It's a bit dusty around here.

Time for some spring cleaning and updates. 🌷

Hello, lovely one.

I’ve been away for a while. Hibernating, hermit-ating.

(For those who want the inside scoop, scroll to the bottom.)

I hope you are doing well. I’ve missed you.

And isn’t that odd? Not bad odd, but special and lovely odd.

It’s possible to miss people you’ve never actually met (save for one beautiful woman living on Vancouver Island.)

As one who was born in ‘75, the first half of my life was spent existing in only one world and communing with real people I could see and touch and smell. This second half has expanded my, our, experience of relationships beyond the mere physical.

Living with one foot on grass and one foot in the Metaverse can be whatever you want it to be. A gift, a curse, a boon, a distraction, a life raft, a community, a hall of mirrors.

The planets I travel to inside the Metaverse are few relative to the vast amount of places available to us for exploration. I pretty much only frequent Planet YouTube and Planet Substack. Once in a while, I’ll pop on over to Planet Prime to see if there’s a throwback to the 80’s or 90’s (heck, even newly vintage 2000’s ) movie I feel like watching.

Most of the time, my feet are on Planet Earth, walking their way through the materium, molding it into shapes I like while ingesting oxygen and smelling the real roses.

My point is, though I haven’t been travelling much to Substack lately, I can honestly say that I genuinely love many of the beautiful spirits I’ve met in Computer Land.

You know who you are.

There was life before I knew you existed and there is life now.

This life is better.

If you are new here at Dancing in a Dream, I welcome you to my world.

Here, there are only two rules to follow:

1. Do no harm

2. ……….ok, maybe there’s only one.

The fact is, in a world of control freaks, I am most certainly not one.

I’m a rebel with applause.

I just want to be free to do what I want when I wanna do it, free to create my life as art.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’m here again to say that art is the antidote. I guess when you really think about it it’s not all that ‘risky’.

Isn’t it always the best part of the very best song on the album that gets worn down into a groove and stuck on repeat due to it’s being played so often? The favourite part is the favourite part for a reason, most likely because of its resonance with something much deeper than sound. Deeper than the senses.

So, I’ll say it again.

Art is the antidote.

Creating is the cure. Music is magic. Beauty is a bridge.

To what?

To everything and anything.

To nurture

to nature

to the force,

to water

to flow

to the source,

to the road

to the code

to the feeling of Home.

Continual bombardment with bombshell teasers that tempt us to believe we can control the uncontrollable can leave one feeling deeply……unsatisfied, ungratified.

And…

…thinking, acting, feeling, communicating, and inter-relating from within a place of deep deprivation can rarely lead to any outcome beyond automatic reacting.

Can you imagine only ever inhaling? Stuck in one gear, sucking in, sucking in, revving and revving…eyes, belly, mind ever-bulging from the intake of yet more and more air, uncomfortably exceeding capacity without any release through valves of expression?

Imagine never experiencing the letting go of a satisfying exhale.

I can’t. I don’t wanna!

What a hell it would be to live with a chronic sense that things are only ever happening TO you.

This is where dancing, dreaming, designing, building, creating comes in.

Finding the one thing that is under your domain is like finding an oasis in a desert.

It is life-sustaining.

Contrary to being detoured away from the matter at hand by the dangling, bedazzled ever-elusive carrots, art-making grants us an opportunity to reel our attention back to the moment; to where the spark of possibility and the space in which to invoke it, evoke it, shape it, shift it, breathe it to life is waiting, ever so patiently, for the return of our brilliant generative attention.

That being said, here are….

my offerings

VLOG #4 | A Chronicle of a Heart-based Artist

A video series that follows the life of a musical artist (me) who lives in devotion to the pursuit of beauty, human connection, self-expression, and creativity.

Driving Blind

An old song/new video type thing.

Hope by Camelphat

A beautiful uplifting heart-bursting song I just discovered thanks to Logan at Decode Your Reality.

Me learning how to sing and play it…..still learning….

Indeed, Dave, indeed….music is always there when we need it. I’m ever SO grateful for that. 🤍

Know what/who else is always there when we need them?

Squirrels.

Especially when you feed them.

more musical art

visual art

Flora Yukhnovich

Amarins Lyklema

---

Thank you for dancing your way through my world and for orbiting my Substack planet.

I so hope you enjoyed your stay.

If you would like to come visit again, click that big button below.

If you enjoyed my musical art, you can join my YouTube channel by becoming a subscriber. It’s free for you and it’d make a HUGE difference for me. I’m growing it as a home for Human-made Heart-based Art, for those who love to dance and dream.

---

personal update

I just want to share with those who care enough to know.

My Dad has been ailing for the past many months. At first we were hoping he would get the help he needs to restore him back to his previous state. That is a dying dream. He is not improving and only deteriorating so the past few months have had me play the role of supportive daughter and offering what help I can. The geographical distance between us and certain family dynamics have made this experience extra challenging. But it’s an honour to be able to care for my dad, as I learn to dance with the inevitability of decline and death with gratitude and grace. Though my attention has temporarily shifted away from Substack and my music/art-making, I know I’ll be back to creating and sharing again, having grown deeper and wiser.

Thank you for reading this, and for still being here for me.

It means the world.

Love,

Jacqueline

✨💖✨