"My dreams torment me, but they're not bad..."

My daughter is writing a story about a place called the Valley of Sadness. In order to write this, she sometimes sits at the computer, sometimes writes in her journal, or, like this morning, puts sentences on little scraps of paper, ideas that come to her that she must hurry to the page, any page, and write down before they disappear.

This is the luxury of creative process that I would like to see everyone have: enough solitude, enough time, and enough lack of tampering to hear those voices and run to scraps of paper to record them. It is only by living apart from other interfering voices that we can hear the ones we carry inside us.

The snatch of monologue above is a perfect example, I think, of what the voices say when you listen to them. "My dreams torment me, but they're not bad." People who work with the human energy field as healers sometimes call it 'being in allow': in this case, the idea that if you allow emotions their honest expression, they may surprise you. What seems negative may not be negative. You may be tormented, but that might not be bad.

The above picture shows how she holds her pencil between the third and fourth fingers—in standard parlance, the 'wrong way.' But it's her way, and I can relate: after trying to sit cross-legged to meditate, and finding again and again that I'd rather kneel with my cushion under my butt, I have abandoned the correct position for my own. Now I can focus on my breathing!