When Sleeping Dogs Wake

To everyone who brought an original home from the archive — thank you. These works carried more than I could say at the time of releasing them. That you felt it, and chose it, means everything.

The catalogue has been updated. You'll find the full catalogue here if you feel like bringing a piece home.

Last month I bled twice.

Heavy, both times. It had never happened before, on the solar eclipse, and two weeks before it. What followed was a series of ancestral dreams. Instructions, arriving as clear as the clearest river.

Dreams have always been my guides, in my art, in my life, in every threshold I’ve crossed. You know this if you’ve read my letters, if you’ve witnessed the journey through the work. But this was different. The steps were laid out one after another. My aunts, my grandmothers, my mother were all present. Some dreams disturbed me to my core. Others brought healing so profound I woke changed.

The dreams showed me the women who came before me. Generation after generation, clenched like a fist around whatever could be saved. Surviving wars and men and the slow erosion of being needed by everyone except themselves. They raised children they birthed and children they gathered. They gave what they had and then gave what they didn’t, and their own dreams were the first things sacrificed and the last things mourned.

But I knew them differently. I noticed how they closed their eyes and exhaled when the birds sang. I noticed when they joked and laughed while holding something heavy. I watched them whisper to the sea and kiss the seashells. I noticed the lit candles and their friendship with the flame. I watched how everyone in our small town greeted and honored them, brought gifts to the altar of their bodies. I felt their fierce infinitude, amongst so many things.

They were vast women who learned to live in very small spaces.

All of them are gone now, except my mother.

In the dream I was in a dark hallway with all of them sleeping. I was being loud and my mother shushed me. Don’t wake them up, she said.

When I woke, I understood exactly what was being asked of me.

I will not let sleeping dogs lie. I will name what none of them could. I will break this cycle to break them, and all of us, free.

What moves through our blood understands time better than any clock.

Love,

Vanja

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