Dreams

Last night I had a dream that I was dating Eminem. You know. Marshall Mathers. Slim Shady. Yeah. It was pretty scary. I think the relationship that we had last night looked a lot like the one portrayed in his music video that he shot recently with Rhianna: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uelHwf8o7_U

I've chosen to title this blog "dreams." But, no, not the kind of dreams where you are in emotionally abusive romantic relationship with a rap star. Not the kind of dreams that happen in the strange recesses of the perverted subconscious at night during sleep. (Referring to my own, not necessarily yours, of course.)

I'm talking about the kind of dreams that your mind drifts into during a long, tedious meeting at work or when sitting across the dinner table, bored to death by the conversation. The kind of dreams that tap into something inside of you that longs to live life differently but is met by the limitations and liabilities of your present reality.

These kind of dreams are even more dangerous. These kind of dreams are even more thrilling. These dreams are the kind that you are afraid to say out loud, afraid to admit to other people...

I went on a trip to Paris, France last month. It was my first time. This was a total, reckless act of overindulgence on my part. I never had the experience of backpacking through Europe as a college student or taking overseas family trips growing up. So as a single 28 year old who is in debt from school loans and who recently spent the past two years of her life in an intensive counseling educational program, I was in the PERFECT position to plan a European excursion... burnt out, broke, tired, old and boring.

Perhaps that was an overstatement.

But you get the point, right? I thought that Paris would be the perfect petrie dish for my bruised, burnt out and bored soul. There was something inside of me that felt so weighed down by the limitations and liabilities of my life that I needed a break. I needed to tap into that life source, that deeper place where time and money and physical age and depression disappear and a little girl dressed in a yellow dress with pigtails in her hair emerges...

She is the dreamer. She is not afraid of grandeur. She is not ashamed of triviality. She dreams big. She dreams beautiful. She dreams beyond the physical and the present. I invited her to lay beside me in the grass of the garden at the Musee de Rodin on a warm, sunny day in Paris and her mind soared to places of ethereal bliss.

Dreams come small and large, practical and impractical, poetic and violent. Here are some of the things that she whispered to me that afternoon in the cool grass of the garden...

1. I want to buy an espresso machine so that I can host breakfast parties at my house and make lattes and cappuccinos for my friends on Saturday mornings.

2. I want to fall in love with a man who will play the piano while I lay on top of the instrument, absorbing it's tones through my chest while gazing deep into his eyes.

3. I want to learn how to speak French and move to Paris in my old age after I retire, snacking on fresh croissants and creamy white cheese until I die.

4. I want to shave my head down to the skull so that I can run my hand across my head to see what it feels like.

5. I want a daughter with brown eyes named Julia.

What is the point of a dream? Dreams are sometimes nonsensical. But perhaps the point of dreaming is not necessarily to escape our present reality, to indulge ingratitude or to shame ourselves.

Perhaps we dream so that we can share something so intrinsically transcendent about who we are with others that it can only be captured and communicated through a dream.

The poet Langston Hughes asks us to consider an important question:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Readers and friends, please comment here and share with me one of your dreams...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB2I5refJec

So This is Grief

This past week my pastor talked about being the kind of person who is able to receive honest feedback from the people in our lives. I stopped breathing at the thought of that. It scared me to death...

As a clinical counselor, I have been invited into the sacred ground of my client's souls. For a moment every week, they welcome me to exist in that secret place with them. I am honored when I realize that they are allowing me access into a solemn and spiritual territory. They are living with me as people who are open, vulnerable and receptive to someone giving them the honest feedback that my pastor had mentioned.

To allow another being to enter into that place takes a lot of courage.

To allow yourself to see yourself for what you really are takes even more courage.

I was in therapy these past several years as a requirement of my seminary's counseling program. It was altogether a terrifying and holy experience. I had shared things with my counselor that I had never told another living, breathing human being. I was allowing my counselor to access the space in my internal world that only previously existed as a silent dialogue between me and God.

That journey can be harrowing and lonely. It can, at times, feel hopeless.

It can feel very, very dark.

But in that darkness, I found new acquaintances. In that space, I believe now, we meet a part of ourselves, exiles that have been hidden away for so long...

Very recently, a good friend of mine became one of the people in my life willing to give me some honest feedback in the way that I had failed to show her love. I felt exposed. But the thing that was exposed was the very part of me that I realized I had been running away from for a long time. I met someone there, in that sacred, secret place that I usually allow no one to go to... until my friend's words caused me to look closer, to go into that dark corner.

I met Grief there. I am only now beginning to get to know her.

So this is Grief,

The friend I have been avoiding for so long.

Our conversations are painful and slow.

And She blanks from time to time.

From time to time She stops,

And is silent.

And She stares ahead as if in a memory.

I lose Her there.

I check my watch and take another sip of my coffee.

I glance over at the young passionates sitting beside us

And wish that I was out to coffee with somebody else.

Until again She stirs,

And takes a breath

And moves on.

I vow that I am never going to call Her again.

So this is Grief.

As She ponders,

As Her fingers twirl Her hair and Her glazed eyes

Stare out the dirty window,

The sun then hits Her in such a way that makes Her almost beautiful.

Grief, sitting in the sunlight of the cafe,

Staring out the dirty window.

My heart moves and I want to kiss Her.

I want to comfort Her.

I want to take away Her blackness and Her pain.

But all I can do is to sit and let Her be.

I let Her stop. I let Her say nothing.

I let Her remember what she remembers.

To love Her is to let Her be Her.

So this.

So this is Grief.