Petey talked about dreams on the message board, and so when I ran across this poem by Emily Dickinson this evening, it kind of got me thinking. I have a feeling I'll be taking this book on the plane with me to New York on Thursday (good lord, I need to start packing....heels, bikinis, cookies, sanity...yep, I think that's everything!), along with The Da Vinci Code, which I know I'll finish and not have to worry about getting only snippets of it during cardio.

Dreams

Let me not mar that perfect dream
By an auroral stain.
But so adjust my daily night
That it will come again.

I'm at a point where I want to make certain things happen in my life. I have this image of what my life should be...what I want it to be...but if I don't adjust my circumstances, then that image will fade as reality takes hold. I have to figure out how to do this though. Isn't that sometimes the hardest part? You know what road you must turn down, but getting there is a bit convaluted?

I recently reached a turning point for me. I don't know...that shoot I did with Jon, Tim, and Steve that weekend really opened up the floodgates of emotions, opened me up to...well...me. How long do we have to search for ourselves? I've had to really work through figuring out who I am and what I want. Dreams are fantastic. You can mold them and shape them into whatever your heart desires and whatever your mind can concoct. But most of the time, our dreams our buried in our subconscious. We never truly tap into our resources, into our destinies (and what is that anyway...who's in control of that? Are we? Do we control our futures, or do we just move when our strings are pulled and end up exactly where we were meant to be?) But if I expect a dream to become a reality, then I must wake up and grab it quickly, before my memory fades and my dream's existence disappears...only to return another evening when I'm too unconscious to be aware of it's power.

What is your dream? What do you want? And do you only achieve it in the middle of the night when the moon sits high in the sky and the world is quiet and your breathing has become even? When you are no more aware of your existence and your potential than you are of the beating of your heart? I want that awareness to rain down on me like the storm from last week.

Yes...I talked of "warm fuzzies" on the board, but I want to add one in here: the luxury of strolling about in the rain, not caring about getting soaked. The sky pours out its emotions, and I embrace them. It's exhilirating; it's like taking the rules and molding them into what you want...taking expectations and throwing them out the window. Where once you would have run to escape, you now stroll and accept what has come; where once you would have waited for dryness, you now rush to meet the challenge head on. Try it sometime...stand out in the rain on a warm summer day, and you'll feel alive too. It's you and nature intermingled.

I'm now going to mingle with my pillow. And dream a little dream that I hope to carry with me into the future of reality.

Jodi