Persons Start Big and are Edited Smaller

It seems to me that persons start big, and are edited smaller and smaller.  I woke this morning from an interesting dream.  Dan Mulhern is a kind of soul-mate, a dreamer engaged in leadership development who happens to be the husband of the now former Michigan Governor, Jennifer Granholm.  I have known Dan casually and professionally for all of his wife’s two-term tenure, and because I receive his weekly leadership newsletter, I suppose he has been on my mind, including moving out of their home and lifestyle with the election of the new Governor. 

When our son was in High School, he was able to spend a weekend in the Governor’s Summer Residence, not for any political engagement, but because the father of a friend of his was an architect who helped keep the historic building up to its character and history.  So in my dream last night, I imagined Dan and Jennifer packing for their move out of that huge building, the place full of boxes and boxes of stuff, knowing they could not keep it all, and trying to decide what to keep and what to pitch.  The pile got smaller and smaller, but every decision was hard, and there was an accumulating cloud of awareness of what was being lost in the culling. 

This morning Dan’s newsletter was quite relevant, all about repotting.  Here’s a link.  When I woke from the dream, I thought of the folks I work with at Goodwill Inn, homeless people who have felt so much behind, who are bereft not only of belongings, but belonging.  Their careers are gone, their homes, their families.  I thought of children in Newark, after watching “Brick City”  , a five-episode film of a few months of real life in that real place. We’re told that we love to look at babies because their eyes are adult sized when they are born, and so their faces are so beckoning to us.  

They are, quite literally, “all eyes.”  Along with big eyes, they start with big imaginations and big dreams.  But reality has a way of editing these things smaller and smaller, and pretty soon they live in tiny knots of mutual protection against further editing, in gangs, or in isolation.

I suppose in my dream, the children of Newark and my homeless homies here in TC and my friend Dan and his wife Jennifer just kind of became the human fabric of my sleeping psyche.  I used to wake up, as a kid with “sand” in my eyes – you know, that dried stuff that sometimes hinders our opening our eyes clearly.  This morning the sand in my eyes was the aridity of a culture that diminishes, culls, strips away dream and hope – that makes spirits, like eyes, less open as our people move through life.