Tiana Cutright

First, a brief introduction to dreamspeak:

The way my psyche works, I will often go to sleep pondering some idea that has attracted my attention, or some issue I am currently dealing with in my life, then I will dream some intense imagery while I sleep, and when I wake up … Big Thoughts happen. Last night I was contemplating the problem of the scarcity mindset I am working through just now (I came by it honestly, btw; my upbringing was unpleasant). Then I slept. And dreamed. And woke up. And this morning, my dreamself (via my morning journal entry) delivered the following message to my awakeself. It's a special kind of advice-to-self (and yes, I do think, and dream, apparently, in lengthy lists and sequences of intertwining concepts). Anyway, I found the insights interesting, and thought others might want to read this too.

On to the dreamspeech:

People are meanest and most foolhardy when we* act out of a lack within ourselves. Such as: lack of knowledge or understanding (ignorance), lack of courage (cowardice), lack of confidence or self-regard (shame), lack of empathy (contempt), lack of community or camaraderie (loneliness), lack of humility (arrogance or conceit), lack of honesty (deception or delusion), lack of curiosity (bias or presumption), and lack of respect (resentment). We feel these out-of-sync interior circumstances as deficiencies, and we will make choices to change the deficient situation or to compensate for things we determine we cannot change.

Ultimately, we do know it is wrong / unhealthy / harmful to act out of these kinds of character deficiencies—we know this is so, because these internal conditions simply do not feel good. Our emotions, at least, are truthful. However much we may try to obfuscate the truth, however much we might succumb to the violent overculture's insistence that we invert good and bad, right and wrong, wholeness and woundedness, however much we may get confused by mental illness and/or moral injury, and however much we may end up redefining pain and disgust as pleasure and satisfaction—all to excuse and rationalize our errors and failings and misfortunes—we are in fact at our weakest, our most fallible, our most unlovely when we get motivated by those emptied impulses, by those lacks in our lives. We become our worst selves when we indulge such hollows within ourselves, such untoward potentialities for our lives and our interrelationships.

Whenever we get lost in this hollowed state of being, we fragment, detach, and segregate. I think the underlying aim of the heart is self-protective here, but the real-world outcome is that we isolate ourselves from life and love. We armor up against the suffering that arises from our disconnection, without addressing the causes and consequences of that disconnection. In our brokenness, we may start sabotaging ourselves and those around us. This is the flailing way of unrelieved despair that resorts to blame instead of exerting itself to restore balance. And out of our increasing loss of integrity and our growing separation from the soulful life: cruelty emerges. And cruelty begets all atrocities.

This dead-hearted state arises from habituating ourselves to feeling badly. When we stop seeking to actually feel better and we settle for pretenses or substitutes, or decide that the bare familiarity of our discomfort (or even of our agony) must be safer than the risks of hope and healing and joy, we interrupt our own authenticity, limit ourselves to our worst options, and sever ourselves from meaningful relationships with self and with others. Meanness, folly, and cruelty indicate that we are refusing to be selves at all. We are choosing instead to become undead fictions, rearranging our identities into appalling parodies of ourselves. Our defenses take over our decision-making, often becoming offensive over time—offensive in all senses of that word. We might then become bullies, scavengers, parasites, or reavers. If ever we let malice define us, we become monsters.

The loving response to sensing a lack in oneself or in another is to take some caring action to investigate and fulfill the true need, and so to nourish in oneself and others the truly good and peaceful soul-conditions that accompany and invite wisdom, fortitude, trust, compassion, connection, grace, awareness, engagement, and honor. This nourishing process consists of both work and play, effort and rest. It requires persistence, adaptation, patience, good will, and active intent. Sometimes it requires faith. But it is possible. Real happiness soundly rooted in care and kindness is possible. And the longer we practice pursuing the Good with determined love, the more probable our experience of joy becomes.

I believe we can be good or become good. We can get well. We don't need to be perfect, or completed, or make no more mistakes ever. These overculture demands are unobtainable. We only need to get real, and be real, and stay real. We just need to be exactly what we are, from hour to hour, from day to day, cultivating awareness of ourselves and of one another, and finding fresh ways to grow our peace. We can choose this realness, this realistic wellness, and we can succeed. We can be and become whole, being wholly ourselves, marvelously dynamic and alive. We can fulfill our wants and needs sufficiently and harmlessly. We can live well alone, and we can live well together. But we have to want to. We must decide to live abundantly. Then we must learn how.

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* I am not using a "royal we" here, nor am I trying to overgeneralize my personal ethics and experiences outward into some kind of implicit "us versus them" (or else a "goodly-me versus all-you-nasty-jerks out there") dichotomy. When a broad "we" shows up in my diary writing, I am locating and including myself within the human community. I am reclaiming my own inclusion. In this particular journal entry, I am locating and including and reclaiming my place within common emotional, behavioral, and moral patterns of human fear and desire, temptation and liberation. I am acknowledging the truth that the hollows and pinnacles within my own soul are akin to the depths and heights I have observed in the choices and personalities of fellow human beings.

Original photograph © Tiana Cutright → Wide Open. 21 May 2022. Rogue Valley, Oregon. JPG.

Photo description: A color photograph of an evening expanse of sky, facing west, right before the sunset hues appear on the horizon. Late-day sunlight glows white and luminous through a thick cluster of rainclouds, with clear patches of dusky blue sky showing through here and there. In the foreground, three thin powerlines stretch from the lower right corner of the scene towards the bottom center. The leaves and branches of a tall tree are silhouetted in an intricate interlace along the top edge and the rightmost third of the image.

Color palette: bright white, pale yellow, cool light gray, light blue-gray, periwinkle blue, sky blue, pale lavender, beige gray, slate gray, dark lilac, payne's gray with a touch of forest green for the silhouettes.

Creator's comment: The air was clean and clear and fresh on a lovely springtime evening in my neighborhood. I looked up into the recently rainy sky and loved how the light played through these bunches of clouds. It was an active, friendly sky, containing calm movement and a peaceful mood bestowed by still-bright but gently diffused sunlight. The nearby tree, as trees will do, joined the airy layer of the sky above with the solid layer of the earth beneath. I wanted to portray my sense of the light, the space, and the breathing of the world in that moment.