Dear Dreamer, You Are a Wild and Joyous Occasion Waiting to Unfurl Its Wings.
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“… from the drydock of mute old men
bring back the miracle of a tear,
from the delta of good intentions
bring back the seed that will change a life.From the fields of the dispossessed bring me a donkey
with Byzantine eyes, from the wells of the mad
bring me the bell and lantern of heaven.From the bay of forgetfulness come back with my name,
from the cave of despair come to me empty-handed,
from the strait of narrow escapes come back, come back.” ~ Lisel Mueller, Spell for a Traveler
Come back. Come back. Dear dreamer, you must come back from this strait of narrow escapes.
This is not a meager or trivial call. I speak these words from my belly, from the bowels of my own deep anguish and from the rivers of life still teeming with my own insistent, unrepentant hope. I am calling you up from your slumber.
You are not just a zombie wandering around in an unbroken dawn, or at least you must not be any longer.
You are not the decomposing remains of calamity waiting to be picked clean by scavengers, or at least, not yet.
Today you are a wild and joyful occasion waiting to unfurl its wings.
You cannot forget this in the face of travesty. You cannot look these times in the eye and then let them win. You cannot allow this moment in history to clip your wings.
These times are dream-killers, and they are meant to be. Only protagonists, full-fledged human participants, get to have dreams. If they can kill your dream, they can turn you into a cog in the machinery of fascism’s unholy hunger for objects it can neatly control.
Dreamers are uncontrollable. They carry within their breastplates the armor of hope. They hold in their loins the anti-venom of a pleasure that will never be denied, at least not for long. Dreamers are the vessels of tomorrow, the harbingers of new possibilities. The dreamers will invent a new way of occupying this planet together.
Fascism, as you might readily imagine, abhors a dreamer.
Dreamers do crazy things. They gum up the works of insane institutions, block the streets of commerce and of Congress. They hold in their hearts an endless, unwavering commitment to a life wedded to purpose, and a way of life designed to awaken and nurture potential. Dreamers insist upon openings and opportunities.
Yes, if they can kill your dream, they can kill the generations of progress you were sent here to unleash. They can murder the future.
They can take the spoils and remains of tomorrow as the plunder of a war they will never have to even fight.
Within you, dear, frightened, disheartened dreamer, beats the heart of a world-changing champion. Within your belly rests the living matter, the soil that will host the seeds of a future that looks radically different from the past. You are among the heroines of this age. Never doubt this!
Yes, everything familiar is folding before our eyes. All that we counted on yesterday is collapsing into a heap of dust and rubble. While the things we are witnessing and experiencing are far from okay, we must rally. We must come to terms with the truth of how we got here and address it.
Yesterday, we were willing to delegate our destinies.
Now that it is clear our confidence was misplaced, we are free of the illusion that someone, anyone will build our tomorrow. We have wiped out any sense that bureaucrats in far-off places, toiling beneath fluorescent lights or dining in opulent restaurants with K Street‘s finest, will ever be accountable to a nameless, faceless public.
In this sense of calling us to attention and into participation, this coming apart is necessary. It is essential that we see the truth if we are ever going to wake up and come together in a higher place.
We are breaking free from disastrous, purely fictional stories about champions on white horses lining the Potomac river. We are coming home to the truth that we must remake this world in the image of our dreams. We are coming to the hard realization that we must make ourselves known. We cannot afford the extravagance of anonymity and obscurity any longer.
We must make ourselves heard. We must join history’s myth-makers as we reimagine every narrative. We must join history’s priestesses and magi as we go beyond what we ever imagined possible, with faith and full commitment to a future in which we can actually take delight.
“Witchcraft is the recourse of the dispossessed, the powerless, the hungry and the abused. It gives heart and tongue to stones and trees. It wears the rough skin of beasts. It turns on a civilization that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” ~ Peter Grey, Apocalyptic Witchcraft
This project to own the future is where you come in, dearest dreamer.
In this, the darkest hour of the darkest night, you must plant the seed of a new vision in the rich, still fertile, earthen mound of your belly. You must also dedicate the womb of your mouth to the task of speaking forth novel word-seeds that will soon take shape as a universe undone and redone by the power of your tongue.
You must unleash your particular, heaven-sent superpower, your purpose, your dream. You must also unfurl your wings as the joy that glues worlds together in pleasure and potency, instead of repelling all hope with the anguish of fear and the poison of outrage.
Not to say that these times are not outrageous. In fact, it is the very essence of this outrageous moment that we seek to render sterile so that it can never reproduce.
To this end, you must bring all that is in you to bear on this moment in history, or there may not be so many others.
You must be the glory rising from the deep darkness of this nightshade illusion.
With what you have inside of you, you can extract the medicine of this belladonna age, and administer it as a cure to the soul-rot in which we are now living. You will take the first doses, and with them you will begin to glow as the lamplight that calls the masses to the expectation of a new kind of life.
I know it is hard when all you can hear are the anguished cries of the damned and the angry utterances of the righteously enraged as they demand justice. I know you wonder if anyone will ever hear your prayerful, soulful entreaties.
Don’t ask pointless questions about who can listen above the tin cries of the madding crowd. Just open your mouth and call into being a world in which you know you can thrive.
I understand, you don’t feel you have the right to fully live today.
How can you, with the hollow hunger in all those eyes staring back at you? How dare you touch wonder when so many are staving off misery, or worse yet, succumbing to it?
Not only can you, you must. Every new harvest must have its first fruits.
Every new tree must offer up its delights, one season at a time. If you do not come forward, if you do not choose to light the way, no one will ever see their way clear to the dawn. You have been given special eyes, brilliant, clear eyes alight with embryonic imaginings of unrealized meant-to-be’s.
Your soul has already been retrofitted for success and groomed for destiny’s race. You know you are ready. You know this is your time. And so I must ask you:
“If not now, then when? If not you, then who? If we are able to answer these fundamental questions,then perhaps we can wipe away the blot of human slavery.” ~ Kailash Satyarthi
I think you know the answer.
It’s time for you to come alive, dear dreamer, as the walking talking alternative to the morass of misery through which we are trudging.
It is time for you to not just form your dream from the inert matter of what could be, but to send it out into the world with all the force you can muster. Down deep in your bones, down in the rich terrain of your soul, Heaven placed one of the solutions for this moment in time.
Within you is one of the hopeful dreams meant to be dreamt into reality so that it can snatch this world back from the precipice of certain destruction for so many of us.
You no longer have the right to hide, to sit idly by, drowning in your own inertia while the world burns, children are martyred, and dreams are murdered by the hour. If you have breath and a modicum of freedom left, you must rise up, dear dreamer. You must bring to light the great mystery concealed in your heart, the brave genius that only you can translate into hardcore options for a world on life support.
Do not simply click past this article as one more moment of inspiration. Do something.
If you don’t feel ready, if you don’t know how to move at this moment, come find me. I will help you break the fateful momentum that has tangled your feet. From its remnants, we will lay down the pathways of destiny we all so desperately need to walk.
Find me. I will midwife your dream. I will hold your hand in the hour when dreams are raging to be born and raging against the umbilical cord that has so cleverly cut off the oxygen supply of hope.
Find me. I will show you how to break the stride of that urge to give up, of that sense that you cannot make a difference. Because I know the truth: you can, and you must.
We need you, dear dreamer. Come!
Come be the wild and joyous occasion of your realization and ours, unfurling its wings, taking flight, ushering in a tomorrow we can proudly call our own.
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