Once a dreamer, always a dreamer...

We listened to what life was telling us to do, a new calling. Dreamers would say, we listened to our hearts and followed a dream, while others called us foolish. Wisdom and stability comes with age, but I’m stuck somewhere between here and yesteryear with my carefree hippie outlook in an aging body. Somewhere along the path, a little voice keeps telling me to be a rational and responsible adult, which I was...for a while. Two grown children, a career and a successful business later, the words continued to churn and whirl in my mind getting a bit garbled and I chose not to understand. Well, that’s not entirely true—I did understand—and I let my heart drive me fifteen hundred miles at eighty-five to ninety miles an hour with my husband hanging on by his fingernails. It was difficult to drive while my fingers were in my ears, blocking the condescending rants from others, but after twenty miles it became an annoying monotone hum that I was able to drown out with the volume control of the radio. While rational people are satisfied with stability, I still seek the unknown. Somebody has to be the dreamer, why can’t it be me?

I never gave up the notion North was where I wanted and needed to be. It was the only place I cried when I left, possibly because of the many unresolved issues that I was too hurt and stubborn to resolve on my own before I ran away again. After I was gone, I kept looking over my shoulder while those memories tried to sneak up and take hold of me. No way in hell, was anyone going to snicker when they mouthed the words, “I told you so…we knew you’d be back,” I wouldn’t allow my emotions to be flexible nor could I fathom compliance.

Years later, we started to go back with long intervals in between as we tried to maintain family connections. Only until recent years did I desired and need a tighter connection with those I selfishly I left behind while I lived my life. On this recent trip, I was forced to see everything through another set of eyes. It didn’t matter that I haven’t lived there for nearly twenty-six years or that I was only following my heart and my dream. It only mattered to me that my father’s and my home state’s blood flowed through my veins, and come hell or high water, and no words of logic from anyone was going to persuade me otherwise. I was meant to be back there.

The driving force to return was more powerful than each waking moment and was only getting stronger as years went by. First, it was seasonal, and then it became an everyday obsession. It didn’t help listening to Kid Rock’s song blast on the radio about the summer’s in Northern Michigan when he sang of moonlight, sandbars and campfires and being caught between youth and adulthood…”While we were trying different things, and we were smoking funny things, making love out by the lake to our favorite song, sipping whiskey out of a bottle, not thinking ‘bout tomorrow…”

For the first time in years, my perception was abruptly altered when I stood knee deep in the frigid waters of the Great Lakes. June temperatures colder than most winter days in the South, I watched the color swiftly leave my frozen feet. I was no longer that girl of seventeen; I only held her young heart. I stood there with an intense need to be one with the Lake and invoked God to please hear my prayer and give me some clarity. Warm tears mixed with the cold rain and the seemingly ambiguous clouds of the noon sky showed no reprieve. I needed that moment of transparency to relinquish every want and need I selfishly concealed…it was no one’s dream other than my own to be there. That was the harsh reality that I have not come to fully understand…

So today, my head is in a cloud, vacant of any productive thoughts and I’m finding it difficult to jumpstart my day. No matter how hard I have tried for the past few days, the cement wall of indecision about my future stalls my mind…

Peace…