High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Dream’

Every minute of every day, new dreams are born.  “Reach!” they say.  “Stretch!  Become!  Do It!” And the world springs into motion.

“Can I? Will I?  Why not!”  the dreamer responds.  And she takes a first step, changing everything.

She imagines becoming a stem, and cell by cell, a stem comes into being.  She imagines leaves and buds and blossoming flowers, and before long she is a flower, laughing beside the mid-springtime stream.

Dreams are the way the Great Yes creates the world.  Hear their music; join their joyful dance.

The dream stream is rolling now.  Put your hopes in a little canoe and push off from the shore.

Hear the sweet you-cans singing from the trees that line its banks.   Breathe the fragrance of flowering expectations that line its shores.  Watch the possibility fishes leap and play beneath you as you paddle down the stream.

Relax into the flow.  The current is in your favor and will carry you where you want to go.  This is the stream that’s in love with dreams, and it’s rolling toward Come True River.

The little bud was living in darkness, curled tightly within herself, when the thought first drifted across her mind: I could make flowers and leaves.

Ordinarily she would have dismissed it as impossible.  It was ludicrous even to imagine that she could become something so grand.

But she was weary of her ordinary thoughts, and this one was so charming that she invited it to stay.  She needed company anyway.  The world had grown harsh and cold, and she was lonely.

As the idea danced for her through the long winter nights, she began to fantasize that she truly was a gorgeous display of flower, fruit and leaves.

She imagined herself swelling larger and larger, then opening beneath a springtime sun.   She could feel its warmth and she imagined bobbing at the end of her branch in a song-filled breeze, surrounded by beautiful, laughing friends.

Day after day she held the image, becoming one with it, giving thanks for the joy and fulfillment it brought her life.

When springtime’s sun finally poured its warmth on the world, the little bud opened to its light, slowly stretching her little leaves and folded flowers.

She bobbed in the song-filled breeze and laughed with her neighbors.  And it all felt so easy and natural that she never gave a thought to the tightly wound, inward-turned bud that she had been just months ago, when a sweet, green dream had drifted in her door.

Except in rare moments, we, who count our lifespans in mere decades, tend to forget that our vision is short-sighted and focused narrowly on the inconsequential, quickly fading moments of our days.

Tossed by the tides of our concepts and emotions, we get caught up by the he-said, she-said, and the us and them dramas and lose sight of that which is, beyond our stories.  No wonder we despair.

But we are luckier than we remember.  The dream that we inhabit is larger than our own, and truer.  And now and then it signals us.  It paints the world with a certain slant of light, or stretches a rainbow across our skies.  And something in our souls responds, leaping with joy.

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The dark days are upon us.  Soon the earth will freeze and the air will be filled with crystalline snow, burying the last of the fallen golden leaves, erasing all color.

The trees will stand bare in the cold, devoid of songbirds, their branches crackling in the wind.

Some would ask how we could go forth now, into the bleakness.  What kind of life will we have in such a hostile world?

We wrap their limited vision in compassion.

We, you see, believe in adventure.  We believe the darkness grants us opportunity to spin great dreams and to ready ourselves for living them when the warmth returns.

We, the children of autumn, go forth boldly, confident in who we are, and fully trusting tomorrow.

What if, with the snap of a finger, you believed your best dream could come true?

What if all your inhibitions fell away, and fear turned to laughter?

What if you actually seized the vision and the day and ran full out with them?

Oh, the hills you could climb!  Oh, the colors you could use to paint the world!

Here!  Take it!  Own it!  Be it!  It’s all for you, you know.  All for you.

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We tossed our hopes into the sky and they gathered there in whipped cream clouds.

And even though they blocked the sun, dimming the goldenrod’s glow as they sailed past, we rejoiced. Hope outshines darkness every time.

We stood there, watching them race across the limitless sky in billowing heaps, towering like mountains above the trees, catching one another, merging into one pewter dream that stretched from horizon to horizon and sang with wind.

We took it as a confirmation and walked home, Yes falling around us like rain.

It seems, somehow, as if it were all but a dream, the long sunlit days stretching languidly across the hours, the bees and butterflies darting from blossom to blossom in the fields, the fireflies of July.

Summer goes all too quickly, a fleeting rush of fragrance and color, a warm and passionate embrace, and then she’s gone.

Nevertheless, she leaves her indelible trace.  Beauty such as hers is kept in memory forever and is, perhaps, what memory is for.  It wasn’t meant, I think, to hold the pricks and stings, the injuries and sorrows, to give them more substance than they’re due.  No, memory was given us as a storehouse for the lovely and the good, that beauty might endure within us even when the days grow cold.

As she pulled her cocoon around her, the tiny caterpillar had no idea what to expect.   She only knew that she had climbed a thousand stems and feasted on countless green, juicy leaves, and that she was quite ready for a long, unbroken sleep.

Last night, as she lay curled beneath the forest of towering grasses waiting for the dawn, a magnificent winged being appeared in her dreams and, in a voice more beautiful than any she had ever heard, told her it was time to prepare for her transformation.

Her cocoon was soft and welcoming and soon she drifted off into a sea of shifting colors and sweet sounds.

When at last she woke, she discovered that she was in a wholly different body than the one she wore before.  It felt strong, and it longed for sunlight and freedom.  And it was hungry, too.   She moved her new legs and pushed her way through a crack in the wall of her cocoon.

At first, she was dazed by the light.  It was far brighter than she remembered and filled with dancing colors.  She struggled to balance herself as she lifted her last foot from the cocoon, eager to see more.  But she could barely move.  A layer of wet, golden fabric of some sort was attached to her back and weighing her down.  She would, she decided, rest for a bit and get her bearings.

The morning sun felt warm and welcoming, and she gazed in wonder at the glistening world into which she had emerged.  Slowly the moisture dried from the fixtures on her back, and she discovered to her amazement that they were, in fact, wings.   She felt her life force pumping into them, spreading them wide.  And when she followed the urge to move them, she suddenly found herself airborne and flitting above the jeweled sea below her.

She somersaulted in the morning air, darting among the goldenrod and grasses, rising higher and higher, then darting down into the billowing ocean of grains and buds below.

Finally, after she had flown for several minutes, a spot of purple caught her eye.  “Why, that must be breakfast!” she said, feeling drawn to its royal hues.   And as she alighted on its feathery petals, she saw its pools of sweet nectar gleaming in the sun.

She hardly knew which was more beautiful, the taste of the nectar or the ornate design of the flower’s buds.  She only knew that this jeweled new world was heaven and that she was exceedingly blessed.

This dream could go up in smoke at any time, and all that we deemed solid float away.

Life’s a crap shoot, you know–a game of chance, where you put down your marker and let the dice roll.

Sometimes you win.  Sometimes nobody does.  It’s the uncertainty that gives the game its juice.  It’s how we find out what we’re made of.

You weren’t expecting otherwise, were you?  Even fairy tales have their dragons after all.

In the end, it really is about how you played the game:  How you took your lumps.  What you learned. Whether you figured out how to have a good time, no matter what, and to be glad just because you were playing.

Yeah, it could all go up in smoke.  The game could fold at any time.

But still there would be love, and still there would be you and me, win or lose.