Feed the Dream

Dreams aren’t for nothing. In fact, life gets fun when you allow yourself to embrace your dreams. Even a little bit.

Dreams:

• spark hope

• fuel creativity

• provide purpose & direction

• push you toward your best self

• make the impossible feel possible

Mostly, allowing yourself to dream brings joy into your everyday experience and - not sure about you, but I need a hell of a lot more of that.

Call me greedy but I want to enjoy my life.

I know what you’re going to say: who has time for dreams? In this absolute dumpster fire of a world?

Really, who doesn’t have time for dreams?

Why on earth are we here?

To be miserable?

I think we were put here to enjoy. TO BE IN OUR JOY.

Think of dreams like little seeds planted in our bellies. They can sit there dormant or we can feed them. A little sunlight here, a little water there.

A little goes a long way and what do you have to loose?

"In our lives we experience these alternations of creation and destruction, growth and decay, birth and death, light and dark, conscious and unconscious.

Unfortunately, in our society we have been taught to fear and resist the decreasing energies represented by the dark, by decay, death, and the unconscious."

"Without the time to withdraw, rest, and recuperate from the demands of the outer activities of conscious waking life, our bodies and minds cannot sustain their supply of vital energy. If we correctly understand the dark, however, we can use the cover of darkness to learn the magic of our own particular secret rites, which can lead to a revitalized and replenished life."

—Demetra George from Mysteries of the Dark Moon

A poem

F*ck your party. 

The way you laugh and say hi. 

How your eyes look through me.

The sound you make when you don’t say anything. 

Do you know who you are? 

I wanna hear you at the top of your lungs! 

I wanna see you alive, messy, shook! 

Remember when you were young 

before the world got in and told you who to be? 

Before the internet got in and told you who to be? 

Remember when everything was possible? 

You didn’t know it but they wanted you small, scared, easy to digest. 

And you were never any of these. 

Formidable Star in the Night,

Winter Water Crashing, 

Resplendent, Rising Sun —

Take my hand, the dance floor is empty!

Yes

I am a mass of memories bending and clapping and whipping in the wind. Sweeping cheeks then lunging into the place where sky meets cloud, striped this time — blue, white, blue — an animal unto itself. The woods speak of these, too. Spindly trunks in rows like soldiers. They don’t crack a smile, only reach upwards, naked but topped with last of leaves. Listen up, she said, strange like the day you were born, sunny side up in my womb, you came out smiling like you’d been here a thousand times before. Sorry? I said. She repeated it back but I still couldn’t make it out. Sun in eyes, eyes in sun. Wind gusts make it feel like 24 degrees, they said. Wind gusts make leaves dance and, with sun on their backs, make moving shadows on living room floors. I call it art. You collapse on the couch. I’m not liking what I liked, you said, but why would you? Things change. As for me, I don’t find too much funny but beautiful? Yes.

Hello hello. New directions!

This morning I made a cup of coffee and wrote in my journal. I told it my worries and hopes and complaints and then I closed it shut. I set my coffee cup on top, to hold the pages down. To keep the words in. To keep them contained. And then I lit a candle. I lit another because one didn’t feel like enough. I asked Spirit to meet me.

I pulled three cards from the tarot deck: Maturity, Patience, Flowering. And I thought about flowers. How flowers require patience and patience is a type of wisdom and how maturity is a merging with what is. A merging with the flowers that bloom and die and bloom again. The truth of impermanence. The fragility of life. The beauty therein.

Manifestation vs Faith

Last year I shared some mockups for album art to Instagram. In the caption, I declared to the Universe that one day, I would like to do some album artwork, dammit! I don’t think I actually said the dammit part, but it was the implied spirit.

Last week, a friend who had seen that post reached out with a job for me.

Modern proclivity would have me say I manifested this. That I told the Universe what I wanted and the Universe delivered.

I don’t think this is what happened.

Jump and Pray. It’s our mantra around here, right? But what does it mean?

In creative work, in life, we constantly walk the line between action and surrender. We put ourselves out there — we go for the job, we write the book, we apply for the residency. And then we surrender.

t’s common to think that surrender is a type of inaction. We sit back, kick our feet up, let whatever happens, happen.

But surrender is an action, too.

Surrender contains rest, trust, faith.

When I told the Universe (and everyone on Instagram) that I wanted to do some album art, I had faith that one day this would happen. I had zero doubts.

Delusional? Maybe. Or maybe this is where the magic lies.

That we humans can dream a thing to life. And that we do it with the help of something greater than us, something that’s inside every one of us, something that put that dream there in the first place.

So make your vision boards, make your declarations. But mostly do the inner work that moves you toward faith. Faith in self, faith in the Universe conspiring in your favor.

We are co-creators. We don’t work alone. It’s a big weight off, don’t you think?

Sun and

clouds and

rain and

four full rainbows.

The sky —

abundant.

All this shit matters

I know it’s not what you want to hear but love is who you are.

Love is the essential reality.

Not hate. Not violence. Not division.

Love.

It’s almost impossible to believe it’s true. And even harder to believe that it’s not just true of any one person, but of every single one of us.

At our truest nature, underneath the heavy weight of it all, we are love.

Me, you, Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, Jimmy Kimmel, the guy who makes your latte, the girl who bags your groceries, the neighbor who leaves their trash bins out 24/7, that random guy on instagram, the boss who picks on you — everyone, all of them, love.

Are we other stuff too?

Yeah. We are. We are a mix of shit, a beautiful and strange concoction of love and hate and everything in between and all of it is okay but what’s not okay is letting the hate win because it doesn’t have to.

Hate doesn’t have to win.

When hate wins, it’s because we have forgotten who we are. That’s it.

And it’s not always our fault. We get distracted by lies the world tells. Lies like I am better than you or getting revenge will feel good or even I don’t matter.

I have news: you matter. All this shit matters. Have you heard of the butterfly effect? How a butterfly flapping it’s wings can cause a tornado? Seemingly minor changes in events can have massive, rippling consequences - for better or worse.

But isn’t that what we do? It’s the lemons into lemonade, some kind of alchemy where instead of raging and making more rage, we direct that energy into something-else. Something holy. We summon our better side, the one that loves and keeps loving and we call out the dangers of not protecting the vulnerable among us, the dangers of using fear to divide. These hands that make the world are our hands. Our mark in the soil. What are we making? What are we leaving behind?

I let the flowers die

I let the flowers die. I didn’t mean to but it happened. Woke up one morning, brow furrowed when I saw the petals were drooping. Blamed it on the flowers, of course. They must have been near dead when I got them, must have been on their way to dying.

I was annoyed when I picked up the vase, expecting it to be heavier than it was. I walked the vase over to the sink, pulled out the bouquet and looked inside. There was no water. Not even a drop.

I was mad at myself so I blamed the flowers — again. There must have been a certain flower in the bunch that guzzled the water, took more than its share, I thought as I filled the vase back up.

Then I blamed the florist. She should have warned me, should have given better instructions like, change the water daily, even though I already knew to do that.

I put the mostly-dead flowers back in the vase. Not ready to let them go.

What we pay attention to grows.

Later I was driving to the grocery store, still thinking about it about it, thinking about how I had let something beautiful die for no reason.

I could feel my brow in a furrow again, and for what? Because I let the flowers die? Because they grew and were cut and were given to me and I put them in a vase and forgot about them? Because forgetting makes me a bad person?

That’s when it popped into my head, something I had memorized as a kid in Sunday school —

whatever is true, whatever is worthy of respect, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if something is excellent or praiseworthy, think about these things

Think about these things. Not to deny the reality of how we killed the flowers — or how our skin is breaking out at 46 years old or we fucked up at work or that person was a dick to us — because these things are true.

And they aren’t the whole truth.

Maybe we forgot about the flowers because we were tending to more important things. Maybe shit happens and things die and none of it has anything to do with us.

Or maybe it does. Maybe I let those flowers die because they reminded me of something I wanted to forget. A thing so heavy, so devastating, that your brain tries to file it away as soon as possible.

Maybe — just maybe — those flowers needed to die so that I could release the weight I was carrying, so that I could return to myself, full-bodied and ready to receive something-else. Something that might lift me.

It was really lovely meeting you, he messaged with a heart face emoji. We met through a friend the other night and I liked him immediately. An aliveness in his eye and a levity to his spirit. He told me he was an actor over tacos. I knew it, I said.

Whatever is lovely, think on these things. The tacos, the heart face emoji, the miracle of meeting a person on this strange planet who lifts us out of the desert, whose flowers feels like home.

Winners quit

Maybe I’m a quitter, I said.

Maybe it’s my purpose: to start things, try things, quit.

Maybe this is how some of us learn, move in the world.

Experience is the best teacher. No matter how much imagining, planning, or projecting you do, you can never really know what life has in store. You can never really know what will happen.

I always see the good in situations in the beginning. This can become my achilles heel. I hold on to the good like a life raft, gripping harder and harder. There has to be something good here, I say to myself, sinking deeper and deeper into the water until I’m gasping for breath.

Sometimes you have to let go of the raft so you can swim to the shore. It’s not that far, you can make it.

You have to save yourself.

Imagine a ribbon connecting you, she said. And imagine a giant pair of scissors cutting the ribbon. It’s over! It’s done!

Seth Godin calls it the dip:

Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out fun…then gets really hard, and not much fun at all. You might be in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac—a total dead end. What really sets superstars apart is the ability to tell the two apart.

Ask yourself: is this something that will respond to guts, effort and investment?

Asking this helps you decide what to do next.

I’d rather watch the mourning doves

I’d rather watch them preen

I’d rather watch them peck at each others necks, grasp beaks, bob back and forth

I’d rather watch one soft, gray feather float to the earth against the backdrop of a foggy morning sky and then disappear behind an olive tree — mint green leaves

I’d rather watch that tree sway gently in the quiet breeze, its motion almost imperceptible, not old enough yet to hold the weight of a dove but branches that reach for the sky anyway

Only one dove remains now, the male, perched on the electrical line that hangs over my front yard, over the olive tree

He turns his head to the side, the bird, I see him looking. Does he see the swirl and ache of the tree? The swirl and ache of me?

Creativity is freedom

To make people free is the aim of art. Therefore, art for me is the science of freedom. [Joseph Beuys]

A creative brain puts ideas to use in unexpected ways. A creative brain uses contrasting combinations of thoughts to foster new ones. A creative brain can:

reinvent

reimagine

rethink.

I’m reoutfitting my art studio for a music studio. It all happened because I bought a drum kit this weekend from a friend who had just happened to decide she wanted to sell it a few days prior to me mentioning I wanted to take drum lessons. Are you interested in it? she asked. I’ll take it, I said.

Serendipity.

Once I reimagined my art studio into something that inspired me, something more useful, it surprisingly gave me a new vision for my art practice (aside from drums!).

Collage is not inspiring me right now and really hasn’t been for months. Even the materials have been off-putting to me? Even looking at my past work is bothering me. It just feels not-good.

At the same time I’ve been casually thinking about painting. It’s been a little bee buzzing around in my mind. In the past, my love of cleanliness has made me wary of painting. Paint is messy. But I had a vision that I could paint outside in my courtyard. Less messy somehow. This inspired me.

Creativity isn’t about about being good or bad at collage or painting or drums. Creativity is the ability to create your future, to follow your aliveness, to be fully present and in charge of your life.

So often we filter out thoughts that don’t fit our immediate purpose or idea of what should happen. I hate the word ‘should’ for this reason. It’s a buzz kill. It can leave us stuck, unconsciously policing creative thinking, the very thinking that can set us free.

Unhelpful opinions

Did you see the viral video of the artist painting a city electrical box get fussed at by a passerby who called his work a “waste of tax payer dollars”?

Aside from being beyond rude, this is just plain inaccurate.

Art:

lifts spirits

makes us happy

releases actual dopamine + endorphins

improves thinking and empathy

lowers stress

is life

It’s funny how so often things that are essential to life and well-being get little-to-no credit or acknowledgement as such. Things like:

art

beauty

community

empathy + a listening ear

self-care

friends

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. [Pablo Picasso]

Worth every fucking penny.

A poem

The world is still spinning

did you know?

It feels like there's no chance this is true.

That all the despair and disaster have swallowed us whole.

But the sun still rises and sets.

The birds still nest and sing.

And we listen and sing along.

We dance in the rain that makes the flowers grow -

an act of resistance,

a bright eye staring boldly into chaos

that somehow burns even brighter.