1I don’t really have regular meditation practice, but as a poet I am very involved in getting into different states of consciousness that are conducive to an associative or expansive spatial thinking. The closest I come to it is that I love getting acupuncture, body and energy work like Reiki when my body can get very relaxed and I see pulses of purple healing light in back of my eyelids in closed eye vision. My mind free associates and visually travels. After one of these sessions I am much clearer and usually feel like writing something. Sometimes phrases arise when I am face down in an acupuncture session and I can record them afterwards. Versions of this kind of consciousness-shifting also happens when I am listening to certain music (usually ambient), memory travel during sex, or doing certain psychedelics. Dream work is important to me as well and I love to dwell in the space between waking and sleeping, and to try and set down the dream in words, not only its narrative elements but its rhythm, its shape, its force, its speed or flow. Swimming or yoga can help alter my mind-body relationship in a good way as well, as endorphins help relax my very active mind so that new thoughts can arise. Sleep is my workshop.

2Lullaby
Promise to yourself
to not always say Yes
You wake up from a dream
And borrow a little more time
To draw one more dream
From the well of your sleep
Maybe sideways write down
Upon waking again
The dream as it flows
Or out of that place
A new song
As you to sleep fall
This night on the hill
You will consciously feel
The dream’s thread again

Other Archer / Autre archère : extraits

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