What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?~”What if you slept…” by S.T.Coleridge
I enjoy sleep. I do. But what gets done while sleeping?
A dog sleeps when tired and will sleep quite peacefully when they are comfortable with their surroundings. If they are fearful or on-edge, there will be no sleep.
I have been fascinated recently how altered I am by my surroundings. Like a dog that rolls over and exposes her belly in contentment while asleep, if I am at ease in my surroundings everything gets better. I see differently. I see possibilities alongside the realities. I do not need coffee to stimulate me or make the creative juices flow: if I don’t have to think about junk, I can make things that are not junk.
A brilliant artist once told me that he had begun guarding himself and his mind from certain things: negativity, anxiety, stress, anger, silly-ness… and as soon as he did that, his ability to think and create cleared as if a strong wind had blown out the smog from his mind.
I completely believe this works for me, too. Whenever “things” invade from the sides, the first thing to go is my imagination and/or my ability to think creatively. Writing gets shallow, the complicated mental digressions that take me to new places become entangled with the spiderwebs of simplicity: because there is very little innate creativity in “simple.” Meaning is given by layers. Creativity is based in metaphor and the layering of simple things to make 2+2=joy.
Yeah, call me a delicate little flower. Whoa is me, people are yelling around me. But in this age of praised ignorance, The Loud is just as likely to be wrong as The Strong; and the kid who throws the tantrum in the sandbox is often less deserving to be heard than the kid quietly building a castle from sand. The shame of it is that the tantrum kid gets the attention while the castle builder sees very little praise for his quiet efforts. A tantrum requires no creativity and is based in raw emotion: even when based in emotion, the creation of a castle requires creativity.
The only things tantrum kids create are holes. Diggers of holes tend to fall in them at some point. Castle kids turn into the people who history remembers.
My greatest concern is that, like my own response to negativity in my surroundings, this world is building up its own downtrodden-ness and begin to be dragged down by all the loud tantrums being thrown in the sandbox. All the sane kids are looking in thinking, “What the heck, man…?” but people are still giving more time to the tantrum kid. The creative and the sensitive are being ignored or pushed to the sides and their quietness is being misunderstood as weakness. Maybe that kid throws enough tantrums and the parents of the quieter kids stop coming to the sandbox altogether? What then, dreamer? Who will build the castles then? The tantrum kid? Will they build themselves?
These are the words
Of my master, tellin’ me that
No weak heart
Shall prosper
And whosoever diggeth a pit
Shall fall in it
And whosoever diggeth a pit
Shall bury in itIf you are the big, big tree
We are the small axe
Ready to cut you down
To cut you down~”Small Axe” by Bob Marley
Stay tuned…
-Noah D.
