Recharging

I dreamt in stanzas last night, the waning yet swollen moon holding court over my cabin loft, the wind rushing down the slopes of the Black Mountains like water gone wild. And so the words were slippery, blown away by the wind, the sleeping eye of moon, the distant gaze of my own inner mind.

And yet…there was something remaining by morning. I remember sitting up in bed, midway through a line of poetry I was composing, then repeating the line (out loud or on the scroll of my mind? I cannot say.). I remember re-reading the poem – I had an image of it handwritten in pencil in my dream, then lucidly telling myself to write it down in the waking life.

The words were gone but the emotional force brought me into the day. Going downstairs to the small kitchen, I felt I will still swimming half-in and half-out of the watery dream world of words from the night before. I could sense them at the edges of my fingertips, the tip of my tongue, and yet I could not taste them, could not reach them.

This is immersion. This is where I need to be to begin the real work of revision, re-envisioning stories, going deeper. I’m at home in my mind now, and must pull my body in to support this process. Tomorrow I’ll visit old ghosts – notes from craft talks, old stories, favorite passages from shelved books – then return to my own page, charged with that greater purpose of waking the words up and bringing them to life!