I dreamt again last night about irises.
A song & a prompt for you.
For months preceding my move from Oregon last May, my sleep was barraged by exceptionally vivid dreams. Loud, disturbing dreams. Nuclear blasts and tidal waves. Bodies in the basement. Rising flood waters. Bodies in my childhood home. Black suns, dream blindness, dream dying, fleeing from a fast-moving storm. Deeply archetypal dreams. Jesters and “witch doctors”. And several dreams about irises.
In one—
I am in a vacant city lot at dusk. (I know this lot. It’s Chicago, it’s tucked between crumbling buildings, one of which I lived in when I was young & heartbroken and had nowhere else to go.) In the fading light, I am gathering purple irises in a bundle in my arms. There are so many more pushing up at the edges of the cracked asphalt and I can’t hold anymore. The evening sunset is quickly fading into a sodium glow, so I know I have to get back to ‘my shop’. A woman alone, I approach the storefront to find my door ajar. A pang of fear shoots through my body, but I push the door open with my free hand. Standing there softly smiling is Thich Nhat Hanh, he is thumbing through my ledger book…
Among my earliest memories is an iris. I am three years old or less and we live in the caretaker’s trailer at Emigrant Lake where my dad is a park ranger. I’m squatting on the trail to the campground, utterly transfixed by a clutch of enormous, fragrant, purple irises in full bloom. I pry into one with curiosity and stain my little fingers with purple juice. I can smell them now.
To get into my morning writing today, I decided to play a little game of chance-o-mancy with my stack of past sketchbooks. I pulled one off the shelf at random and flopped it open— to today’s date, one year ago…
On the adjacent page, next to a sketch of the Fool tarot card I had pulled that day, I write: “Eclipse cycle messages as we close our Oregon chapter— the last total lunar eclipse of the Flower Moon was May 16th, 2003”. The Fool, the Zero, holds a traveler’s satchel in one hand and a small flower in the other as he steps to the edge of a cliff...
A Song & a Prompt for You:
Much of my creative work is centered around nested loops & cycles— endings disappearing into beginnings into endings, blurring the line between origin and infinity. The iris returns to bulb, blooms to iris. When you court an idea like that, it courts you back.
The song I’ve included for you today is my current cyclical exploration— You can let it transport you and act as a writing timer while you play with this week’s prompt. Grab your notebook, press play on the track and start writing. Use the first person present voice:
Where were you and what were you doing a year ago today? And where do you think you were and what do you think you were you doing 20 years ago today? If you can’t remember, write what you feel and imagine.
Once the song ends: Read back over your writing and give it a five word title.
[Comments are on for those who would like to share their title lines.]
Most weeks I publish free creative prompts here in Image. Word. Mystery. As this publication rolls along I’ll be sharing more of my experimental music and animations with my paid subscribers, but today I’m sharing this work-in-progress with everyone. If you enjoy my work and would like to see it continue, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or sharing this post with a friend. xo
Thank you Lisette - I really enjoyed having your music as a timer, it was just really wonderful to write to. Per usual, with anything you prompt in my life, 5 seconds in I was like "ah ha!" lol. The title of my piece is "Moving towards something to explore." Thank you for spending the time to make these posts and share you're stories. I truly perk up when I get the push notification saying that you've made a new post. Loving it. Loving you. :) -anna
"My lens is my lease."
This title emerged from the idea and reality of personal reflection. No matter the temporal direction I choose to focus on, I deepen my sense of the present moment. How I view where I am in every 'now' also directs how I continue on a certain path or move to a new one. While this is a personal sense, and written in first-person, I feel that the deepening through this exercise of self-reflection is universal. There's a wee bit of word association in there as well—on reading your share about irises and the prompt, my mind's eye pictured a lens.