pivoting and the power of the mind. Can we, in our grief, decide to stop grieving? Or at least stop grieving so hard?
I called a friend a few weeks back, someone who always seems to see right into my soul and speak the truths I’ve been hiding from myself. They said, “You can keep learning this lesson if you want to. There’s no right way.” And this freed me. It freed me to scratch the itch knowing that I would likely find disappointment. But isn’t disappoint also clarity? More than anything, it reminded me that I can do it my own way.
Living in a city, I often lose sight of what feels good for me. I have a lot of empathy and pride for my past self that took to the road alone for months with big lessons to learn. A friend who encouraged me to go spoke of a time she did a similar thing. She said “I wanted to grieve my own way, at my own pace, and I didn’t want anyone to watch.”
I’ve done this in the extreme, four months alone on the road camping out of my dead grandmother’s car, sharing bits and pieces of my story with new people I met, believing the comforts of home and the people who knew me could not hold me again until I had ‘healed’ myself. I never want to feel like I can’t go ‘home’ again.
Now, I am figuring out how to move through without leaving. How to leave without feeling like I’m running. How to come back and come back and come back home. How to grieve without feeling like I’m punishing myself. How to imagine myself doing things that sounds like dreams. How to stay in it with myself with an arm around my shoulder to say ‘lean on me.’
I crave the malleability of time that exists for me in the woods, on the road, in a creative practice, in a studio. Without having avenues for making and being that feel outside of the pressure of time, that eat up hours like pieces of popcorn—by the handful—I always feel like a part of my self is missing.
So I look at how people with many responsibilities find balance inevitably through compromise. There is a time to work, there is time to be in a city, to run errands, to be busy and exhausted. There is a time to walk on the beach, escape to the woods, mute your work group chats. There is a time to meet with friends and collaborators and make books, frolic, eat ice cream, play games. There is time for all these things the same way there is space for all different kinds of connections with people. The trick, I’m beginning to believe is putting them in their correct places and not pretending like it’s time for one thing when it’s time for another. Or that your connection with a person is one way when it’s actually something else. Even though it feels like everything, everywhere, all at once. It’s also this thing, right here, right now.
I’ve been thinking often about the famous quote by John Muir that goes “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” While he wasn’t talking about emotions per-say, my feelings about one thing are inextricable from my life’s story. I try to isolate a feeling about something and find it attached to a movie reel of past memories.
If I was a hero in an epic, my fatal flaw would be my desire to be understood. I’d die trying to externalize my most complex emotions and I’d lose everyone I thought I loved in the process. I’d miss out on the fulfilling connections that were sitting right in front of me, and I’d spend my whole life rehashing the past. It helps sometimes to imagine myself as a character in a book I like; endearingly if not infuriatingly flawed but lovable none the less. Then it helps me to remember the rules to “Art the Game” that a significant person in my life shared with me years ago. It goes. . .
rule 1: see the most beautiful truth in everything
rule 2: tell nobody
rule 3: live beautifully
Somewhere on the internet these rules are published beneath a close up image of an eye with lashes wet from crying.
I imagine myself living by these rules and being content with the fullness being just mine sometimes.
The eye is mine.
For the Record:
I, just this morning, finished a very good book called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Kevin. My roommate lent it to me saying she felt deeply for all the characters, that the storyline was complex and spanned many years and I was sold. It’s vaguely about three people who are creative collaborator on video games. If you like thinking about relationships, the creative process, the baggage we carry, and believably nuanced story, I’d recommend it.
In the last week I’ve spent turning inward, I found a great deal of comfort listening to Marlee Grace’s podcast on their Newsletter YES YES. I’ve been reading their newsletter for. . .gosh probably a couple years now, and their gender journey, creative discipline, and way of organizing their life has really resonated and urged me forward when I felt stuck. I’m happy to say I’m now a paid subscriber for Yes, Yes, but their weekly newsletter Monday Monday is free always. I don’t think I would’ve started a newsletter without their example.
Lastly not not leastly, the band glow in the dark flowers just released an album. The two people in this band, Jessee and Philip, while I don’t know them super well, are very cool people who are special to my friends and very kind to me. I saw them live for their album release and these songs are the real deal ya’ll.
you can also give them a look on insta
That’s all for now ya’ll thank you for reading and thank you for sticking around through the weeks where I was too afraid to write to you.
As always, if you have any insight about protecting energy for dreaming, how to witness each other in our grief, or where to get some really good ice cream, I’d love to hear it. My line is always open.