dreamtime

scrapbooked graffiti -- a newspaper butterfly with the words 'don't pretend' up over the right wingGood (& wet) morning to you out there — how is this Saturday morning (is it still morning where you are?) rising in you?

I’m preparing for today’s Writing the Flood workshop, and getting some writing together to send out to the folks in the Dive Deep workshop. Suddenly, there’s a lot of writing-related work happening in my life, and I’m so grateful for that.

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Here’s a prompt and a write for this morning — the prompt comes from the second Dive Deep meeting, last Thursday evening. We spent most of that meeting discussing one another’s writing, but we write together every time, even if it’s just a short one, like this here.

The prompt was, “this is what the dreamtime looks like.” We took 7 minutes — give yourself 10 or 15, if you’ve got it, and follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go.

This was my response on Thursday, a stream of consciousness:

This is what the dreamtime looks like: this long lanky backwoods, this soft deciduousness, this capital market statuary, this beekeeping, this ephemera, those dancing feet, the hands on fire holding a bewildered heart, that long sip of soup, this fading you. The dreamtime went black but still she brings her roses to its feet, still she knelt down with offerings, her body bare or barren, brute force peeling the skin of her knees. This is what prayer feels like when its heavy, the push of an exhalation through chewed and swollen lips, yellowed skin far from the sun. This is her offering to what the dreamtime doesn’t give her, this lack of answers: a bat cave laden and latex but hollow, and she walks away from too many toys and the promise of a fast ride and another broken hero. She jumps on the back of a lace-heavy ghost, she kicks at shins, she wails for the priest’s attention but all the monikers have turned their backs, spelunking among stalactites and sulfur breezes. Her knees are raw, not bleeding, just colorful, and she knots them heavy with sediment and shallow pearlescence. She is still waiting for the blue dreams, the hopeful sleep, the wrap-around dances of drummer’s bones, she is knelt at the mouth of everything and all she is waiting for is to be swallowed.

Thanks for the way you let your words come, even when they are confusing and messy, even when the sense hasn’t formed around them yet. Thanks for your creation, your faith in what you make.

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