Keeping the Dream

By Brother David Steindl-Rast from Gratefulness.org

For those who will gather
in Megan’s honor tomorrow at a candlelight vigil,
May peace embrace and find expression
through every heart

To light your candle in a group just for Megan, click here.

(To light your candle in my Dream Group click on the icon)

I light this candle for a thankful heart
an overflowing heart
and for all the blessings and inspiration to have one

(To light your candle click on the icon)

I light this candle for Megan Meier
whose life ended way too soon…
May there be healing of broken hearts
lessons learned and new choices…
for those who can make them

(To light your candle click on the icon)

In my post, Why Am I Here?, this past Sunday, I talked about Sylvia Plath’s writing about indecision, and the fear that surrounded her.

Her words reveal not only the fear over making choices, but about the fear of loss. Every choice wasn’t seen as embracing something as much as relinquishing something else. It’s symptomatic, I think, of a society that gives you the impression that you can…and should have it all.

That’s the first lie I had to give up.

It’s easy to see why I should have believed it. What’s more seductive to believe you can have it all, when society says, as female, you can’t have any of it - other than what’s prescribed in a very narrow band of choices? I realize many of my choices were knee jerk reactions to what I felt was constricting me.

Deciding to be something means deciding not to be everything else not chosen. If that’s what you focus on, every choice is about losing.

But I wonder what our fear of loss is really a blanket for?

There’s more to our inability to make a decision other than being paralyzed by too many choices. Because I’m beginning to see that depth is, also, a matter of choice.

Indecision protects us from diving in deep. In our hesitation to even get our feet wet, we spare ourselves the unknown places of the deeper section of the water. We run back and forth from one body of water to the next contemplating which one we want to swim in, and all the time we are safe on the shore, fooling ourselves into thinking we’re trying to choose, when we’re actually trying to avoid.

Avoid what? Intimacy, for one, either with another person or with ourselves.

It’s the same thing isn’t it? The person who’s afraid to commit to a monogamous relationship or pick a field of interest to develop their skills and talents. It’s all about holding out, because there might be something/someone better.

But the fact is, we don’t want to give in to anything or anyone. It’s not a journey or a race, not even a rat one. It’s a game of dodge ball we play, and indecision is the excuse we use to keep us in that game and out of the very real world of depth with its demand and risk of courage and vulnerability.

The photo in the new banner for this blog is a graphic enhanced version of my grandson held in my arms, taken two years ago. I have gotten a lot of positive feedback concerning that photo, that it’s pretty much become my logo.

Somehow the nurturing image of a woman holding a baby seems fitting for the concept of “Keeping the Dream”.

How tender all our dreams are, how beautiful that they should receive our care, our nurturing and protection. And I don’t mean “our” in a rhetorical sense. I mean yours. You, who read these words now. You, who I may or may not correspond with in email, who may live in my town or across the ocean.

I think about all the sorrow in this world. I don’t need to be fixated on sorrow to be moved by it. And I don’t need to cover my eyes to it to stand in awe of the love that exists in this world either.

I wonder if you know how important you are. I wonder if you realize just how unimportant it is to know how much of a difference you can make…and just make it?

I wonder if you will give yourself the gift of risk and allow yourself the joy of serendipity.

I wonder who you are, if our paths will ever cross and in what indirect way we will affect each other’s lives in ways we cannot fathom.

Today I am wishing you well, my stranger who has graced this page, my brother or sister in this family of humanity.

Keep your dream. Live it. Embrace it. It has a life of its own that it wants to share with you. Like most partners, it may not look like what you’ve always imagined it to be. It might only be a very quiet dance, kept away from the sunlight, coming out only at night. Dance in the moonlight. Dance to your love’s pleasure.

Every dream is a seed to a better world. Keep that dream alive in you. You are more important than you know.

Now that’s the million dollar question…or in today’s economy, trillion dollar.

Next to, “Who am I?”, “What is our purpose?” is the big question.

I remember in my youth, as early as preschool, and a good deal into my adult years, pondering that question. I still ask it every now and then today…but the answer I seek is decidedly different in nature and less urgent these days.

There was an excerpt from Sylvia Plath’s, “The Bell Jar” that struck me to the core when I first read it. Chapter 7 (formatting changed for ease of blog reading):

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I was afraid I’d be like that, and in some ways I was. But I did manage to find a way to develop certain skills in specific areas, some through choice, others through necessity, and found a niche for myself despite my indecisions.

I’ve stopped looking at life as it were some big multiple choice test with right and wrong answers, and made friends with my imagination that can dream up of more options that I will ever have enough years to live.

When I was younger, the question of my purpose encompassed not only my place in the universe, but what career choices I should make. But I see now they are only extraneous to the real issue. When you understand the question, then everything else attached to it becomes less important, in and of themselves, because you see they are only in service of something greater.

To me, the answer to the question “Why am I here?” is no longer a cornucopia of choices. There’s only one answer - To love.

Don’t roll your eyes, it’s true.

When I remember this, every encounter becomes an opportunity to find some way to express love. It may be opening one’s heart or closing a door. It may be extending yourself or drawing your boundaries, but everything - everything is an opportunity, a request to love.

This really makes a big difference to me, because instead of becoming frantic over losing time to “get it right”, get the training, make the career moves, locate to the right place, each and every present moment is just where I need to be to live my life’s purpose. I don’t need a degree or a new job to do that.

From that perspective, I can make whatever choices I need to make to affect the shape and form of my reality. Even if the details of my life are not what I want, at the moment, the heart of it can be true to its purpose - my life’s purpose. There is no waste, just a journey where love is expressed through one form or another.

And that’s what will remain after we “retire”…from our jobs or our lives.

I’m sorry I didn’t post yesterday. I missed it. I’ve really come to look forward to sitting here on a daily basis. It’s become a lovely daily ritual, and it just doesn’t feel right when I skip a day.

Yesterday was a day of preparation. In just a little over an hour, I pick up my nephew. We have a special relationship, he and I. I was his mom’s sister…still am, as far as I’m concerned, and she was the world to him. We see her in each other.

I look at him and remember how much she adored him, how hard she fought to stay here.

He was seven when she passed away.

You know, when she died, in trying to explain why, a spiritual teacher of hers said to her husband, “She wanted to give you the highest.” And through my grief and tears a resounding thought came through - What a crock!

Death had to drag her out of her body, and there’s no doubt in my mind Death has a few extra scars to show for it.

Few people would fight so tenaciously, cling to life even when one of her own doctors was telling her to quit, because he couldn’t stand to see the pain she was in. A doctor, no doubt, who has seen a lot.

It was hard to witness. But she said she made a promise to her son that she would do whatever she could to stay. And she did. Way beyond what anyone would think possible.

I suppose it’s comforting to think that when something you don’t want happens, it’s for a good reason…or was meant to be. But it isn’t to me, and it especially isn’t when it doesn’t honor the real passion or discount the tremendous effort that person put into attaining something…and failed.

My sister did not want to go. She didn’t want to suffer either. There was no grand purpose in it for her. And she never would have broken her son’s heart for anything. I was with her as she was losing her battle. I held her hand, climbed into the hospital bed at times, to hold her as she was wracked with pain. I know why she put herself through that. It was to stay long enough for the tide to turn. It didn’t.

What she was was true to herself all the way to the end. That is the inspiration in this story.

Not some hyped up explanation as to some cosmic purpose.

I don’t know why she had to die at this time. Even that statement implies there has to be a reason for everything. Maybe that blank needs to be filled in by us. It goes without saying there’s a lot I don’t understand, especially where suffering is concerned. I don’t understand why my sister died to not see her son grow up and my abusive father lived to have another set of kids.

But I still believe in Justice, even though it doesn’t always manifest here. And I still believe in Grace, even though it’s sometimes absent in the lives of those who deserve it the most.

There is no greater way I can honor my sister than to not become disillusioned.

My not understanding doesn’t determine my belief in hope or in something better or more than what we see. But that doesn’t mean I invalidate the experience of the suffering or pretend that what is clearly unjust and sad isn’t, just because it doesn’t fit into what I need to believe.

So no, I can’t tell you in the great scheme of things, why my sister died. But I can tell you what reason she didn’t die for. She didn’t die because she was in cahoots with some cosmic plan to express some noble idea of love as sacrifice, or because suffering and early death is the mark of a truly great soul.

If achieving that stature required the breaking of a child’s heart, never mind her son’s, she would have been content to enter heaven as the lowliest one.

Cancer took her, when she didn’t want to go. She never would have abandoned her son…and she didn’t.

If I have anything to do with it, he will know that.