The Art of Dreaming ... And Healing
I wrote these words a year ago today.
As I sit here now, the dream I speak of in the piece below - the one I could not even see - is clearer than it has ever been. I can fully imagine and see and feel every detail, in a way I have never been able to in my lifetime.
Before this chapter of my healing journey, there was such fear and trauma at the center of that dream that as deeply as I longed for it, I couldn’t get anywhere near it without being physically sick.
As much as conventional wisdom says we have to either be “making our dreams happen” or “getting over them,” I’ve long known that there is a space in between.
I've always known what my dream was – even when I couldn’t see it – and also that my heart was just not healed enough for it.
I knew that I was simply not ready for that dream, even if it had been possible.
I spent more than a year in the space of not knowing whether it was possible, because my heart knew that’s the space I needed to be in in order to learn what I needed to learn.
What I learned in that space is that this moment is the only one we can ever know ... So the question of whether it's possible is not even a question.
Everything is possible.
Our hearts know things.
They know what we need to know, and when we need to know it.
My heart knew on this day a year ago that I could not see that dream because I was not ready for it.
It also knows today that that has changed.
I am ready for it, in a way I have never, ever been.
I have no idea what the future holds, because the question of whether this dream ever comes true - like the vast majority of everything in life - is completely beyond my control.
I also know to my core that it is absolutely, 100% possible.
As are a million other wonders I’ve not even conceived of yet.
Healing. Is. Miraculous.
Mystery is wondrous.
And Susan of 2017 knew it.
I write often about dreaming. I had to learn as an adult how to dream, because growing up in the shadow of my mother's deep depression, I learned that dreams never came true, and that dreaming only led to misery.
Since I've learned the art of dreaming these past three years, I've been stunned to discover that the dreams I can clearly see, those I spend my time imagining and seeing and feeling in every detail, seem to materialize before me like magic.
MAGIC.
I am really not kidding about this.
Last week I stood next to a man I had dreamed for years of singing with, as the chords to the very song I had sung with him a thousand times in my imagination played before me. A month ago I showed up at church to discover that I'd get to sing the song I had been singing endlessly for two weeks, with the artist who wrote and performed it. On the Opry the night before, yet! Two years ago, my favorite artist and human on this planet invited me onstage to sing with him, speaking NEARLY VERBATIM words I had heard him say a thousand times in my imagination. He prefaced the invitation with an entire string of words I'd imagined countless times but never dreamed he would actually think or say; it was as if I had sent him a fucking script. I was floored.
My biggest dream, however, the one that feels farthest away and takes up the most space in my mind and heart, is one I absolutely cannot see clearly. When I sit down to imagine it, there is simply not a clear picture ... It is obscured by deep wounds and paralyzing fears and the mist of the unknown.
I can get lost in longing and grieving the vague but deep void of not having this dream, but the truth is my heart is simply not healed enough to even know what this dream truly is. I cannot create a picture of it, so it is clearly just not time, even if it were possible in this moment.
Right now that dream looks exactly like this photo I was stunned to come across today.
PHOTO BY JEREMY COWART | www.JEREMYCOWART.com
This Saturday I will have the amazing opportunity to be photographed by one of the most phenomenal artists, photographers, and dreamers in the world. He's opening up his studio to do portraits for the general public.
Not your run-of-the-mill portraits ... But portraits using his brilliant artistic eye to create something beautiful and different.
Portraits like this one.
A vision he created of the man at the center of my most profound, and most obscured, dream.
The fact that this portrait exists - this stunning reflection of exactly the way my deepest dream looks in this moment - takes my breath away.
Art is such magic.