You know, I make these classes, I made a summer full of them, and I begin these stories and I make these paintings and I lovingly collect strange specimens for future doings and there seems to be this idea that I seem to know what I’m doing. Do people actually work like that, knowing what they’re doing?
I admit, if this is safe to do this here, my approach has never been full knowledge of what I’m doing but rather, “what happens if I step into this dream?” or “this dream seems like a good dream to dream so let me do more work into this dream.” If this sounds like a dream life it isn’t because dreams interrupt everything. They interrupt ritual. They interrupt some idea humans have about progress. They interrupt projects. Dreams, like Spring interrupting winter, have their seasons I suppose. I often think are leading me somewhere or toward a product or toward a future life. Or Summer. They are interrupting me right now because I set out to tell you something else completely, with a plan but the plan didn’t get done because of the fever of dreaming. The dreaming happening right now is the Linden tree in full bloom outside my window. And although it’s obscured by NYC’s toxic smoke plume from Nova Scotia wildfires, the color of the sky and the toxicity of the smoke has a message. Inside the fires and the smoke that made it down the coast and across the country is a dream saying “pay attention” or “stop buying plastic” even “VOTE”. Wiring this writing to skew toward dream messaging climate disaster messaging is a dream.
This Spring was one big dream. It happened all on its own but I guess I also allowed it to happen. I watched Spring unfold from it’s first quiet struggles ‘til now which, with rain and sunshine, has taken on quite a fervor. Now, which is almost summer. I watched the order of things, the science of blooming, blossoming, growth, like magic which is science which is magic.
I watched flowers dream. I watched humans dream. Maybe all the close kinship with the hard ways out of the soil was akin to dreaming our way out of the pandemic. For others folks, the dreaming came back after the long haul of carrying the overwhelming loss of the last three years around their bodies like a big shadow, muting dreams, as sorrow is wont to do. For still others who might be newly beginning grief, because sorrow indeed comes for us all which is much more uplifting a thought when it happens on you, the dream is still sunk below a list of the management that grief takes on—the nighttime of tidal waves washing over you and the charred mountain of whose face needs scaling to get to the Spring of it on the other side so dreaming can commence anew, if you are lucky, if you let it, if Spring comes which I really mean to say is summer because you become Spring in grief. It is mostly that struggle which I suppose is a kind of dream.
What kind of unpragmatic way is this to title this The Art of Beginning? Or start a new project? I guess this was just a way to name Spring which I watched open something, allowing me to begin something new again, which I hope you too are paying attention to if you are ever to begin again.
It leads me to consider if all the grief I wrote about for the last few years still needs me right now, as I begin something on the other side of that writing? Perhaps, sometimes a project surrounding trauma might need leaving behind, something akin to mourning forever, which would be awful. That is to say, all the bits that will mourn something forever are tucked away and dreaming of something bigger, tinged with so much more wonder right now, allowing itself up in some kind of new fertile soil (these are a hell of a lot of flower metaphors). Having faced almost all there was to face, the only plan I had for the year was to get my sense of humor back and remember I had a body, which will be of great value to the next thing and the next thing—and this dream and the next dream—the next human we hug—the next life we get to live inside this one wondrous dream of a life…
I read all of this to my husband asking him if any of this made sense. He quickly said, “yes—I get it!” and noted, “But maybe we are trees not flowers…with traces in our rings of the fire, you know, everything that tried to destroy us but didn’t. Like, you don’t get to see a human’s rings which maybe you are trying to say?”
“I think we are probably both,” I say, and now I am thinking about trees.
Love it! See my recommendation of Deb’s wonderful work here: https://michaeljudge.substack.com/p/note-to-readers-ii
Oh Deb, this is so lovely. I know you’ve had quite a year, and this is a beautiful beginning to processing it. My heart is with you and as you speak of dreams, my mind wanders to New Mexico and weaving energy into the beautiful memories our future will create. Hugs💖 Patricia