I felt so messy and chaotic yesterday, and so stuck with my dreams...
And today I know why!
The answer is so obvious it's silly, now that I see it.
I need a new Dream Book for this dream.
I always say this to people when they get tangled up with multiple dreams - if you have more than one dream you are working with, you need more than one Dream Book.
Dream Book is where you get into the nitty gritty of the Inner Work, Dream Work and Outer Work of the dream, this is where you get into the details of it so you do need a different Dream Book for each dream.
You can move veerrrrrrrryyyyy slooooooow with Dream Book, just have a book for each dream so you are holding space for the process.
And here I am, for some reason, dreaming without a Dream Book!!
So OF COURSE I get tangled. OF COURSE I can't tell if I need Inner Work or Outer Work. OF COURSE I don't even know how to start the Outer Work...
So now it's simple. I am going to give this dream 1-2 hours a day. Either DO THE THING... OR... work on the Dream Book to learn more about it.
I am SO excited.
This is the dream of making a whole new body of work in visual/textile art... I see the big picture of it, like what it could be in 10 years, but all year I have struggled to find my way into the practice of it. Everything I do feels too small or insignificant in comparison to where I want this to go.
This is CLASSIC "looking too far ahead to be able to take steps where you are".
We want to KNOW the big picture of what we want - of course!
But then we have to FOCUS on the small steps that are immediately doable.
We have to put ourselves into the process and then stay in it long enough to get to that end. But being in process, especially being at the beginning of the process, doesn't necessarily look anything like the Big Picture Dream. It's easy to get tripped up there.
It's easy to have all sorts of feelings about how insignificant the little steps feel in comparison to the Big Picture Dream.
But if you don't take those steps because you have too many feelings about them being insignificant... then you're not getting any closer.
It's like we think if we wait, eventually a train will come and ZOOOOOM us all the way there.
That's not going to happen.
It's the steps-so-small-they-feel-insignificant that get us there.
I've made so much insignificant art this year.
I am calling them experiments.
Each one is so far away from where I want this art to be.
It's breaking my heart to be so far away from where I want to be. And my broken heart doesn't want to make more insignificant art.
AND YET
The REAL heartbreak would be to give up because it's uncomfortable.
The next ten years is going to go by no matter what I do.
I can either keep making insignificant art and see if I can grow it into a creative practice that creates the work I can dreaming of...
Or I can still be stepping in and then stepping back when it gets uncomfortable, not committing, waiting for it to not break my heart, and not be any further ahead.
I know what I choose.
