What's Your Saturation Job?

two prompts for digging deep & another Cerridwen-esque dream

If you haven’t experienced a Hayao Miyazaki movie, I recommend it! It's not just that the animation is gorgeous, but the characters are vibrant, relatable, and so very vulnerable. Last night’s dream felt like being thrown into one of his movies. I was chased by shape-shifting Miyazaki-like critters the size of my hand, hundreds of them, constantly changing forms. I wish I could remember what they looked like, but all that remains is a color-saturated blur, a fast-moving cycle of human-turned-animal-turned-machine-turned-creatures-I-can’t-even-name. Abruptly, the chase reversed itself, and I became the pursuer, the critters scattering into the sky and woods until I was left standing alone at the edge of the woods trying to decide if it was worth it to continue my pursuit.

My psyche is clearly still working through the story I shared last week about another dream I had many years ago—I call it my Cerridwen dream: a wild, Scooby-Doo influenced version of the Welsh story about the goddess Cerridwen and the boy Gwion and their own shape-shifting chase that ends with Gwion incubating in Cerridwen's belly, preparing to transform into the bard, Taliesin.

If you’ve never seen Miyazaki’s movies, these adorable pop-up cards are from My Neighbor Totoro. The movie focused on two young sisters who are trying to make sense of their mother’s illness and get help from a giant nature spirit (or Kami) named Totoro.

I’m still too close to last night’s dream to think about what it might be signaling, but when Jenn read a draft of last week’s post about Cerridwen and incubation, she wondered if I had more to say about Cerridwen's transformation and her role as a messenger in my dream. According to last night’s dream, I sure do.

Here are a few early thoughts, doughy ideas that need to rise somewhere warm in order to grow:

• Eventually, like Cerridwen, we must accept whatever transformation is coming our way.

• Bearing witness to transformation, and holding space for incubation–our own and others–can be a type of initiation, where we learn to unravel, to re-form, and to get curious about what wounds need attention in order for whatever is coming next to be born.

• And then there is that piece about softening our hearts to the things that have betrayed or hurt us. Ouch.

Acceptance, forgiveness, healing. No big deal!

This deep work feels like the kind of creative investigation the poet, Anne Waldman, calls a total saturation job. Get lost in something. Learn about it and keep learning about it–explore it from every angle you can think up. Take years, or decades. Dig in.

So, I’ve decided to play with a new creative constraint to help me with this saturation job that started with a dream about Cerridwen four years ago. I’ll explain it through this week’s prompts, and maybe it will offer you an entry point for own saturation job, character development, thorny thoughts–whatever it is that is asking you to dig in.