Calling all dreamers
I am known to admit that placed in a room with ten men in tuxedos I would go home with the waiter every time. That could be because I’m attracted to the dreamer, the magic bean buyer, the pray-er. My second husband was want to say that the most moving thing he ever witnessed in his life was a goat giving birth and he described the event as if it happened long ago in a gypsy fable.
So it is that despite all the knowing, I’m moved by this Sty who was playing the drums in church this morning and whelped up when Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was being sung, as he was playing it, drumming on the cymbals with his finger tips and wiping tears simultaneously. Such a dreamer. A magic bean buyer.
Before experiencing the rock n roll church in Destin this morning for my first time (more on this later), we were walking in Bay Town in the chilled night air and happened upon a four-piece raggedy band in what looked like a makeshift manger. Heading up the band was an older woman, with a weathered face and hair too long and too white, singing:
Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself, it’s only me
Who wants to wrap around your dreams and,
Have you any dreams you’d like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness,
Like a heartbeat, drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering, what you had,
And what you lost and what you had and what you lost
You can change aspects of yourself – those dynamics that become knee jerk to such a degree you think they are too ingrained to wipe away – you can change these things about yourself, I tell you this from experience – it takes work, it takes practice, it takes desire. But, it can be done. Then there are aspects of yourself that you know do not have any rational value – who you are attracted to, who you attract, what you value, what you don’t.
I was watching Family Feud in the hotel room and the question was, “What would you say you did as a living to a woman to impress her?” #3 was CEO – I just shook my head – nothing would make me run away faster than CEO. Nowhere on the list did it say artist, musician, writer, poet, dreamer, hope-er, wisher, seer.
The qualities that carry me over the threshold into lala land.
Shel Silverstein wrote an Invitation:
If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer . . .
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
I think the difference in me at this time in my life is that I know what moves me, but I also know now I can enjoy my life without trying to place another human being into a role that was actually devised by someone else for some other set of circumstances in some other time – a role that I never really cottoned to, to begin with, for myself or my partner, and so it is freeing to hold what is dear and yet not contort to conform to what I should be with this person and who this person should be to me.
“As is,” is how Sty says he comes to me. “You gotta take me as is, baby.” As is, it is.