January’s Prompt: The Dream of Jazz Hands & Invisible Freedom
Every month, we pull a question from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and offer a reflection. This month we pulled the “dreams” prompt:
How have your dreams guided you through your life?
As I contemplate this prompt, I laugh because I recently found two bits of writing that I rescued while rummaging through old boxes in the basement of my dad’s house. They were two ragtag loose-leafs claimed by my young handwriting, big round letters, cursive on the angle. One was the notation of a dance routine complete with jazz hands and step-ball-chains. The other was a free-write essay on “freedom”, free-writing an apt strategy for the topic. I write “The whole world is involved in every person’s freedom and desire for freedom”.
Neither piece was dated, but my guess is I was about 13 when I wrote the dance steps and 14 when I wrote about freedom. I was a hungry child reaching for the rhythm of my body, slipping into the waves of music, sensing the complexity of freedom, a cornerstone of American life, and trying to find my personal connection to it. My soul’s impulse was to see, experience, and question the tufted folds of meaning that coursed around my wiggly body. It became a practice to touch the multiplicity with my pen and to move to the music, or for that matter the drum beat of printers, the clip of passing trains, the rolling warm tones of church bells. I was moved to move and write and contemplate. I dreamed dances, I dreamed questions, I dreamed love. And this is now the life I live.
When I think of the innocent dreams of childhood, the wide-eyed desire, responding to life, I ask, can we separate life’s circumstances from the dream? Are they connected? Probably. For me, I have felt my dreams ripen and shift as life piles up with challenges: new phases of hormones, accolades and rejections, births and deaths, love and loss. Rubble becomes the fertile soil from which to garden a new dream into existence.
Paul Klee’s essay “On Modern Art” sees the artist as a sort of tree.
“From the root, the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eyes.
Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree.
Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he guides the vision on into his work.”
Maybe dreaming emerges from the nervy root tips of our being, so we can catalyze new buds to burst forth. Is life but creation, with all of us creating in our own way?
Yet the tree is also part of a grove. Are we not nurtured and nudged (or not) by the grove or the village: the people who come along, whistling down the long alley of life, toning the next note in the song: mothers, fathers, friends, friend’s parents, neighbors, teachers, grandparents, and maybe even strangers, animals, plants and trees.
I remember the woods behind our house in Sewanee, Tennessee. At 9 or 10. I would meander through the leaf-covered cold toward the lake but never to the edge. I liked to be alone back there. I’d find a falling tree to rest on and sit quietly. I loved feeling the alive “grandmother tree air” looming between the grey spikes of wooden splendor all around. The trees spoke to me, told me there was so much more than meets the eye, reminded me that time is thick and most of life is invisible. They encouraged me to keep noticing what’s beneath the surface. The trees held an important seat in my 10 year old village: they were the wise grandmother amongst a village of nuclear family, neighbors, school and church. These arbor-villagers were part of my grove, drawing me towards my dreams in a way that others in the village couldn’t.
As a reader, we invite you to see what the prompt sparks in you.
You may be even noticing that when you read the prompt, you immediately think of your night-time dreaming life. Or maybe you jump to being called a “dreamer” by your very practical parents. Or maybe you fulfilled all your dreams and feel your dreams as a powerful force in your life or maybe it’s the opposite. This is the beauty of the BreakBread prompt, there are many possible responses for yourself and for others. Make sure to be open to what’s there and if you like something, we also invite you to make “jazz hands.”