The agony of dreaming big.
A note on a windowsill beside a candle. The note says “Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to day” - Maya Angelou
I’ve been thinking about the joy and agony of big dreams.
This spring I had my last session with The Big One, our yearly 9-month-long class. My group had gone through a lot together, three seasons of life and writing, two retreats, many tears, and a pandemic that turned us all into two dimensional pixel faces. By that final evening, trust was deep and real. I wanted a final go-around question that would let us surrender right in. I couldn’t think of one.
Then, right before class it came to me. “What is your biggest, most audacious writing dream?”
This is a question you can’t ask without a LOT of trust in the room. It’s vulnerable to articulate our dreams, especially when they come from our art, our voices. I took the chance and here I am months later still thinking about it. With every participant’s answer, I leaned into my screen further, my heart sloshing and full. It was an extraordinary moment.
I’ll probably get a lot of emails about this, but I’ll just say it — I have never been one for vision boards. I hate the idea of not living up to my expectations. I feel most safe when I am grounded in the moment, doing what I can with the tools in my hands. Breakups and pandemics and car accidents rarely make it onto vision boards, but they are just as much a part of life as anything that does. I can get a little crispy about this.
But seeing my group answer that question, feeling how it grew us to listen to each other, it shifted something.
I promise I’m not going to turn this into a pep talk about how anything is possible. I just don’t think it is, and I don’t think it’s a healthy, life-giving, justice-loving belief. But that night, I started to wonder if I had missed the point. Maybe, if we approach our dreams as trajectories rather than expectations, as directions to point our sails rather than treasure maps to follow, they turn into a kind of power I didn’t let myself see before.
Dreams after all, are just desire in story form. When I’m talking to a group about plot, I’ll say “plot is desire.” We figure out what our characters want more than anything, and then we watch them move towards it. In the current of their desire, and the reader’s investment in that desire, we find a story.
And maybe then, maaaybe, it’s the same with real life — maybe our plot is desire. Maybe the more we know our desires, the more we articulate and trustingly share them, the more we get to be at the centre of our own story.
Woah.
We’re prepping our fall workshops at Firefly right now, and it’s making me think that actually, all plans are dreams. I dreamed that I’d be in and out of the studio this summer running workshops, with retreats around Ontario and a weekend off to do a triathlon for my 41st birthday. I dreamed all kinds of things that weren’t true about 2020. We all did.
But you know… all those summer dreams got recycled into something. The rural retreats turned into Stay At Home Retreats, and a vigorous increase in my late-night MLS searching for our someday Firefly Farmhouse. The triathlon plan turned into a lot of yoga on my bedroom floor. Same direction, different details.
I made a video to walk you through doing some writing on this question. Please write as freely as you possibly can, it’s just you over there. No one is looking over your shoulder. Click here to watch it.
And before I let you go, a whole-hearted recommendation to this non-Firefly class... I recently finished an expressive writing program with writer and educator Leesa Renee Hall, aimed at identifying and interrogating internalized bias. I loved it. She runs them 4 times a year, click here to learn more.
OK one last thing — here’s a poem for you
That is all for today.
Doing things you want to do matters.
Knowing what they are helps.
Let’s all work towards that, and support each other wildly along the way.
On your team,
