a joyful dream

and you're invited

Last night, I dreamed about sharks. An orderly row of great white sharks were crossing a body of water. I was in the water, and I was with Sarah.

I think we need to turn around? I said.

The sharks weren’t scary. They were formidable. Focused. Determined. Not after us. It just didn’t seem like a good idea to cross them. They were a boundary. A boundary of sharks. It was a joyful dream.

I can’t say exactly what the dream is about, but I do know that Sarah and I have been spending March in preparation for April, and now March is more than halfway over.

We’ve been preparing, and preparing is a funny verb, because it means that you’re getting ready to do something, but also preparing is doing.

Do you know what I mean?

We are preparing a book.

Preparing = writing, rewriting, drawing, redrawing, iterating, reiterating.

We’re preparing a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to prepare for the book.

Preparing = trying to learn how to edit video, how to talk about our work on video, how to get used to watching ourselves on video, how to set up a Stripe account, how to calculate for taxes and fees, how to seek a place in a complex online ecosystem.

Registration link here

We’re preparing a series of community events.

Preparing = casting the mind’s eye on the concentric circles of connection.

Asking: Who can we reach? Who can we serve? Who is this work for and how can we find them? (These questions are at once generous and selfish.)

Registration link here

Preparing =

I thought I’d just crank out a few slides on Canva to share our upcoming events. 36 hours later, I was still painstakingly typing text on my typewriter, scanning what I’d typed, cropping it, fighting with editing tools.

I was straddling the threshold—not just of analog / digital, but also of frustration / satisfaction.

This is territory I’ve been getting to know well lately. I do a thing over and over and over. I get lost in process.

I say, oh-my-god—WHY did I just spend hours typing text for Canva slides?

But I know the answers:

Preparing is doing.

The process is the product.

AI could make these slides in an eye blink and they’d be so pristine they’d make me puke.

All the weird little blips and flaws on that typewriter text? Those have started to feel like life to me.

An (emergent) Joyful Practice principle: We go slow and we take pleasure in the work.

Preparing is dreaming. Preparing is love.

Anyways, the sharks. The dream. I felt both safe and awestruck. I’m trying to carry that with me into April.

I hope you’ll join us in the water.