The Muse: May 2020

Have you been having unusually vivid dreams lately?

Apparently lots of people are. I've always had vivid dreams, but not in such a heavy volume as now. It's like live-streaming your subconscious, without the subscription fees. I'm dreaming about friends I haven't seen in years, 5-foot-tall swimming fins, and cinnamon ice cream. Is that even a thing? If not my subconscious might have just invented something new!

I just looked it up online. Yeah it's a thing. Darn.

A few weeks ago I had a dream tsunami. That's multiple waves of dreams in succesion, and you remember them all. It's way too long to write it all out here, but I'll share the last dream, the best one of course (because even the subconscious mind knows to save the best for last).

I had just released a baby turtle into the sea and was swimming right behind it to make sure it learned how to swim well and avoided predators. A few times the baby turtle (which, by the way, was the size of a small adult) swam close to a sea lion poking his head out of the water, and I worried the sea lion might try to attack it. But he was totally chill. Satisfied that the turtle would be alright, I went off exploring the ocean on my own. I don't think I had any snorkeling or diving gear on, but who needs any of that in a dream!

I dove underwater, and saw an impossibly long tree trunk that had been submerged just a few feet below the water’s surface. A parade of marine creatures was headed toward me, swimming along the tree trunk. Among them were three large and colorful sharks, swimming after what looked like bait. My instinct was mixed. I knew I should have have been scared but I’d seen enough Instagram posts of divers rubbing the bellies of sharks that I had no fear, and knew I’d be fine if I just kept a low profile. As in, about a hundred feet lower than the sharks. Plus, this was a dream; I could always just wake up if things got dicey.

Close on the heels of the sharks was a cluster of fishing lines, hanging deep into the water… but with no boats and no gear. Just the lines, somehow suspended in the water. They were intertwined with various kinds of geometrical shapes… triangles, circles, squares, made of some kind of metal of various shades of blue and silver. More marine creatures followed… I swam past all that, and then saw something really small above, close to the water's surface.

Flying fish! I had seen a few in real life in Hawai’i but never while I was actually in the water with them. I thought, what an amazing opportunity to see them up close! So I swam up quickly to get closer to them. There were two, and they had names (which now escape me). They horsed around with each other (can a fish horse around?), paying no attention to me. Their wings looked like modern art… white, decorated with thick black angular lines and squares. I wanted to play too, so I pulled on one of fish's fins. And just like two children welcoming a third into their playtime, they began to swim around me...

and then I woke up.

          ~ Birgitte

Art in the Time of Quarantine. That should be a novel...

Ok Aria, take it away:

Hoi! I hope you all are safe and feeling good. This is the newsletter for May! Hope you enjoy =^•^=

So there’s this cool thing that happened to me. I take walks every other day or exercise and usually I scooter with my mom to a nearby parking lot. One day we were exploring different parts of nearby neighborhoods when we stumbled across this chalk-written message:

"Tough times never last, but tough people do."

I thought that was really cool.

So a few days later we grabbed some chalk and scootered over to the parking lot we go to and I started drawing some chalk dragons and other things like the serpent here in the little sidebar. It grabbed a lot of people’s attention. So I made this scavenger hunt where you have to find 5 dragons all scattered around the parking lot. People loved that. They would stop as they passed by walking their dogs or running or biking with their kids, and walk around the dragons and try to find them all.

A few days later we went again and we saw that someone had made their own scavenger hunt but instead of dragons they wrote a secret message. The message was “I Love You” which was very sweet. How they did it was to scatter the letters with numbers on them so you could read them in order.

Anyway, so more and more people kept noticing the chalk art... and then one day I wrote this chalk message saying: "Hello! You can bring chalk here if you want to write or draw something! (Heart) "

And someone actually did. The person drew a bunch of stuff and even re-created some of my drawings in their own way! They also wrote a message back: "Thank you so much! I'm not as good as you but I also like to write and draw with chalk."

I thought it was really nice so I decided to respond. From there we drew and responded to each other until one day I decided; “Hey, what if we meet up at a certain time?” so I wrote a time and day—this past Saturday at 4pm.

My mom and I went, not sure if anyone would actually show up. When we got to the parking lot it was empty, except for 3 people at the other end, where all my chalk drawings are. Somehow both my mom and I knew it was them! So yeah we met up. Turns out she's a girl my age…! She's really nice and we drew together (6 feet apart of course)

So yeah! That was fun! I made a new friend this way.

And here's some of the chalk art!

~ Aria