That girl, we'll call her "friend", she spoke truth when she talked about her dreams. How they are nebulous little things that vaporize like angels with golden wings as soon as babies come onto the scene. It's not just the screaming, squiggling bundles of joy that suffice to spook those flitty little wild things called dreams into the darkness. There are pains of life, where you find yourself stopped like dead in your tracks blinded by oncoming headlights of some unforeseen. This is when the dreams dissipate like a morning fog lifted. This is when you find yourself spread-eagle on the pavement, wondering where the car keys are. Dreams can get dashed to pieces, even if they took a lifetime to mold themselves into their perfect little shapes. "Always we begin again," says Saint Benedict. Always, with broken dreams, broken hearts, broken pride, or a broken favorite coffee mug, we just begin, again. Because a heart cannot fly if not offered a chance to dream. So here's the invitation to broken-hearted dreamers everywhere. Dreams are a partnership with Creator to say, "Let's make something where there was nothing: some idea, come to fruition; some longing, turned to art; some heart, made whole in light of Truth; some relationship, restored and brimming with Life. These are the scandalous things that bring our heartbeat back in rhythm with all of creation in our own humanique way. Our dreams, through their very nature, bring beauty, bring order, bring breath, bring knowledge, bring names to those parts of life that have been without for too long. Our souls need these things, because we were made to dream. And the world needs these things like a tourniquet on a bleeding-out arm. The dreaming is the real stuff of life, not the lists and the laundry and the hopeless attempt at getting places on time. Dreams write continuous and continuing threads on the door posts of homes and hearts and wraps a soul (and families) who otherwise hurts with reasons to live. So, do it. Dream a little. No one demands clarity, no one demands cookie-cutter responses or pretty pictures of perfect-square lives. No one has to see it but your soul. Open your heart to dream, just a little, and you find an anchor is dropped into the very Heart that drives this world beyond what we can see. Me? Now? I'm gonna dream in broken pieces of some things being unbroken, sometime. I'm gonna dream even only broken dreams because it is in the dreaming that Hope is released. Maybe one day I can see those dreams in technicolor or full-size print or maybe just etched in smile lines on my face. This is what I dream. This is why I dream. Your turn. What about you? {post sparked in 2016 by a sweet, honest, & open discussion of "breathing room" by Leanna Tankersly and breathed into by a generous gift from M, who gave me the courageous template to start}
