Pipe Dreams

Dancing the Dream

“The instant fish accept that they will never grow arms, they grow fins.”

                           Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening)

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a ballet dancer. It started when I was a cloud in the second grade play. I wore a tutu with a white, snowball skirt and floated across the stage without speaking a single line. I was instantly hooked. I wanted more than anything to have those netted skirts, those wooden-toed shoes, that sleek hair, and the ability to dance like a glamorous ballerina. When I was in middle-school, a family friend moved to town. She had taken ballet classes when she lived in Asheville, and still had the costumes and shoes. I would go over to her house, climb into the attic, put on her toe shoes, which were two sizes too big for me, and I would dance among the cobwebs and pretend. Alas, it was not to be. We had neither the money for lessons, nor the teacher in our little mountain town.

Later in my youth, I volunteered as a Candy Striper at the local hospital. I decided then that I wanted to be a doctor. But algebra stopped me in my tracks, and chemistry slammed a lid on that dream and nailed it shut. It was not to be. As Nepo says, “before we can be what we were meant to be, we must accept what we are not.” I was not destined to dance on a New York stage, nor was I to be a brain surgeon. There are so many things I am not. I wonder if you are the same.

Some of my friends and relatives knew what they would dedicate their lives to from childhood. My friend, Renae, who is now pastor of a large church in Nebraska, baptized the barn cats on her daddy's farm as a child. My son, Jake, who is an artist, drew murals on his bedroom walls at two. When he was five, my other son, Ian, set up a folding table in the front yard, dubbed it “The Tabletop Curiosity Shop,” and sold his toys to the neighborhood kids. Now he's wheeling and dealing antiques and collectibles at a shop downtown. His ebay store is 'the tabletop shop'! But some of us are not so fortunate, or we ignore what our true gifts are and pursue something we think we “should” be, or perhaps, what our parents believe we should be.

The moment we give up the notion that there is something grand we could be, or should be, what we truly are can rise up and be known. Everyone has gifts, and sharing those gifts will make for a happy, productive life. Not everyone will see their childhood dreams come to fruition, but we can all find within ourselves what we are meant to be, and that, in itself, is a beautiful dance.

                                              In the spirit,

                                                  Jane