“The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between sleep and waking, when you don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened.”

I have a tendency to dream with bizarre coherence.  My dreams are vivid and typically “story-like” in structure.  There seems to be a logical flow of time with a sequence of events that appears to make sense to me in the dream, but upon waking I am often curious by the nature of the content.  Where do these things come from, because I often dream things that have no relationship to anything I might have seen or experienced in my waking life – nor that I could have easily imagined.  I have wondered if perhaps our dreams allow us to tap into a subconscious universe of energy and thought.  It’s exciting to think that some of the other 90% of our brains that we aren’t using is activating in our sleep.  Whatever the case, I dreamt last night.

I was disappointed to wake up in the middle of a happy dream that seemed to me just to be an exercise in self-fulfillment.  I always wish I had the power to go back to sleep and just pick the dream up from where I left off when they are so genuinely satisfying.  Unfortunately, when I willed myself back to sleep it was to dream of something altogether different. 

I sometimes do not remember large parts of my dreams beyond having a vague idea of the circumstances and activities playing out, but there will be points of extremely vivid memory for me.  In the one last night I disturbed a small net unwittingly that had been thrown over a large group of bees.  The upsetting of the net set the bees free, and they swarmed over my feet.  I could feel the heat from their soft, compact bodies which were unusually large, very large.  At first, my heart pounded in the instinctual anxiety that comes when a bee flies near or lands on you, but as I calmed I recognized them as the benevolent sort of honeybees that would not hurt me if I was very careful.  I could not disturb them so I sat still with my legs stretched out watching them crawl all over themselves, completely obscuring my skin from view, and waited for them to drop off on their own.  All the while, though there was the surprising heat, the prickle of their hard, tiny feet on my skin, they did not hurt me.  Every so often one would drop off and I’d shake my foot a bit to try to dislodge others.  Eventually after long, tense moments the bees were all gone.  I was relieved and a little surprised because I realized afterward that they had been eating away the dead skin and calluses from my feet leaving them very smooth and fresh feeling.

“My sorrow, when she’s here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.” – Robert Frost

It’s been threatening rainstorms all weekend, and this morning they’ve finally broken with a vengeance.  I can’t stand rain in winter. I’m of the opinion that if it’s going to be miserably cold and wet, it might as well be with snow.  But the rainstorms in summer, I love; the thunder and lightning, the smell of the wet earth when it’s scorching hot. I love the steam that rolls mesmerizingly off the pavement, and god…the green is so brilliant it pierces the heart with a private happiness.  And yet, summer rainstorms bring a sweet sadness, a quiet loneliness that makes the world feel so still, poised and ready for me to pour the raw medium of my emotions onto paper. I come home to my art in the rain.

Days like this make me want to shut myself in my room with some quiet music, a cup of coffee, and my paint brushes.  I’ve been feeling like drawing/painting again recently with a fervid passion.  Usually I am just so lazy that I don’t do anything about it, but I am beginning to reconnect with my emotional relationship to my art, which I had for a long time lost.  Such that when I approached art at all over the past few years, it has been with hesitancy and a sort of quiet trepidation. Like that when you are going to see someone who was very dear to you that you have not seen in a long time and you cannot help but worry that they are so different you will no longer feel yourselves “close”.  Inevitably, it ends up never being a terrible concern, but the lead up is so dreadfully sad that some days I just opt not to do it. 
 
Art for me, like writing, has always been a deeply raw experience. It taps into an unguarded chaos of feeling – strength, agony, love, loneliness. It requires me to bear everything I am and feel to myself before I can really offer what I’m doing its own special fingerprint.  It has been my inability to bear my soul to my projects that with the exception of a single piece, my art has often been flat over the past five years.
 
I’m convinced that the curse of all artists (whether they be musicians, painters, or writers) is to be esoterically sentimental…often in excess.

The word “neon” finds its origins in Greek of which “neon” is the neutral form of “neos” meaning “New One”.  Although a very common element in the universe, neon is actually quite rare on Earth.

I was catching up with a friend of mine earlier today who I hadn’t spoken to in quite some time and naturally we got on the topic of what the two of us were planning  to do with ourselves in the near future.  He is 21 and a high school drop-out who has long since been frustrated by being “trapped” in his small town, a situation exacerbated by his limited ability to make a living so that he can get out.  He has been dating a girl across the country from him for some time now, flying periodically out to see her, and naturally I popped the question, “Why don’t you move out west?”  To which he replied, “Heh, I might be stealing your lessons.  I’m taking my time with that.”

He was referring to my last two (failed) attempts to move from the small town I grew up in 3,000 miles cross country to Seattle over the course of 2009, and the lessons learned from them.  It just happened to be that his statement finally sparked my “inspiration” for this blog, an inspiration for which I had been searching for nearly two years now.  It isn’t that I couldn’t think of anything to write about.  I, you will likely see, never lack for words.  Rather, I wanted to write about a topic on which I had a unique but powerful perspective and about something that people would want to read. For some reason, I really don’t feel like my life is exciting enough from a day to day perspective to imagine that anyone would want to waste their time with it (:P), but his statement made me realize that my experiences totaled over 24 years definitely have a distinct value.  If they can touch people, help them even, I think it would be a travesty for me to keep quiet about them. 

I am 24 years old.  I was born in Chicago but grew up in a small, southern town.  I graduated summa cum laude from my university with a Bachelor of Science in Marketing and Japanese Language (Yup! I can speak Japanese…some anyway.).  I have lived abroad in Nagoya, Japan, attempted massage therapy school and two moves to Seattle, spent a month in Vancouver, BC, and received a government scholarship to do Master’s Degree studies at the second best university in Japan (Waseda University) that I had to turn down less than 5 days before my plane was supposed to leave.  I was also the object of incessant bullying through middle and high school, became in my search for acceptance the victim of a pedophile as a teenager, and I have learned one of the most difficult and powerful kinds of love – unrequited.

Through all of that, and a great deal more, I have discovered that I am a beautiful, strong, and intelligent woman.  And I can tell you honestly, that learning to like myself is truly the most difficult struggle I have ever face.