What Comes After Dreams?

I NEVER EXPECTED to be here—unsettled, sometimes looking over my shoulder at so many precious and lost moments. I expected to always look forward, always be moving somewhere. I yearn for some fruition of my dreams: a time when racism and the earth are healed, when every child is loved to his or her full potential in every way, when my lover and best friend never doubts his beauty, when I am the person on this earth whom I long to be. I long for the certainty that my children possess—that they will save the frogs.

I did not choose these dreams of mine. They were given to me. I’m sure of it. The Spirit beckoned them, whispering: “Dee Dee, this is part of my vocation for you. Strive to make these dreams a reality. I will go with you.” And with that God-inspired passion at my back, I plunged ahead, doing my best to be faithful to what was asked. Truth be told, I expected to bring at least one dream to fruition—given all the heart that I was willing to pour in and all the need and the rightness of the causes.

It hasn’t worked like that. There have been no triumphs.

I sit with my friends, some of whom are four decades farther along this riddled path of life. They humor me. To them, I am so young. “Ah, I would love to be 50 again,” they smile at me from their older lives. Now they struggle with physical and mental diminishment and significant loss of independence. One cocks his head at me and says, “Ah, at 50, I started an entire new life!” I am too young to feel so daunted.

It’s not as if I have ever had illusions about changing the world, but I have thought that I might shift one corner of it. Here I am, emptied and less resilient than a few years ago, as if I stand on the verge of throwing in some cosmic towel. My peers resonate. Some shift we can’t name makes it hard to keep our spiritual grounding. There must be something more to this time in our lives than crossing our fingers as we watch the next few generations grow up lovely yet fragile behind us.