sometimes, the dreaming is stronger

One summer, I took a Greyhound to New Mexico and Arizona, to discover the wide landscapes. Though without car, I made my way to panoramas I still remember. There is something to be said for immense spaces. One feels that gaping openness when traversing larger countries, with interminable roads.
One can make a parallel between physical presence in such places, and the mental spaces one can create in one's thoughts - to tempt creativity.
When I imagine open spaces, I think of Joy Harjo's poem, Beautiful Valley: "I discover where giant butterflies burrow and dream. Startle them. They rise in unison, become the sky by imagining rainbows. They are shimmering power in the wet light in this valley they call Beautiful." The thing about this poem is that it is connected to a picture of vastness (follow the link). The landscape is like this huge canvas, where one's thoughts are free to dance in technicolour. Whenever I use the latter word, I think of Joseph and his technicolour coat - and the Lloyd Weber song, Jacob and Sons.
Come to think of it, the Joseph story shares the same theme as that of my recent posts: someone with signs of greatness is led to doubt and difficulty and can only realise their dreams if they work to multiply their virtues despite every reason to fall into bitterness and despair.
Today, I am thinking about this in terms of space. There is no space for inspiration, or even much goodness, if one is beleaguered by negative thoughts. The only way to give the heart space to feel the freedom to want to do good is by letting go of the babble of what other people may or may not have done to complicate one's little life.
And if one leaves that all behind, watching it get smaller and smaller, like what happens when we leave the city by boat, and look back at it, until it is a speck before disappearing altogether, one can feel the greatness of the horizon, which, through its magnanimous spirit, makes the observer one with its sheer greatness.
One of my old time friends used to call this centering. She would describe returning home to Utah, climbing onto one of the huge boulders, and center. There are many places and many ways to get the distance we need in order to start dreaming again.

Today, I spent quite a bit of time on Dulce Delight, a pastry blog Katrina linked to a while back. Everything from the design of the site, to the apron the delightful cook wears was worth the time I spent on the site. My favourite post, though, was this one about Rio de Janeiro. "Doing nothing and feeling happy is also a state of mind really hard to achieve, you have to put effort to set your mind free of worries and be aware of the present time in order to achieve this state," the post explains.
And then... there was the post about the author's husband. You must follow the link, because you won't believe your eyes. Already, Dulce Delight is too cute for words: the little kitchen, vintage fabrics, Raiza's bright smile. But then, in the post about her husband, one sees this little landscape, where orange juice flows freely from nature, and wonders for a moment: how real is this place? You won't understand until you look at the image.
You can follow the link to Vinicius Costa's magical world (though I recommend you read Raiza's post first), and be transported to a world of dancing fabrics which form bridges to communication, shirts which unfold into stories, and shoes which emerge from forests, reminding me of another favourite Liu Sola passage: "I can let those shoes on my feet take me anywhere in the world and choose for me any kind of beginning and any kind of end."
Life is choose your own adventure. We write our own stories - not by controlling events per se, but by colouring them, and deciding what is in the foreground, and what in the background.

I Am, Oh Anxious One, ~Rilke

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star’s vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.

 Drawn and star elements: Animus.