WISHES AND DREAMS ARE NOT WASTED

Wishes and dreams don't have to come true to have value. I'm taking this thought from the nature writer Sydney Michalski on Substack.  Maybe you know her.  Wishes and dreams are hopes and hope is good on its own.  It is never wasted.  As Emily Dickinson says, 

Our hopes may be dashed, this is not unusual.  But then the hope changes and continues to live.  Hope sustains us, whether the hopes are large or small.  Today I hoped my dermatology biopsy would turn out negative, and it did.  A hope fulfilled.  My husband's turned out to be a basal cell carcinoma and so we hoped they would get clean margins and they did.  Another hope fulfilled.  Last summer a spot turned out to be melanoma, so I hoped it was early stage and it was.  It needed no treatment beyond removal.  One hope disappointed but the second one fulfilled.  Were any of these hopes wasted?  Not at all.  

There is always something to hope for.  We each ultimately hope for a long life and a peaceful death.  But in the interim we might hope to get into college and then to graduate, to find a partner or be happy single, to find a job or be brave enough to leave one, to have enough to survive or enough to share.  Each hope today is for something tomorrow.  

A dream or wish looks to the future.  I hope I get to go the Florence again.  I want to see the ancient chapel where Dante met Beatrice, the Duomo, Michelangelo's David. This may or may not happen.  But the wish itself is lovely.  It sets to mind these beautiful places, my memories of them and the feelings that seeing them again would bring to my heart.  My breath enlarges, a bit of the awe returns.  Every time this wish surfaces something good happens to me.   The wish itself brings joy. 

A daydream is a happy thought.  Living in the woods, winning the chili cook-off, taking a dream vacation, remodeling the kitchen, being debt free, learning an instrument. . . .  These are all worth thinking about, each a dream that might become a plan.  

Michalski writes, "To look ahead to what is possible in the future, and fashion a thoughtful vessel to contain its potential, and offer it into the sweeping current of the present, could never be a waste of time." In nature that vessel might be an acorn, or a seedling from the Rose O' Sharon that jumped the fence and might bloom this year, or another forsythia plant emerging through the pine straw as a shoot from the root of my giant spreading shrub.  

In our lives that vessel is our heart.  As vulnerable as we are, as fragile as our hope may be, we set it afloat before our eyes and rest upon it.  And if it becomes a plan, we work to make it happen.  But in the meantime, if it brings some relief, or respite, or even joy, let's continue to wish and dream and thank that faithful thing with feathers that perches in our souls.  

Nina Naomi