What's Resonating This Week #14
Sisyphean inertia, Potato time, Dream work, and Cards
Howdy, folks. Selecting a topic to focus on is atypically challenging this morning. Ironically, I said the same thing to my Book of Mirrors this morning.
Essentially, at this moment, my available energy, spoons, fucks to give, etc. are insufficient to fuel my creative desires.
One of the causes is very much also a blessing: my “muggle job” has completely transformed.
For the first time in very long time, I feel like I have the support of my leadership and my peers to do really big things. Additionally, I’m not having to spend much energy convincing people that the things I want us to do are valuable or important. Everyone already agrees.
My biggest challenge right now is pushing this massive boulder of organizational inertia up the hill of progress. If I zoom out, I can see myself gaining altitude. One inch at a time.
And every single inch carries the weight of a Sisyphean endeavour.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not only what I wanted and needed, but ultimately its a situation of my own orchestration. If you’d asked me at the beginning of the summer if this is where I’d be right now, I’d probably have laughed in your face. Such is chaos of the moment. For me, 2025 has been a year of embracing chaos and learning to work with it to influence reality in accordance with my will.
If you think that sounds like chaos magick, you would be correct. But it’s more than that. It’s also a matter of working with the emotional triggers that are tickled by that chaos, discovering the core fears my Ego has associated with that chaos, and setting aside the inherited fight or flight responses that my “lizard brain” invokes in response to those triggers.
What I didn’t realize was how much energy this inner and outer work combined would burn.
So when I finally reach those periods of free time where I can create the things that I deeply want to bring into the world, well, I’m fucking exhausted.
All I’ve got in me is potato time…
What I’m learning, however, is that potato time is not only “OK,” it’s essential, cyclical, and inherently, it not visibly, creative.
It’s essential because the human brain, especially the neurodivergent variety, is tuned to a resonance between “productive AF” and potato.
It’s cyclical because all resonance is cyclical. It’s a wave form that oscillates between two extremes of polarity.
It’s creative because of the ridiculous amount of unconscious creation that’s happening while we rest. Our unconscious mind is constantly churning through and working things out. Much of this activity happens while we’re sleeping.
And it’s our dreams that bring it to our consciousness.
I know what you’re going to say: “I don’t dream.”
Yes, you do. You just don’t remember them.
What’s the difference, you say?
The difference is that your unconscious mind is doing that work vs. doing nothing. You’re just not paying attention, so your dreams are sinking back into your unconscious mind before you can record the symbols in order to work with them.
OK, you say, I’ll bite. How do I start remembering my dreams?
Start paying attention.
The standard advice is to place a journal and pen by your bed, and first thing, as soon as you wake up, jot down anything (regardless of how small) you remember from your dreams. If you don’t remember anything, write down “I remember nothing.”
This worked for me, but only after I switched to using a dream recording app called Temenos on my phone. I don’t think there’s anything magical about the app itself (it does have some cool feature that I don’t really use much), but I realized I was much more wired to grab my phone first thing, so I decided to piggyback on that habit. When I was using the paper journal, I’d often forget that it was there.
You need something that’s fairly automatic, because you need it to happen while you’re still in that liminal space of just waking from sleep. If you don’t act immediately, you’ll fully “wake up” and that dream will disappear before you know it’s gone.
At any rate, you know what I’ve noticed during my recent proliferation of potato time? A lot of really important dreams that are helping to sort through some long-term internal struggles, the resolution of each of which is preparing me for that next burst of external creative activity.
Stay tuned… the results are on their way. It just isn’t going to be quick!
What’s Resonating with the Collective?
A new feature I’m planning to include in my weekly-ish letters is a collective tarot reading that interrogates the energies flowing within and around all of the members of the Falken’s Labyrinth community.
For this week’s reading, we have a three-card spread, pulled from the classic Rider Waite Smith deck:
Four of Pentacles
The Empress
Knight of Cups
I find this pull fascinating because within it I immediately see the same energies that I’ve been writing about this morning.
The Four of Pentacles carries with it both energies of stability and stagnation. It’s often referred to as “the miser card,” representing one who is overly focused on accumulation and protection of material wealth, often money itself. Examining the man depicted on the card, you can see that he is crouched in a defensive posture, braced for impact, guarding his head and his heart with his coins.
While many readers automatically see the Four of Pentacles in a negative light, that’s not my approach. Having recently, as you know, experienced extreme financial instability, I have done a lot of work to call in the energy of this card.
Lack of stability is exhausting.
It’s hard to let yourself rest when you’re standing on the edge of the cliff, worried about falling to your doom.
When we look next door to the Empress, we see another seated figure. But it’s a different kind of sitting. The “bad bitch goddess of creation” is reclined and relaxed. She’s in a posture of recreation (RE-creation).
She’s in the posture that I’d much rather find myself in. And I bet you would also.
Moving further to the right, and the Knight of Cups, the message of the first two cards becomes even clearer. The Knight is carrying the emotional energy in his cup from left to right. If he keeps going off the edge of the card, he’ll keep flowing in that direction.
The emotional energy of Earth/Pentacles stability is being carried forward to the Empress, where she can rest in that stability and perform her magic. But wait, there’s more!
Look at the numbers on the first two cards: 4 + 3 = 7.
Seven is a number of struggle. Conflict. Frustration. Deception.
As long as these first two cards don’t have a harmonious flow between them, that seven energy is going to keep popping off. The Knight is opening up and facilitating that flow.
What’s the message for this community?
While I know that many if not most of you would love to just bathe in that Empress energy, don’t forget the essential task of creating a stable foundation in the mundane world. Recognize that both of these energies are not only essential, but that a lack of continuous emotional flow between them is also essential. Otherwise, we’ll end up stuck. And the shadow expressions of both of these energies will start unconsciously projecting everywhere we look, amplifying the struggle of the seven.
That’s it for this week. Stay resonant folks.
love so much about this post. I've been working on remembering my dreams more and routine stablization/financial stabilization has been a big theme the last year and a half.