Hatsuyume of Peace: First Dream of a New Creative Paradigm

"Hatsuyume (初夢) is the Japanese word for the first dream had in the new year. Traditionally, the contents of the dream would foretell the luck of the dreamer in the ensuing year. In Japan, the night of December 31 was often passed without sleeping, thus the hatsuyume was often the dream seen the night of January 1. This explains why January 2 (the day after the night of the "first dream") is known as Hatsuyume in the traditional Japanese calendar." [Wikipedia]

As in English, the word for dream in Japanese (yume) means both deep aspiration and unconscious visualization. The significance of the post above signals the beginning of an end; the nature of originality. The nuclear age is a sure sign of the paradigm shift in human life on Earth. Until every nuclear arsenal is disarmed and abolished, we are living in an age of mass oppression, global misinformation, and unyielding aggression. 

Over 2000 nuclear weapons have been detonated since the first two that ended World War II.   

And so, on a much smaller scale, I am beginning to transition into a new phase. SoJourn(al) has seen unprecedented readership in the last month, with over 4000+ views, especially attributed to  growing international interest for the post, Dream and Love. 

I will be accepting contributions/submissions from readers, writers, artists, and dreamers of all kinds while I post once a week instead of once every two days, beginning with a professional feature ghost-writer. Meanwhile, I will be republishing more from my experimental writing collection, featuring original musical soundscapes by the Dream Author (also a regularly performing world fusion musician), together with the exhibition of new manuscript artworks to complete the seven-cycle series of manuscript art and experimental writing. 

At the same time, I will be creating another site to support a more singly-dedicated, long-term creative non-fiction writing project. My Hatsuyume, my first dream of the new year, or new cycle of seasonal life on SoJourn(al) is to continue to grow creatively, and to welcome all who are interested to collaborate, connect and unite.

In Solidarity, Peace & LOVE

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In continuity with the previous wellspring of visual stimuli, the photographic wavelength of colour turns the mind in an outpouring rush, a quaking truth of Earth on a course of unforeseen exploratory, after all, we are visual creatures 

River Styx Canadiana by RK

On the Other Side by RK

Water-and-Sky Medium by RK

A Way Through by RK

Take The One Less Traveled by RK

 _____________

This smile, these eyes…
Not because it’s you that I enjoy…
Nor your surroundings, and our place in them together…

I smile for what’s inside…
The poetries and open-ended music of Love…
...

Loosening the human rope around the oceanic neck…
The great ring of fire…
Lassoed in spring by the Albertan rains…
Toasting to hot chocolate whispers over Mexican breasts…
Sweetened by the oily touch of American tongues…
Piercing the used flesh of an imperfect dream…
...

In Rusty Kjarvik and his chess logic…
Pinching the Grandfather reality…
In the light of Persian mystical nights…
...

My instinct’s crying bold in the proud deep of North American continental strife…
To transcend the borders of national glory and reach the great peak…
Budding with growing concentration camp Israeli trees…
A miracle as grand as the celebrated synagogue of ancestral lies…
Bearing down hard on the smoky aftermath of the beaten Greeks…
Chained to their swollen shields…
Engraved as the shell of Turtle Island…
Beaming with foresight into the sweeping ancient European imagination…
...

Restitution, despised yet somehow completing our entrenched need…
To be and play forward in the shapeless deep…
The unceasing downpour…
And slow drizzling food of creativity…
To give our most valued offering…
To the smallest most insignificant pull…
Which finds our being necessary…
And in that moment die…
Unafraid to the dream inside…

excerpts from "Why, Autopoietic Eternity!"

Atheist Tomb of a Truth-Seeking American: A Plea for Disarmament

Tomb of D.M. Bennett in Brooklyn by Cory Doctorow

"I have learned to modify my prejudices. I am ready to believe Hamlet was right when he assured his friend Horatio that there was in Heaven and Earth many things not dreamed of in his philosophy." D.M. Bennett, as orated in The Truth Seeker 

It is at times like these that we Americans look to our history. Who are we? Where do we come from? How did we get here? What could have led to this? What is happening? 

Those among us strong enough to ask such questions are motivated to seek truth. As the president weeps for the children of the nation, so we must all begin to weep with minds full of emotion, burning with an intelligent self-awareness towards post-political change. We don't need rhetoric. We need new laws on guns. We need free thought to embellish the minds of such substance as founded free press in America. Disarmament is the new abolition, and as long as guns are indiscriminately accessible to immature minds and wounded hearts, we are all slaves to this mortal era.  

__________

The last thing I remembered was the initial feeling of impalement. Careening off a flight of concrete steps, I flew from my bike onto a metal pole. My back cracked in shards. When I came to, the city was dark. A Rastafarian man burned down a hand-rolled cigarette in the shadows. I knew from his countenance, to walk outside would be a bad move. I did anyways.

The Customs Cabin by Ferdinand du Puigaudeau

The street lamps glowed over empty streets. The absence was chilling, yet I could feel a human presence both alarming and alluring. As I made my way down to the riverbanks, the icy shoreline stared at me with two riveting eyes. The male stance was formidable and intimidating. Fear struck. The air breathed of danger. I needed to know why.

Night on the Southern Shore by Nikolay Dubovsky

As I hurried further on down the shoreline, a group of men whispered in the dark. I quickly smelled the entrenched anger, the mortal struggle at hand. I fled. On my way back, I met a friend from before the accident. He recounted his story, how he had broken his back in an accident that mirrored my own. I didn't question the curious coincidence as he went on to explain the unthinkable, we were now living in a world so hostile to mankind that people were literally killing each other for the last crusts of bread, the last drops of water, the last feet to walk, the last fresh air to breathe, the last day to live.

__________

"towed current
            pulled slow,
            drifted away

hand,
            fingers following new lines
...

virgin thorn brush
            frame lilting strong above the careless face
of artistic madness
in the jokester’s foam and rust
...

the pulse breaking off the tops of widow’s peak waves,
            blushing high over the coastal horizon,

a piercing thought
that boiled in the mind’s own brain,
an intuitive question
            with an answer as certain as death in the next step"

excerpts from "empty Blown mind"