Dreams with Bones

 I have always dreamed soaringly, sprawlingly. When I was eight or so, I wanted to buy the amusement park Six Flags and live there, renovating it for my own private use. A few years later I longed to buy my neighbor's million-dollar house and turn it into a bed and breakfast with my mom.

I used to fret endlessly over how to make a million dollars before the summer started, so I could implement my grand plans (although I now realize that buying Six Flags would have taken a whole lot more than a piddling little million). And when the summer arrived, and I found myself no richer, I would tell myself, "Next summer, then. I'll make enough by next summer."

Ha.

I'm not sure when my values shifted. I think it began when I was around fourteen, when I started learning about food–how we grow it and how it works within our bodies to nourish us or to poison us. With that knowledge came a respect for slower things–the carrot nurtured in a garden for weeks versus the grease-blotched carton of fries handed through the drive-through window. Slowly I began to understand, too, the value of money and work and time, and to realize just how unrealistic my earlier aspirations had been. Oswald Chambers writes in his book My Utmost for His Highest, "We all have any number of visions and ideals when we are young, but sooner or later we find that we have no power to make them real."

I was sixteen when I decided I wanted to skip college and become a farmer. In the two years that have passed between the initial making of that decision and now, the dream has morphed and solidified and grown bones. It stands upright when you poke it, instead of crumbling into a pile of glittering ashes.

There is still something to be said, I believe, for keeping a few dreams you know you'll never make into realities–to imagine what it would be like to be a famous actress, or a yoga instructor in Bali. But pick the dream you want to live out day after day, and go about putting bones inside it.