What's fueling all your little fires?

A seasonal creative inventory.

Sep 20, 2024

The voice urgently echoing inside me as I surfaced from sleep the other night was repeating:

“I’m groping in the night for fires to put out.”

…I’m groping in the night for fires to put out…I’m groping in the night for fires to put out…

Just conscious enough to push my eye mask up and fumble for my phone, I took the words down (thinking: I’ll figure it out in the morning…) and fell back into another agitated sleep…

By morning, hovering over my emotional support coffee with my sketchbook in my lap, this message had lost all context from the dream world. So, all I could do was take the ever-poetic dream messenger at her word—

Ok! No wonder I’m so tired! I’m groping in the night for fires to put out!

Interestingly, it was this time last year I woke up with another dream-phrase echoing in my ears:

"From coping to coppicing..."

Lisette Murphy

September 1, 2023

It’s the middle of the night and I wake up from a deep sleep to realize that I am both hearing and seeing words in my mind’s eye:

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Because I worked with that phrase in my drawing and writing, “coping to coppicing” worked on me in the weeks and months that followed last year. The dream messenger had gifted me a whole new perspective on my state of being— I just had to walk with it a while.

So: I suspect that as I continue to tend this image of groping for night fires it will similarly reveal new dimensions of myself to me…I wonder what this discovery will be?

I’m imagining today that this is some sort of a dream-larder.

What if… every September the Dream Maker plucks a perfectly ripe sentiment off of the vine and says, “Here, store this one away: it will get you through winter” ?

Other things I’m tossing in the larder as summer comes to a close…

Watching

“Vesper” 2022

Oh, how beautiful a future-fairy-tale-sci-fi-fable-film can feel with a female writer/director! I want to talk for hours about this strange surprising film with you (seriously, hmu)…but there is a scene in which the young protagonist learns to howl like a wolf…ow-Woooooooo!…and this slow, stunning scene won’t leave my thoughts.

The lesson I’m taking into my creative practice from this?: Learn where to linger.

Listening

The hypnotic forward motion in the music of Awa Odori casts a strange spell over studio hours, collapsing time completely...

In an era when simply resisting urgency is its own profound rebellion, I’m thinking about just how slowly and artfully I can move through the next few months...

Reading

Bird Wings by Rumi: Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror up to where you are bravely working. Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings. By Rumi From The Essential Rumi Coleman Barks with John Moyne

Adrift by Mark Nepo: Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we’ve lost face each other. It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

Noticing

291,800 birds migrated across Iowa last night.

How do you know when it’s time to flap your wings and fly through the night to get somewhere you’ve never been?

Making

I finally said “yes” to a project I’ve been thinking about, sketching & constructing in my mind for years— a ten foot iris, with painted fabric petals.

Every step of the project I’ve said, “Ohhh I love going to the hardware store to look for supplies!”, “Weee I love making big immersive props!”, “Ohhh I love going to the craft store!”, “Oooooh, I loooove playing with fabrics!”…So: Why hadn’t I just let myself make this project before now???

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the synopsis is: scarcity.

How many things would you love to do but can’t seem to “justify” because it’s “just” for you. For your love of process?

What I’m taking away is: I give myself ample permission to play in a sketchbook every day— no justification needed there! But what else am I saying “no” to out of fear it’s too frivolous a use of my limited resources?

Your prompt…

What’s inspiring and informing you right now? Take inventory of the symbols, sensations, songs and sentiments you’re carrying with you. What kind of season did they spring from? What kind of winter are they preparing you for?

And I’ll offer this: If you don’t already keep track of your dreams, try asking for insights for your “dream-larder” this week…and promise to write them down, whatever they are.

If you like sketching and want to make this more concrete: Draw the shelves of your larder and fill it with everything you need for winter. If you do, I bet you’ll be surprised how often you come back to that imaginal pantry in coming months…

xo,

And: Happy birthday to my littlest co-creator. Sigil turned ONE this week!

Jade Eby

Oct 1

I love every single thing you've written about here, but this question has all my creative and personal cogs going: "What if… every September the Dream Maker plucks a perfectly ripe sentiment off of the vine and says, “Here, store this one away: it will get you through winter?"

I LOVE this because it often seems as if I go through something similar every Sept-Dec. Some of it is S.A.D. living in a cold, wintery state, but I think the other part is that my guides and the universe conspire to give me something to hunker down with every year to figure out so that I can "emerge" in the spring with newfound wisdom, awareness or insight. So obviously, I'm obsessed with your question because I think, yes, your dream maker is totally making it happen for you!

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