facing forwards

in which we catch up on last week's "Chrysalis", look ahead to Valentines Day at Rockwood Stage 2, and I tell you my dreams

Hey Hartlist,

Let’s try this

TL;DR -style newsletter summary:
1. Get tickets here for theValentines Day show @Rockwood Stage 2 Feb 14 7PM
2. The next Chrysalis livestream will be Feb 13, 4PM the day before
3. Catch up on last Sunday’s Chrysalis livestream below
4. I had a weird and possibly insightful dream.

Had a great time last Sunday dusting off the old ‘Chrysalis’ livestreamseries chops (can you ‘dust off’ ‘chops’? well anyway):

The whole “last Sunday of the month” thing that I declared didn’t quite take off, did it? Maybe I will institute “second Sunday of the month”, that has a nice ring to it. So that will put us Sunday, Feb 13 - the day before Valentines - for the next livestream: The Chrysalis 59: THE DAY BEFORE VALENTINES.

I think it works.

I’ll leave you with one strange little nugget today. Warning: if you’re the kind of person who hates hearing people talk about their dreams, I’ll see you next week. But also this is fast… because the dream was weirdly fast. There was no big story, and I wasn’t even really in it. It was more like watching a short video while a voiceover narrated a short parable to me. While I ‘watched’, the voice ‘said’ something like this:

A man is on a horse, traveling to a far-off destination. He is gazing at the land ahead, which seems hot and endless, and barren, and unchanging. He’s been traveling a long time. He hangs his head and says to himself, “what’s the point? There’s nothing out there for me. It just goes on and on and more of the same and I should forget about it and give up.”

But the man, you see, is sitting backwards on his horse.

So at this point you’re either like “… cool, Rebecca, see you on Valentine’s Day… maybe”. Or you might have heard what I did, which is something like: Make sure you’re not mistaking your past for your future. Make sure you’re not making assumptions that it’s always going to be just like it’s been. Make sure you’re not spending all your time staring backwards and basing all your decisions on that.

This makes sense to me, because of course we (think we) know the past, so we’re comfortable with it, even if it sucks. No, I can’t ever be a successful, whatever, skydiver, because, look, I haven’t been so far. And then we get to feel comfortable about kind of “knowing” the future also (‘and so I KNOW I will never skydive’.)

But even more than that, it reminded me that the past is no indicator of “the future” (if such a thing exists at all - yes, I said it, and I do read tarot cards professionally.) The only indicator of “the future” (ifsuchathingexistsatall) is… the present. What we’re doing now. Where we are now. And which way we’re facing, you know, on our horse.

All righty. See you out there.

Rebecca