I had this dream last year and the image is still vivid in my mind: A big TV antenna like the one we had on top of our house when I was little, only bigger, and it was covered in ball moss that I needed to pull off in order to get a signal. That dream was about clearing a path so a signal could get through.

Here’s Thomas Merton:

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.

This morning, not in a dream, but in a post-dream state, I was in the kitchen fiddling with the fat dial on our Tivoli radio, and I was thinking, again, about reception.

You can have a good antenna pointed in the right direction, but if the tuner isn’t twisted to the right spot, all you’re getting is static. I’m hesitant to use machine metaphors for creative work, but there’s something here.

You can clear space in your day, clear space on your desk, and clear space in your mind, but at some point you have to move your fingers.