Candles in the wind

In the night was the dark,

In the dark was the dream,

In the dream was the Child,

and myself there unseen 

You are all beautiful brilliant angels, gentle, innocent, radiant, and ingenius.  You are also all sensitive, kind, loving, helpful and spiritual.  You may not really be who you think you are today - if you are an adult reading this. You were born with an amazing life waiting to bloom forth from your fresh little souls.  You were born with talents and interests, skills and latent, yet unformed, great ideas, art for your life canvas.  Did you reach those inborn, latent, dreams for your life? 

As children we were told that every snowflake was different, each one of the trillions of white laced snowflakes is different than the one next to it, and that we children are all uniquely different as well.  It was an interesting theory anyway, one which I thought about as my sisters and I played inside an iridescent igloo we'd made in the six-foot-high snowbank at the end of the driveway. While the bright winter sunlight sparkled on the icy glaze making windows on our igloo, we laid on our backs, charmed by the magic all around us, and watched those delicate, fragile, short-lived snowflakes gather above us.

In the book was the word

In the word there was truth

In the truth there was age

In the age there was youth

Yes, perhaps the theory is true, we are all different yet we are all alike. Maybe we are alike in that uniqueness. Today, while my lovely sisters and I are as different as those snowflakes, we are alike in so many other ways.  We are  extra sensitive to just about everything - food, violence, mean people and irritating smells and overhead lighting. 

And I said to the Child 

Do your hands they still bleed

After all of this time

Do you think there's still need

But the Child only smiled

And said not a word

And the snow it came down 

As if it hadn't heard 

The challenge for us, as it seems it is for all people, is having the courage to allow our unique lacey patterns, our intricate human design, inborn in each and every one of us, shine in the light, dance in the magic of life all around us, and softly just be, like the flowers I described the other day, to just be the beautiful beings God made us to be originally before the world got in the way.  

And all that night the snow came down

To heal the scars our lives had found

And the dreams that lay broken 

The temptation for all of us, and especially for those like my sisters and me, who are sensitive, is not to lose our uniqueness, not to lose our original design in the compression of that admixture of sun, light, heat and human endeavor.  In short, how do we maintain our unique selves, and along with that unique selfhood our unique path and dream for ourselves,as we live among all the others who are also striving to express their beinghood here?

And there upon a bridge of dreams

Across the night we walked unseen

With no words ever spoken 

Life is scary for sensitive souls.  It's a dangerous endeavor - just managing to survive is an all consuming effort, and yet aren't we here for so much more than just survival?

And then on through that night

We did walk for a while

And our steps turned to blocks

And the blocks turned to miles

We also run the risk of losing sight of our own dreams as we are fed the popular fad dreams by the corporate dream-makers out there.  I truly think that so many of us are hiding inside our personal igloos unaware that we are missing out the greatest experience of our lives.   We may remember that we wanted our lives to be a little different than they turned out to be.  We may have made decisions, perhaps ill informed at the time, that we wanted to be or do or accomplish something in our lives.  

Then we followed a path

For as far as we could

Till we found ourselves there

In an evergreen woods 

Today, the economy may have taken a hit on those dreams, maybe some of the ways we chose to get there didn't work out.  Whatever unknown factors may have diminished the probability of those dreams ever coming true, whatever extinguished the light of our little candles back then, whatever it was, it can be undone. Your dreams are like unborn children, they will be born - maybe some dreams just take a little longer than others. 

There were thousands of candles 

Upon every tree 

It was beautiful 

But there was one mystery

For with all of those candles

You must understand

That the only one lit 

Was now in that Child's hand 

Maybe our little lives were once like candles in the wind and we so badly wanted them to come true, but each time a dream was blown out, we lost a little heart and slowly over time, so many of them may have been extinguished by the winds of life as we know it.

And there upon that Christmas scene

The candle wax of melted dreams

And the years they had taken 

And as the snow did gently fall

He one by one relit them all

Till each dream was awakened

Before we can ever accomplish great things, *we have to recover the dream.  We have to remember who we are, walk with the Child awhile, it may be a heavy woods, a frozen dark night of the soul, but the Child, silent, is always present.  That Child is obviously the Christ, but that Christ is also the Child within you, the one in you who walks with you always.  The Child holds the power to relight your dreams and with a relit dream, there is nothing you can't accomplish because in the act of relighting, you realign your priorities, you tear down the false gods of this world and choose to honor the true one, who comes to us as a Child.  Isn't God amazing?  

And there to that light

That young Child showed to me

All the things that he dreamt

All the things that might be

How for everything given

That something was gained

Strike one match in the dark

And all the world's not the same 

In our world, bigger is better, smarter is better, money is more valued than love, tough is more prized than gentle.  In our world a king is more important than a servant.  And, in our world, nobody wants to feel uncomfortable.  We all want to be comfortable and yet we had these dreams -these high hopes for our lives and where are we now, today?  Are we comfortable?  Probably not.  Not really, anyway.  Who can say they're comfortable if they're not living in tune with their own inner dream?  But, we think we are.  The truth is we're addicted to our pain.  We're terrified to try to step outside the comfort zone of our own status quo.  We want to get in shape, but do we really want to commit to the gym everyday?  We want to change our careers, but at - you name the age - do we want to go back to college? 

And then I asked that Child

Why this night has a star

And he said, "So we'd know 

That we could see that far"

And these candles are wed 

To that distant star's light

If we're aware that everything we've been doing - all our lives - isn't working, are we willing to really change?  And, if we commit to that necessary change, are we willing to stick with it? Changing your life will demand a kind of courage that is more exacting than anything you've ever experienced.  But, how badly do you want to live a real life, rich and full of all the awesome experiences and accomplishments you once dreamed for yourself? 

What price would you pay for the life of your dreams?  The only cost is to face your truth - your own fear - your own internalized ghosts of Christmas passed - when your own tender little child self was traumatized by the power brokers of your (and our) life - who somehow took your family, your community and our whole world hostage, killing the innocence in everyone to establish itself as king.  But, now you know the truth. the true king is that Child who visits you on a long winter night, invites you silently to walk into the dark, empty woods of your life, and in that stark moonlit truth, He gives you back your dreams and welcomes you back to life.

And when I awoke, 
well the Child he was gone

But somewhere in my mind

I believe he lives on

And somewhere in my life 

Between here and the end

On a long winter's night

I will dream him again

This Tiger Lilies post is dedicated to my beautiful sisters: Alexandra, Frederica, Jayne Kathryn and Francesca and my kind and loving brother, George Franklin.  Never forget !