Tag Archives: dreams

Peace of January Dreaming

Reply

Astonishingly, it’s the end of January. If I hadn’t been counting the days off one by one, writing a new musing every day, I wouldn’t have believed it. Zoom, one month gone. It’s blowing away, here in this neck of the woods. After a day of wildly unseasonable warmth, the temps are dropping and the branches are whipping around. I saw a poor misguided earthworm last night who was pretty sorry about the torrential downpour and going to be even more upset about the temperature drop. The Worm Moon isn’t due until the end of month… that’s when the soil’s supposed to warm enough for them to come out again.

I’ve had the quote from Helen Keller open on my computer for quite a while waiting for a chance to use it. It seemed right. We are meant to dream out loud and in color. We are meant to take those dreams and make them real.

It’s not just that the world needs our dreams of Peace, because they do. It’s because we need to dream and to make our dreams come true. It fulfills us. It allows us to live our lives to the very edges. We are invited to become explorers in our own lives. Another great quote, this one from Earl Nightingale, a motivational speaker and spoken word artist, showed up (don’tcha just love the Universe?), “Don’t give up on a dream, just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” And won’t it just? Why not be the best you? The best you is the one that’s having fun!

Peace on a Star

Reply

Winter skies are glorious… it always seems, on those days that it’s clear and that I can convince myself to go out and take a gander, to be distant and huge and filled with many more stars. Being in the desert this winter, where the sky really does go on forever, only reinforced that notion.

So if we’re going to hitch our dreams to a star, it’s a great idea to do it in the middle of winter. They’ll soar far higher and carry farther with those stars.

For the first time in many years, I’ve actually made a vision board. I work best in words rather than images, so mine’s pretty verbal. And since no one’s here to tell me that I’m doing it wrong because “working with words isn’t creative” as one workshop leader tried to convince me. And I’m working hard to narrow the focus and the scope of my vision down. Often my dreams get too big and I wind up missing the mark because there were too many components for one person to shepherd in a year. And as most for most of us, my dream needs to fit into the rest of my life.

Dreamers we may be, but we still want some balance in our lives. It’s not a stable Peace that consumes its dreamers. We need laughter and love, feasts and deep thinking — All those will make Peace richer.

I just looked at the weather, and around here at least, there are a lot of cloudy days before we get a good glimpse of the sky. But how about this: encourage everyone you know to walk outside on a cold and starry night and pick out a star on which to hang a dream of Peace. And then imagine an entire sky, filled with dreams of Peace. Makes it a bit easier to move forward with your dream, doesn’t it?

January’s Peaceful Values

1

It’s interesting to me that if we really want to find the push to do the work that’s important to us, we need most to keep looking within. The question that is our biggest motivator is or should be, “What do I believe?” It’s easy, easy, easy to say, I believe in Love, I believe in Peace. But what we believe in is what we act on. So if we’re not acting from love, a couple things could be happening.

We could be frightened, frightened to take out our precious, precious values and expose them to a scornful world. But then we waste them. Our values are there to act on. And if people dismiss us because our beliefs are too corny or naive, ok. We then need new associates. We have a much better chance of making Peace work if we ally ourselves with like-minded, like-hearted, and like-souled people.

Some of us may like the notion of ourselves as a sort of Joan of Arc, ready to take out our beliefs only when the perfect cause comes along. But every cause is perfect and every cause is flawed. Act now, get in practice. Then should the big cause come along, you’ll be well practiced in the art of dreaming your ideals into being.

And some of us haven’t done the work to develop our ideals to the point that they direct our lives. We may say we believe in X, that grand and glorious X, but in fact it never touches our lives because we’re afraid to really believe that x will make a difference. We like the way it sounds. We hang with people who also say that. For whatever reason, we haven’t taken our spoken values into our hearts.

That means that something else is operating. So, better, far better to dig down and see what’s really going on. I’ve been reading a lot of empty my mind books lately. It’s been wonderful to uncouple from life a bit. But in my little sci-fi fantasy world, magic is afoot. And in this series the author talks about magic being imposed from the outside… If I think about it, the commercial brainwashing we undergo (every time we open a magazine, sit on a bus, watch a tv, open our computer) does a very good job of diverting us from what is deep and meaningful.

Our hearts are true… we just need to get there! So… what drives you?

The January Peace of Possibility

Reply

The ceremonialist in me (HA! Word Press doesn’t even think that’s a word!) thrilled to yesterday’s pageantry in the capital. Yes I understand the dangers of mob mentality. Yes, I understand that not everyone likes this President. Yes, I understand that there were things that weren’t perfect. And still it was wonderful.

I loved having icons from my youth singing. And damn, James Taylor still has a voice. Everyone sang. I loved Richard Blanco’s poem, its presentation, and that he was who he was. I loved that Obama was hopeful and reminded us where we go demands that we remember where we came from. I will always treasure the line Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall, because these are important icons to me. And when all the leaders stopped after lunch and paid homage to MLK, Jr., and you could feel Obama pray, I was so moved. to re-member, to put the body back together.

But what I really loved was seeing people’s expressions of happiness and camraderie. I loved the palpable feeling that good things are possible. I hope that wherever we come from, whatever we believe, we can touch that possibility and then reach for our own. What we do matters. I believe that so much.

Peace of Spectacular Failure

1

Failure is how we learn things. It’s how we grow. If we’re not willing to experiment, we never stretch our minds and our resources. Failure keeps us humble and it keeps us laughing. And goodness knows we need to be laughing. Whatever else I know about Peace, it’s not all earnestness. There’s a great deal of shared laughter.

We need to stretch our abilities. We need to dream big. This means we might fail in a rather spectacular way. Ok. So, laugh, reconsider, try again. Practice failing at things that don’t matter so that you’re used to missing the mark. But don’t practice by pulling the target so close that you can’t help but hit it. Push it back. Imagine differently, more generously.

If you take your work and your life seriously, you’re going to keep experimenting. It may seem counter-intuitive that taking your life seriously also means being willing to laugh uproariously at your failures… and then to learn from them.

So, my dears, Dream. Try. Win a little(or a lot). Fail a little(or a lot). Laugh. Reconsider. Try again. That way lies Peace. (and a lot of laughter, shared and otherwise!)

Stillness and Peace

Reply

We live in a frenzied world. Some of that chaos is imposed by our fast-track society. Some of it we buy into or even foster in ourselves. We’re over-tired and under-nourished — at least spiritually.

You’ll have noticed from the title in my poems that I believe Peace is not just important, but imperative. I believe it’s what we were born to do and create. You don’t get to Peace, however, without some reflection about who you are and what you want. You need time to notice what’s wrong, so you can pull a string and start winding that particular tangle into order.

I’m working, and eager to help you work, on my own Peace of Mind, Heart and Soul. But I don’t believe you need that Peace in place before you start working on Peace of World. Perhaps we’re to put ourselves onto the Infinity Path and walk the loop between the two, as they lead out of and into one another.

But mostly? It’s time to stop and proceed slowly. Time will hurry up as the year moves on, but at the moment, reflect, consider, weigh… Get to know yourself and your desires. Consider carefully the dream you wish to build and realize this year. Take this time, my friends… The world isn’t going to leave you alone forever. And the stillness? it’s your time to fill up.

Peace of a January River

Reply

While driving down the river yesterday morning, the river was enshrouded in fog. When you have days like we’ve had recently, where the afternoon mercury climbs and nights are frigid, the river puts off a lot of fog. It was a beautiful ride.

It was only as I writing later, that I realized what a great metaphor for January dreaming this particular river view was. Isolated small islands would appear out of the fog and then fade from view. There was never a complete vista, simply small glimpses. As we’re building our dreams, it’s important to begin to identify the important building blocks. Too many of us start to build before we have all the pieces laid out. This foggy river was a reminder that there may be something important hiding in the mist… We might as well let things emerge as they will for a while, so that we can create a good plan rather than having to try to incorporate crucial elements at a later date…

The Slow Start of Peace

1

When the sun peeks in my window, I wake up, and move fairly quickly from 0-60 mph. Those who receive my daily musings can attest to receiving them in the early morning for most of the year. But not right now. An early night doesn’t necessarily correspond to an early morning. The quick move from asleep to awake means that my dreams are left behind as I engage with the day. During this time, Nature has laid hold of my schedule and claimed it. As I sleep later and awaken more slowly, dream fragments stay with me and the day starts more softly. The warming cup of tea adds reflection to its normal heating and jolting work.

My friend Lenore read something and passed it along about an Arctic animal — maybe a squirrel? — that hibernates. (He apparently hibernates for 7-8 months a year. What a life!) Every two to three weeks, he uses a huge percentage of the energy stored up for the winter to rouse into a dream state. Then, dreaming completed, he drops back down into his stasis and waits for the cycle to continue until the thaw happens.

Since squirrels are probably not dreaming about Peace, what is so important about dreaming? What do they, what do we gain from lingering and snuggling? I don’t have a psycho-spiritual- physiological answer for that! I can only suggest that we try lingering and see if it makes a difference in our lives. And then, during the rest of the year, if we can find a way to allow that difference to grow and guide our lives. Fulfilling our dreams moves the world forward… but we can’t fulfill them if we don’t stop and dream them first. “Slow down, you move too fast.” Have a groovy day!

The Peace of Winter Trees

Reply

I was delighted when I studied Chinese Five Element Theory and discovered that it includes a Fifth Element, Wood, one of whose functions is flexibility. In our busy urban lives it is an element to which we pay too little attention. Tree hugging — actual rather than philosophicall! — is really quite balancing for our health. It improves our spiritual and mental flexibility. Most of us can use that! (as for whether tree-hugging, philosophical, is virtuous, I invite you to discuss amongst yourselves… but I would, no great surprise to any of you, come down on the side of the trees.)

One of the joys of learning the five element theory was the need to suspend disbelief and learn something completely new. I compare it to learning the alphabet. If you spend your life trying to figure out why the would designate this symbol A as the letter A, you’ll miss the astonishing things that can happen when you break the code of reading. Here’s to learning new things and believing six impossible things before breakfast!

And of course here’s to trees and all the wonderful things they teach us, of which flexibility is only one!

Widening and Narrowing Circles

This summer I was off to Peace Camp: ThinkPeace Workshops for Girls. It was astonishing. and I still haven’t distilled everything into a drink I can share. So many wonderful ideas. So many wonderful Girls! And Women! And such wonderful Work. yah. more later! Heaven on a stick for a Peace Sister. (Yes, there’s pondering about Peace Camp for Women!)

But what’s caught at my heart today is the notion of how your circles both enlarge and focus when you begin to look in a different direction. It’s been about a year that Sacred Village has been a public entity rather than a closely shared dream. Goodness knows, thanks to my beloved Web Guy, I’ve owned Sacred Village for years. (Dreams deferred can be just that! And sometimes dreams take a while to take substance. Don’t give up!)

As part of my attempt to put myself out there, I did what you’re supposed to do. I got a twitter account. I started friending people. I started posting. An early lucky follow was Kelly at ThinkPeace. Almost immediately “We Belonged to a Mut-u-allll Admiration Society.” Love, love, love, that woman her partner Liz and their work! I watched in amazement the work The girls and they were doing. I wrote a poem to support their work in Million Bones Project. Eventually, I held my breath and sent my plea… “Can I come to camp?” Yes! Delight ensued.

So off I went. Wow! And there as the teacher of the week was (drum roll, please) the fabulous and lovely Jeanne Demers author of The Ruby Books.

She works with Girls to help them find their Voices. We all started stories. (Yo, TP Girls anyone finish yours?) She’s a beautiful wonderful soul! (funny too!). At the end of the week, the girls started working at their World Girls, doing their research and building connections to girls a world away.

Now Jeanne has moved to Austin (cause that’s how hip she is!) and she’s gotten a job with the Girls Empowerment Network in Austin (GENaustin). She’s going to be wandering into school after school starting clubGEN. Girls will be speaking out all over Austin. The Girls of Austin couldn’t have a better gift. Girls! Leadership! Peace! Empowering and putting to words the connections between those things. What a wonderful, wonderful thing!

I can’t wait until the next time our paths cross. Because now that they have, you know they will again. Sing Hey! for a wonderful new friend and a woman doing her Work! My dear friends, meet a dear friend: Jeanne Demers (Cool Aunt, Great Woman).