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| A photo from a weekend drive up Paulina Peak with my dad...8,000 feet toward dream level. |
We sat like smooth cups of coffee with Bailey's stirred in: creamy, comforting and reminiscent of holidays. Our conversations lapped at my soul like tides against creamy beach sand, the kind your toes sink into like velvet against skin, or dipping fingers into the jar of rice on my grandmother's kitchen counter. Something about it was comforting, family and soul and hearth and home. We sat in the courtyard, a little band of artists carried away with possibilities and reality; an innate knowing that this was the season of leaping, of casting lines onto stars and swinging from open windows into the vast abyss where universe meets sky and landing on plush pillows of clouds where possibilities roam free like Oregon cattle.
We rested our backs against Ponderosa pines and sipped whiskey from flasks tucked in jacket pockets on riversides. Surely this was what summer nights were for. Artists, thinkers and vagabond sinking into blankets of this could work, making safe little harbors to launch from, and casting nets wide into ocean and dreams.
This is the place where dreams rumble up from the earth's core, hot and molteny with the decadence of chocolate lava cakes, that taste so rich you look around to see if anyone notices you surrendering to a slice alone in candle light corners of cafes. Dreams have become luxuries, a fear many reluctantly let slide through open fingers like sand to be scattered in the wind.
Dreams were never meant to slip away like that, but to hold hope on the wings of sparrows, and cause us to pioneer like our great grandmothers across the Oregon trail with her grandmother's hollyhocks seeks tucked in the hem of her skirt. To plant in new soils, new places...a reminder of legacy and lineage and a tribute to the journey we can never know for certain will extend to the promised land.
I pick my dreams from amid thorns in the furthest recesses of my mind, guarded by doubts and nay-sayers who assure me: it can never be done. I cry a loud "fuck you" to the residual hauntings of "it can't be done" or "success must be traditional."
In brick-walled courtyards and tipis on the shores of deep lakes, I stretch and break the boundaries that have contained me thus far, pushing past walls and roots and wounds to expand beyond the stuck places toward freedom.
Crows caw their songs overhead swooping in to dive bomb my head in a reminder to skip playing safe for the wild adventures of chasing dreams, swirling them overhead like lassos until they catch and take hold.
