Prompt 319. Dream Nests & Nectar

& Day Five of our New Year’s Journaling Challenge

Suleika Jaouad, Just Married (2024)

Hi friend,

I recently had a long phone call with a friend—a nourishing, grounding conversation in which she told me about her New Year’s Day ritual. Each January 1, she wakes up and goes into nature—depending on where she is, maybe it’s a city park, maybe it’s an old-growth forest—and she makes note of the first wild animal she comes across. She does a little research about that animal, its habits and distinctive characteristics, and it becomes her guide for the year.

In that moment, I thought of the magical experience I had recently with a bananaquit—where on a boat excursion to a remote island in the Caribbean, one appeared out of nowhere and nibbled a strawberry from my palm. I said I’d like to loosely interpret her ritual for myself. Together we read a little about the bananaquit and learned that it’s also known as the sugar bird, since it loves all manner of sweet things—from fruits to nectar to actual sugar granules. Immediately it came to me: This year I need to look for the sweetness.

Lately I have found myself back in the dilemma of balancing my physical limitations and my ambitions, be they things I want to pursue personally or professionally. I struggle with making plans—I struggle being confident in making them and in giving myself grace if I’m not well enough to see them through. Everything seems feasible in the moments when I feel well, so I want to say yes to things—to a deadline for a new creative project, to a dinner plan with a friend. And yet, sometimes only an hour later, my energy dissipates and the nausea ramps up, and that plan suddenly feels completely untenable. I want to be a person who makes strong commitments, who does what she says, who can be counted upon. I almost get angry with myself. I think, Shouldn’t I have known this wasn’t realistic?

I find that flux so difficult, because both selves are real—the one who makes the plan, and the one who needs to cancel. I don’t know which version will show up at any given moment. And on top of that daily flux is the bigger looming question of illness, one that I have to face directly each time I have a bone marrow biopsy. The next one is scheduled for later this month, and I told my friend that it feels like the sword of Damocles is hanging over me. How do I face each day without being hijacked by fear?

Looking for the sweetness seems like a perfect antidote to the worry and fear. By looking for the sweetness, I mean seeking beauty, presence, and peace in every circumstance, letting go of my fears of suffering and death and what binds us to the material world, being nourished by what’s already inside of us—the nectar of bliss, as its called in Bhagavad Gita. It’s an ongoing practice—to stay nimble, to accept the constant flux, to find contentment wherever I am.

Maybe this all sounds a little mystical to you—a little too woo-woo. I admit it does to me, too. But I also know that since I relapsed three years ago and then again this summer, I have found myself gravitating toward certain symbols without knowing where they come from or why, like the roseate spoonbill that appeared to me in a dream during my second bone marrow transplant and that I felt compelled to conjure in watercolors. I have arrived at understanding without fully understanding; I have found answers by loving the questions. As the poet Rilke says, “Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” (These last two lines have become such a guiding light that I chose them as the epigraph for my new book, The Book of Alchemy.)

Today is Day 5 of our New Year’s Journaling Challenge, where we’ve been celebrating and cultivating the idea of magic—be it the magic of the human mind, the magic of imagination, or the magic of memory. For this challenge, the prompts have been curated from the very best of the Hatch, our monthly creative gatherings for paid subscribers. Today, it’s a prompt I shared back in April 2023 called “The Logic of Dreams.” Whether you’re taking part in the challenge or just dropping in for the regular Sunday fare, I hope it allows you to lean in to the seeking.

Sending love,

Suleika

“Looking for the magic these past few days has been an excellent start to the year. Thank you for putting these videos together. They are the highlight of my day and a wonderful way to reconnect with this community.” —Beth

This comment from Beth perfectly encapsulates how I’m feeling about this year’s challenge—so rich and poignant, setting off powerful reverberations within the community. If you missed the start on January 1, the prompts are evergreen, so you can jump in now if you’d like!

Vincent Van Gogh, Still Life with Three Nests (1885)

Prompt 319. The Logic of Dreams by Suleika Jaouad

As much as I love poetry, I admit that I sometimes feel intimidated by it. I worry that reading a poem requires some special training that I don’t yet possess, or like I’m clumsily decoding a new language. But lately, I’ve been trying to defang that fear by kicking off my mornings with a poem. Things that are helping me find a way in: I read the poems out loud, I transcribe them into my journal, and sometimes I even repeat a line that resonates with me over and over again until I’ve committed it to memory.

Some time ago, I came across a poem called “Dream Nest” by Dana Levin. In it, the speaker describes a nest in a tree outside her window—

More like a basket
        	of twig and hair, 
        	surprisingly 
        	tall
           
            and deep—

What follows is relatively straightforward and utterly dreamlike: The speaker realizes something lives in the nest, something that you wouldn’t expect. A beat later, she somehow knows it’s a human, though as soon as she attains this knowledge, the nest disintegrates. And then comes the resolution; the speaker understands that it “wasn’t about trauma, the perfect/ and then the broken,” but rather,

Born and lit and broken
                                     comes I.

In a postscript about this poem, Levin writes, “Sometimes, as I fall asleep, I ask for an instructive dream; and sometimes my psyche provides. As the dream dissolved, I felt as if I was spun from thinnest glass. Waking up, the last stanzas came to me as the dream’s lesson.” I love the idea that you could put a question to your unconscious, and that might just answer.

I also love how both the content and the form of this poem mirror dream logic: the foundation always shifting underfoot, the line breaks and white space mirroring the fragmented nature of dreams. I haven’t dreamed in over a year, maybe because what was lurking in my unconscious was too much for me to unpack. The idea that we have agency in our dreams is something new to me. Even more exciting is the idea that there’s power in looking at them, rather than pushing them away or hoping you never see them again. I’m reminded of a Rumi poem called “Your laughter turns the world to paradise,” which encourages a daring lightness in the face of our fears:

Crack open my shell. Steal the pearl. 
I’ll still be laughing. 
It’s the rookies who laugh only when they win. 

I’m interested in approaching my dreams with this kind of attitude. Instead of fearing the dream world or feeling hostage to it, I want to approach it as a place of untapped potential, as a really fertile space. I want to explore what I can learn not just from my creative work, but also dream work—noticing the patterns and shapes and symbols that appear again and again.

Writing requires paradoxical action: to seek without expectation, to engage in accidents of composition without guides, to trust our creative intuition without knowing where it will lead. Levin describes it as a revelation: “The poem talks, and I listen. The poem dictates, and I record.” Levin describes a way into this kind of writing as “focused non-focus.” It’s like asking a question and allowing chance to suggest an answer. Like pulling words from a bag at random and composing something from them. Like trolling through your dreams not only to begin a poem, but also to help it along if you get stuck.

Your prompt for today:

Close your eyes and pay attention to what floats up. Maybe it’s a color, a shape, a word, a memory; maybe it’s something you dreamed recently. Now write as a medium might. Channel what comes. Create with focused non-focus. Allow the surreal to unfold without worrying too much about what arises and why.

Poets featured in today’s newsletter—

Dana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, and received a BA from Pitzer College and an MFA from New York University. She is the author of five books of poems: Now Do You Know Where You Are, Banana Palace, Sky Burial, Wedding Day, and In the Surgical Theatre. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation, Levin currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.

Rumi, Molana, Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Balkhy (1207–1273), was born in or near the city of Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan. Considered the greatest poet of the Persian language, Rumi’s major works are the Masnavi, a six-volume collection of mystical teachings in rhyming couplets, and the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a collection of lyric poetry dedicated to his spiritual mentor. This translation of “Your Laughter Turns the World to Paradise” is by Haleh Liza Gafori, a poet, vocalist, and performance artist of Persian descent born in New York City, from her book, Gold. A second volume of her Rumi translations, Water, is forthcoming in April 2025.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• On Creating Beyond Fear, a video replay of my Studio Visit with the dazzling Elizabeth Gilbert, where we talked about the allure of a new creative project and being gentle with our fear and where Liz gave her life-changing (for me) “purpose” talk

• Goodbye to All That, an installment of my advice column Dear Susu, where I wrote about leaving the city, house hunting, and big dreams

• Eleven Minutes, a very special gathering of the Hatch, where the artist, teacher, and Isolation Journals community member Rhonda Willers shared her pinch-pot gratitude practice—a heart-expanding, transformative, grounding meditation

Our Isolation Journal No. 1

The other day I saw a comment from a community member who had filled her special edition Isolation Journal to the last page and wondered if we had more—and we do! Get yours at the link below before they’re gone!