How can I give you this meadow? This thrust of purple loosestrife. This showy stand of goldenrod with headdresses of brightest yellow. There, milkweed—fleshy, plump—dangles its pale green pods like underripe plantains. Let me show you how to behold them. Let me show you how below them, there are little buttons of knapweed and bird’s foot trefoil. Purple, yellow, purple. How all these purples and yellows amplify each other, drawing the pollinator’s eye—Mother Nature’s mastery of color theory. Look lower down where self-heal and wild thyme sprawl, see how the whole ground blurs mauve like a Monet. Careful or you’ll step on a bumblebee, browsing the clover. That sound? It’s a swallow scything the air. It’s a meadowlark, fluting shyly from the sedges. It’s the click of bugs rising in high August. We are here on this hill, alive to this moment. It matters.
I recently read something somewhere that said: “You are living the dream you dreamed.” It’s the kind of thing you’d see stitched to a pillow on Etsy—an emblem for a tchotchke—but it comes to me now as my hand idly strokes my son’s back while he’s strapped to my chest in a wrap. I bend my neck to kiss his hair, which smells sweetly like macaroni. Throughout my first pregnancy and the year after, and all through the fear and uncertainty of the second, this was the vision I held: walking through this very meadow in summer with a baby pressed against my body. This is the dream I dreamed. I am living it.
And yet, astoundingly, I’m already dreaming of other things. I see friends traveling and peers playing festivals and I think, that’s what I want. I want adventure and freedom and faraway places. I want to do big things! My days have shrunk in diameter, and I dream of rambling and roaming once more. But exactly a year ago, I was flying home from Europe, having just performed in Italy, Poland, and England, and I was aching for the meadow and the baby. Now I find myself wanting a Freaky Friday switch, to wake up in another dream.
What is wrong with me? Why do we do this? This constant pulling away from the present, fighting the weight of it when it is exactly what we want. We look to the next thing, and when it arrives, we are off again like restless birds. It’s as if as soon as we attain them, our dreams depreciate. They lose their value, become hollow trinkets to discard in a drawer. It’s not that we’re ungrateful for what we’ve got, it’s just that it’s so incredibly hard to stay, to stay, to stay as the world rushes on, and life lapses, and we get older, and there is more—always—to see and do. The depreciation of dreams is an existential epidemic.
Cut it out, I tell myself, swatting the thought from my mind. I want to appreciate my dreams and how far they have carried me: all the way here, to the goldenrod rejoicing and the weight of a small miracle in my arms. It is enough. It is more than enough. It is everything.
When I feel stuck in the mindset that something is missing, I call this the Land of Lack. Like that world in the Phantom Tollbooth, where no matter how much they eat, the people feel hungry. The Land of Lack is a trap. It’s bleak and sallow; it’ll swallow you whole. The only way to leave the Land of Lack is to recognize it for what it is, to say its name and banish it with a laugh—how foolish I’ve been, how very human, to forget to look around at the land I’m in right now and cherish it.
So join me in this meadow. See the fuzz of seed heads on the wind. Touch them, the dry tops of the grasses, the way they crumble and scatter. Help me hold this moment, even as the flowers are fading and flying by, even as the trail takes me on and away—let me touch down and remember that I am living the dream I dreamed, that I am grateful beyond words, that I am so happy to be here.
"The depreciation of dreams is an existential epidemic." Oh ain't that the truth, Nandi! We are trained for restlessness, not for presence. It is drilled into our neuropathways, and requires intense moment by moment unlearning (intensity and presence - oxymorons). Babies force that upon us, and it brings up our anger, our resentment and irritability. It brings us down to small when our ego minds blend with our genuine ambition calling us to go big. It challenges our greed and longing (are you a type 4 on the enneagram?). It asks us to look at the hole in us that only SEEMS like it will be filled with BIG living. It's all the sound of one hand clapping if you ask me. And the baby just keeps needing and needing and needing. Oh I remember that time. Love and hate of motherhood. Such a test of patience, stamina, our capacity for boredom and staying present to the small (yet enormous) changes. Anyway...thanks for your writing as always. I adore how you describe the meadow. I wish I could remember all the names of all the plants as you do Nandi. Miss you!