One morning this week I woke up and asked the picture, “How do I know what you’re trying to tell me?” And it came back with ghost images and swans flying and geese on the ground.

I actually met the geese which gave a good look at them unlike the swans who I had to meet on the internet. I know something about black swans now mostly, “Here we are, misunderstood and flying over a great divide.”

The animals too. I had to find them through an erasure, their shapes rising to the surface and it felt like a mirror. “Hello lion, tiger, fox. What are those heads there telling you?”

They still have not replied, they are still disappeared. In return I have given them no eyes, which allowed them to see everything. I consider that they are feeling their way with every other sense through this new world they’ve been tasked with.

Something about your own refection in the window, or looking in the mirror.

Sometimes I see that my dog has found his own reflection but I’m sure he doesn’t know that it’s him in there. Still, he seems comforted by the presence of himself, knowing intuitively it’s just another good dog in the room. He has met dogs before he’s not so crazy about and is the first to point it out when necessary. He’s honest in this way. He wears his self-protection on his dog sleeve like any smart street dog with a sleeve.

Or maybe it is just a continual surprise for him to see his reflection, as though he’d been looking for himself for a lifetime.

I found a solution for what was in the middle of the forest. It wasn’t a lion wrestling a man, like I thought might happen. It came down to a game I play in the endless beginning moments in my studio when I’m too distracted by the world to connect to the work: I write out lists of ideas and objects and phrases that I find in my writing and in my art work and in the world, cut out the words, jumble and place them in a jar and choose three from the jar in which a growing collection of these words live.

So into Commedia dell’Arte throughout my Pinocchio obsession was I, that the puppet theater keeps appearing and reappearing. It got chosen this week from the jar. As did the forest. As did the middle. It has appeared again here, maybe this time as Smeraldina and Tartaglia. It is unintentionally them.

Here, sometimes, the unintentional leads me to understand what to do next, like the dog finding himself in the mirror.

More Flowers

All these flower-like flowers this week, from the workshop I’ve been taking with Studio Schmal. Since I traffic in flower-like not flowers, I enjoyed the play and splashing with water but then I saw the news and watched another young student, Rumeysa Ozturk, targeted only for her voice, I think about her each night, in a terrifying place, and began to hold her in this flower, this flower, wondering how can we not agree this is terrible? And how can we create together to end this blatant abuse of power, to protect our highest values and our most vulnerable as though it is our family and our friends and our world, because it is.