These Days All I Have The Capacity For Is Dreaming

Of Worlds Under, Inside and Beyond the Blue Light

Black and white photograph of me touching the distance while wearing archival AYZACO, workwear I made under the blue light of my sewing machine. Photographer: Stephen L.A. Miller

An email asks for an eternity in exchange for a “modest honorarium”, a PowerPoint asks for energy from reserves currently running on a backup generator, every administrative task on the to-do list begs for blood and some days survival looks like pushing it to tomorrow.

I teach a workshop on time management and feel insincere as soon as I leave the Zoom room — because I know the issue isn’t time management, it’s not enough time to grief, not enough time to scream, not enough time to dream. We don’t need new time hacks, marketing strategies and promises that are impossible to keep. We need a new world, we need a new world, my god, dear god, we need a new world.

Perhaps this is why these days I only have the capacity for dreaming — for reading, for writing, for imagining what we may offer eachother in a time like this.

I’m desiring less workshops and more conversations, less emails and more poetry, less blue light and more embodiment. I am desiring more work away from keyboard, all the while it is the blue light that illuminates the pathways where we find eachother. How do we work with the blues of this moment, both online and off? How do we create pathways to that daydream you had last week where we let our bodies rest on seating as generous as clouds, read silently together and let birdsong infiltrate the room from the window in the right hand corner saving our lives if only for this moment.

On May 10th, I wrote a thread about how I no longer crave the myth of work/life balance — instead I long for work/life ventilation. I long for, and perhaps live for, the room of my practice receiving air laced with birdsong and a story from a parallel universe, a parallel possibility, I can’t name but can smell, a world I can’t know but can hear. A world I’ve only gotten glimpses of and, upon falling in love, decided to carve out a living by living inside it.

Now it is May 31st, my 32nd birthday, and I am taking a break from reading while at my favorite coffee shop to write to you just as an older black stranger with long gray locs wears a dress so yellow it gives me permission to allow my eyes to water, spots the cover of the book I’m reading by Toni Morrison and smiles while giving me a thumbs up. I look about the room where we’re silently reading together and I’m confused thinking they’re mistaking me for someone else. The pretty bird wearing crying yellow screams “Jazz” loud enough to penetrate my noise cancelling headphones and gives everyone in the coffee shop a reason to look up.

I realize what they’re pointing to just beyond the book…the new world, all the possibility always, already surrounding us and I scream back, “Yes”.

Let’s Work Together 1:1

These days all I have the capacity for is dreaming with you. Doing the work of imaging how we might create offers that allow us to carve out a life shaped by desire. How we might create offers that engage our entire sensorium both away from keyboard and behind the portal of possibility it has the power to open up. When you hear the new world drumming from the inside of your heart as it beats, what does it sound like? No, what does it feel like? Let’s put words to it together so we may live inside it.

This container is for you if…

• You are dreaming of ways of working that don't put your values, desire and income at odds.

• You are dreaming of ways of working that engage your sensorium, allowing you to ground and regulate inside your nervous system from moment to moment.

• You are dreaming of ways of working that allow you to practice pulling the worlds we need, in the future we desire, into the present.