how to dream (big) when the world is encouraging you to stay alert . informed . awake
how indeed
Find me in the morning, before the day has done its work on us. While I’m un-punched, limber, in line with the stars. Potassium. Closer to the bed of the universe. Find me travelled; while I can still hear my mother’s voice, while my fear is upside down and I am petal, I am unfettered, silver-soft, and I hear singing. Find me at the top of the light while exchanging with my ancestors, far from the terror of everything else. Find me open-souled, dense with hope. Find me.
……..
Strategy as a hamster wheel. Strategy as a brain drain. Of course, holding your bones in place is necessary when navigating a career in the arts or creative field, making art, and living off said art / creative practice. You must plan and have some idea about how to make it work. You must always be trying, ideating and testing (right?) There is also the other truth - the low, unshakable understanding of creativity; there are only so many hours allocated to us and in a large part of those hours,
to travel far outside the box,
one must dream.
Take this newsletter, for example. I show up to my special place on the internet weekly, but it must happen close to when I get out of bed, or it will not happen. It must happen when the day is still alight with art possibility, meaning that it has not been overtaken by flattening, earthly matters (or at least not the types that compress and limit.) If too much of the day has occurred, I will sit there, overwhelmed or blocked, not knowing where to begin. I can write after a few conversations at a push, but they must be the right conversations. I must still have some semblance of hope in my heart, some boundless entity budding in some small part of my brain. Since I like to write about all the deep pleasures that can be found, about twitching timelines, half-reality, and psychic possibilities that fizz and melt into each other, I must believe in the world,
or the art disappears.
How can we sustain it? How can we make room to think about, carry out, and strategize art and its place in The World? Then The World will turn and make some more bad magic, and then we will get to hear about it. All my close friends are worried about something. We wake up to bad news. We wake up, and there’s the horror of more and more newly uncovered deeds, people in court, evil networks, fresh violence- more and more of it. And one must live in the Real World (right?) and listen to people brave enough to speak out. One must hold space. One must show up and be porous and bold. One must be supportive. And one must make things and make things and continue to make things. (Right?)
But no. You’re not a machine. I am not a machine. Oh dear.
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