Are Your Dreams Rooted in Matter?

I was certain that when I was 35, I’d be a “real” adult. Ironically, it took me exactly until I was 35 to somehow feel like I went from being Pinocchio, to a “real boy.” A lot of us have these internal clock markers that if we moved around on the timeline of our consciousness, I wonder how quickly we’d get to the places within ourselves we hold out until…”we’re 35,” “we’re married,” “we’re...whatever.” 

Which is the moral of this story. 

So much of my work is about settling in. Not running. Facing, with boldness, the life we signed up for. Not settling “down,” but “into” our bodies. This is what my field calls embodiment. 

There tends to be a large cognitive dissonance between what we think we’ll feel when we get to a place versus what we actually feel when we get there. There’s also a huge dissonance between where we actually are now versus where we think we have to be to be worthy, or make this life thing worth it. 

I used to be terrified to anchor to the density of what felt like this dark metallic ball that trapped me to it.

Always trying to get out, whether by passive suicidality, self sabotage, or merely wanting something other than exactly what I had, for years, I used visualizations to anchor the frequency of what I wanted. The problem is, I didn’t ask myself “what’s the matter?” The matter part was up in the clouds, and I hadn’t found a way to root it. 

Let me explain.

At least once a week I work with someone who says to me, “I hadn’t even looked at this as if there were any other options,” after we’ve unburied a hidden treasure for them to carry around rather than the burden they were bearing without knowing there was any other way. 

When we’re too close to something, or too far removed from it, it’s too hard to really, actually, see it. One is a mirror clouded by our stinky breath and the other, a pipe-dream castle in the sky with a split staircase we can’t jump to. 

Bridging a center is life work for our kind of folk.

This is one of those moments for me. I’d literally never even thought to do what I’m about to share with you, until my sixteen year old son insisted on it, not even knowing its been a “pipe dream” of mine. 

When I was a young girl, I found solace and reprieve in my grandparents apple orchard. Being alone out there in the rows of ripeness, was likely one of the safest sensations my childhood had offered me. So in my pipe dream visualizations for over a decade, the place I go to when I meditate is a peninsula with a large cottage-looking house, covered in Ivy, tucked into the largest part of the land. In the distance I can hear the Orcas and sense the dolphins, while the birds sing freedom songs. When I’m done with my meditation “in” my meditation, I walk myself to that tucked away house, but first, I meet my daughters at an apple tree that sits stoically decorating the landscape just in front of the house.

There we pick freshness from the tree and we sit, enjoying the silence of ourselves in the perfect quiet of nature; together.

Point is, I thought I needed to manifest that house, that pipe dream, for all that to be real. Turns out, just because we don’t have what we thought our dreams would look like, doesn’t mean we haven’t anchored our dream into our reality. 

I never, ever thought to plant that symbol in my pipe dream, in my present reality. Our house isn’t directly on water, it’s not a stand alone house, nestled in the perfect of places, the yard certainly isn’t big enough, it’s not paid off, and nothing is perfect like it is in my visualization. 

But my horticulture-botanist enthusiast son, enlisted all of my kids to insist that every kid needs a tree in their yard.

Word on the street has it that the owners before us were in a civil dispute. The wife loved the stand alone tree in our backyard, and when she left, her husband cut it in half just to spite her. 

For years we had a large tree trunk standing just taller than our fence. We’d thought about carving it into a totem, among many other things, but this year, we finally pulled up any remaining roots of that tree, made a fire pit where it had once lived, and burned it all, ceremoniously. 

The next week, my whole family, together, planted an apple tree in its place. We planted two apple trees actually, for pollination purposes. 

The energetic clearing of what this means is one thing. But the other thing, the most important thing is, I found a bridge between my “too close to see what I already have” and “too distant pipe dream,” and it came in the form of a baby apple tree looking for a home. 

Turns out, I didn’t need the outer dream to look perfect to live into the reality I wanted to experience.

I now sit on my back porch, look to the autumn color display painted upon the mountain landscape surrounding my Pennsylvania town, and there, feet away, sits the apple tree I used as a symbol of rest and rejuvenation in my vision. 

I never thought to plant it because nothing else was in place. I didn’t think it “mattered” unless I had it all.

The mountains that surround me are not ocean waves like my dream state. The house is not a cottage, inviting me into never having to worry about a mortgage payment again. It’s louder than in the quiet of my dreamscape, but it’s the truth of my landscape; and to be on land, rooted, is why I’ve come.

And this is settling into reality rooted in matter, rather than waiting on the branches of dreams to fall from grace. This is the stuff of “real.” Grace, from the ground up.

Here’s your reminder, the one my son gave me. 

Just because our reality doesn’t look like the one we wanted in our dream, doesn’t mean our dream isn’t what we already have in our reality if we take a slightly different look.

What’s a bridge between being so close to feeling far away from your dream you can’t even see what’s right in front of your face, and... your pipe dream? 

My bridge came in the form of an apple tree and somehow that taking form in physical reality, was all the transformation my psyche needed to know that everything I’ve ever wanted, may not be my backyard, but from my backyard, everything is within reach if I put my arms out to truly touch it, in form, not in theory. 

Planting that apple tree, somehow changed our hearts and homes.

What’s your apple tree? 

You don’t have to wait to plant, merely because the ground isn’t perfect. 2020 taught me that.

If ever I leave this home, her new owners will not see a spitefully cut down trunk, but a tree, full of fruit, juice, and life; and right here, I hope they can feel that this is the stuff dreams are made of. Right here.

Lest we forget.