You can be removed from the ceremony, but the work never leaves you. Not if it was always really there.

I am carrying enormous things, I'm not fully permitted to belong, I'm improvising ways to remain useful, and there is a tremendous amount of force moving through me that I don't entirely control.

1st blush dream notes:

DAH presentation I’m not on program because of moral failure But am making props Make 4x 12’ inflatable globes with cool art look Filled with smoke Have to transport in my mini cooper End up in mountain town. Looks like the projects in dust meridian One Road into neighborhood Go in service with NG Take a cat on leash Snow I push cardboard like snowplow and clear streets See Nois and Jeanie Will Ferrel calls me into a meeting in the little town CEO (Victoria Beckham) wants me to put graphics on globe. Giant V and a bunch of smaller graphics. Thrusting dreams – hips thrusting as I lay in bed, like an earthquake (dance or sex?)

Moral failure → exclusion → making things anyway → carrying the 'world' → isolation → clearing a path → summoned by authority → my creation branded

Big forces req managment: inflatable globe, smoke, snow, geography, organizational authority

“I’m not on program because of moral failure / But am making props.” It occurs to me that in my circle, moral failure precludes me from even tasks like this. I am only allowed to watch, but I insist on engaging anyway, this is a form of self-enrichment and disobedience at the same time. For someone who sees their own worth through what he provides, this is almost a natural imperative than it is a choice. I can't be on the stage, but I can contribute to its function.

Globes. Model of the world, but fake. Big, fragile and filled with smoke—something intangible vs real. The size and my mode of transportation are incompatible. 5lbs of potatoes and 1lb of sack, as it were. Like the stage limit, it's intractable problem that can only be solved with a different set of circumstances.

The mountain town—opposite of the multi-thousand person venue and the totem representing the world (x4). This is is small, quaint and abandoned. Isolated, the idea reinforced by the one-road-in-and-out. Maybe the represents my reality (or perception of it) verses my inner landscape (the stage and world management).

Pushing the snow: Again, a 'problem' that i am unprepared to confront. That someone tells me in the dream, 'yeah, you should have brought a snow plow, they pay really good money for plowing snow when it stacks up like this.', is almost a challenge. To make money, to help the community, to butter both sides of the bread.

I know how I felt: Unprepared for an opportunity but not giving up and letting it pass. I'll use whatever tool I can find to show that I can push through this problem. Claim this opportunity. That's what mules do, they push. They don't wait for convenience or comfort.

Field Service with Ng: Energy going to help someone else. Service of others, saving the world one persona at a time. The cat: another anachronistic addition. Cats are neither controllable nor standard operating equipment for the preaching work.

I never speak to anyone, I just acknowledge the cat and it's resistance to the leash, when the man approaches about the snow plow. In that moment is when I see Jeanie and Nois, an older couple who are generally friendly, but not very close or deep. They are peripheral friends at best. They acknowledge us but do not engage. And I do not engage them either. This mirrors real life. Though I have tried to get to know the man and find is good qualities, of which he has many. A cat doesn't naturally need to be walked on a leash, so responsible for something that doesn't quite fit the situation.

This is adapting.

Will Ferrell calling me into a meeting. Think: WF from Barbie movie (executive). Comically serious about his job. Tells me someone important wants to talk. I follow him into a 3 story brick 'projects' building. Leave cat and Ng outside. I am surprised such a high profile meeting is happening here in this dirty-snow little town on a sunny winter day.

The CEO being Victoria Beckham: beautiful and poised. no hesitation in what she wants and I want to please her. She is associated with branding, fashion, fame, visual identity. I am surprised that the 11th hour she is now asking me to make the graphics happen. I explain that I don't have time to reprint the globes, but that I might be able to cut vinyl and apply it. I am nervous to even offer this as I'm not sure how the vinyl's elasticity will marry to the globe substrate.

it doesn't occur to me in the dream that a woman who represents power asks me to rebrand my own art as hers and I have no hesitation. My people-pleasing is in full effect and I hope to hold nothing for myself if it means making her satisfied.

Is it the authority or the beauty that makes me respond? Or is it just my need to see others comfortable and content?

The hip thrusting in bed during an earthquake doesn't fit this scenario at all and almost feels like a secondary dream. IDK if this was related to sex or dance. The physical sensation: rhythm, I think is the more important takeaway than the location. The body itself becomes something that is moving the person rather than something the person is consciously controlling.

Almost everything in it involves large forces that have to be contained or managed—inflatable globes, smoke, snow, geography, organizational authority—and then at teh very end, my own body produces an uncontrollable force.

Takeaway: I am carrying enormous things, I'm not fully permitted to belong, I'm improvising ways to remain useful, and there is a tremendous amount of force moving through me that I don't entirely control.

It does trouble me I was so ready to give away my own agency to make someone else happy. Maybe finaly being aware of that is a good thing.

#dream

08/17/26

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“May your seas be wide enough for wonder, your harbor always waiting, and your light never fail when another soul is searching.” – The Lantern Keeper

Sometimes we are born again through the memories we left in cold rooms.

I was looking for my hat—the wide-brimmed one I wore when I was someone else, someone who drove through red dirt roads and squinted into the sun like it was a dare. The kind of hat required in Dust Meridian.

It had been missing for years. Maybe longer. I didn’t even know I was looking until I opened the refrigerator and there it was, perched beside a frosty beer and a carton of eggs.

Cold to the touch.

But not dead.

I blinked.

“What are you doing here?”

I wasn’t joking.

It felt like it owed me an explanation. It had disappeared ten years ago. I looked high and low, traveled and called everyone I knew, but it never materialized. I lamented its loss—the countless adventures we’d shared. It was practically part of my identity for nearly a quarter of a century.

The hat turned slowly—almost shy—and answered, but the words slipped sideways, as if the air between us was warped. I heard syllables like birdcalls, like eucalyptus leaves whispering in spirals.

Like a secret I knew once, but had since packed away with my passport and the smell of old firewood.

Still, I smiled. Not because I understood. But because something in me stirred—some flicker of a self I’d shelved. Not abandoned, exactly—just chilled for safekeeping.

I held it to my chest. It smelled faintly of sweat and eucalyptus, of rain that never came.

I considered putting it back in the fridge. Maybe it liked it there. Maybe it was hiding from the heat of a life half-lived.

But I didn’t.

I slipped it on, and for a moment, the kitchen spun into something vast the wood floor cracking into gravel, the hum of the refrigerator becoming cicadas in the trees.

And there I was.

There WE were.

Me, and the version of me that remembered what the wind felt like in wild, open places. The one who once drove toward the horizon with no map.

And no need for one.

2025-08-02 11:09:49

#reflection #essay #memoir #journal #100daystooffset #writing #dream #poetry

Home | About | Full of Stars | Contact | HeartCartography

“May your seas be wide enough for wonder, your harbor always waiting, and your light never fail when another soul is searching.” – The Lantern Keeper