The Next Step Is the Dream
Image by Greg Rakozy
Ode to Our Dreams
You feel like sharp cracking of brittle bones,
gentle wind whispering through hair,
an elusive, unnamed scent electrifying our bodies.
As sunlight filters the darkness,
we’re left confused, gasping for air.
Though seemingly familiar,
you are paper thin
and you bathe in moonlight.
So we use you as fuel for our fires,
to keep on forgetting.
Everything needs strengthened
to accept possibility without judgement.
Our hearts beat faster in pursuit of love,
still you don’t give up.
You call us to surrender to our courage.
By your divine intoxication and grace-filled will,
may we finally remember the points of our existence
and journey home to meet them.
Hello friends! It’s been a little while. I hope this message finds you knee deep in the dreams you hope to pursue. The above poem has been like a muse for me along my own path to do the same. And if not, that’s ok. Here’s the chance to meet yourself and see if the next step is your dream.
As for me, I spent the last three months embracing the potentiality of Winter’s promise. I cozied up to its soft, unyielding contours and spent much needed time nourishing myself through rest, connection, and play. I also spent a good amount of that time opening myself up to ALL of the emotions that accompany major life transitions. It was time.
My partner, Jamey, and I, of course, also had to keep life moving and luckily had quite a few guests staying at our cabin over the winter, but we really tried to keep our workload lighter and plan short bursts of activity where we could. It helped that this year Maine REALLY felt Winter - 3 months straight of snow adding up, less than 9 hours of daylight a day, and temps that didn’t go above 30 degrees!
As our lives here continue to unfold, I find myself cherishing time in ways I have never been able to before. Time to move slower and gentler, more fluidly, in deeper and deeper connection with myself and others as well as with Nature and her seasons. And by opening myself up to these possibilities, Winter brought a slowness and darkness that was honestly unrelenting in the many ways it helped me see my ability to surrender. Each time I thought I had learned how to surrender, light shone awareness on my discomfort and events showed up offering even greater opportunity to surrender deeper. And in case you were wondering if you still face challenges even when moving slower, look back to my previous sentence and my observations around my lack of capacity to surrender. :)
Some of the bigger challenges included:
Renegotiating Opposites: When we moved to Maine, we brought our tiny house on wheels with us. Cool right? Its original homebase was in Colorado. While there have been so many benefits to moving with our tiny home, we were not prepared for what would happen when moving a house from one climate (arid, desert-like Colorado) to a completely different one in Maine (where water and decay are amongst its richest resources). We spent all winter chasing and battling back mold working to add more insulation behind furniture and filling in air gaps to prevent thermal bridging and condensation on our interior walls. We’re inching closer to having a house that can survive the climate of Maine, but it’s been a process of surrendering, observing, and accepting.
Death and Dying: Over the winter, we received several cancer diagnoses of our loved ones including in November when my mother-in-law shared she had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. We spent a good amount of our winter opening ourselves up to all of the ways we can more fully accept and allow death and all that it brings with it - suffering, loss, lack of control, grace, fear, surrender and most of all the beauty of getting one more chance to deepen our connections and shed the past before finally letting go into the void.
Trouble with Dreaming: I know you have probably heard this before - dreams don’t always end up the way you imagined them. They can’t. It’s just the nature of putting your vision out into the universe and inviting people and environments to bring themselves to the process. It’s a co-creative one. The dream shifts, grows, transforms, and evolves. The majority of the time you have no idea what’s happening but you can go for one helluva ride if you can stay in your courage long enough. Without going into too much detail, last summer after opening our first short-term rental, we received news from the town we live in that our dream of opening more short-term rentals on our land were not going to be allowed. We had to come up with something else. Something closer to our soul? Something bigger than what we could conceive originally? We spent the winter understanding what that might be.
Chasing “Security”: As we have been experiencing the highs and lows in pursuit of our dreams, there have been moments where our courage has tripped. Winter was one of those moments. Often, when you exit from the societal view of what you “should” be doing, and instead, pursue the way you want to live - the one that feels compatible with soul, you question…a lot. What are we doing? Can we really pull this off? Can we make enough money doing what we love? Do we have to sacrifice ourselves and our lives upon the altar of capitalism? How long can the money really last as we pursue the next part of the dream that’s taking longer than we planned to manifest? By January, the questions and the lowering cash flow really started pressing on us. I’m sure our work with death and decay had something to do with it too. A “too good to be true” full-time job landed in my email inbox. I was scared and questioned what the universe seemed to be offering me. Dreams, after all, don’t always end up looking like how you originally thought. I decided to engage with the opportunity, and this began a three month long journey of uncovering my many still yet to be explored fears, hopes, yearnings, intuitions, and bodily responses. In the end, I realized that even though my prior experience would enable a certain job to be the perfect fit, I was no longer a perfect fit for my previous experiences. What do you do when your past identity doesn’t define you anymore, and your body simply won’t let it? I decided to be grateful for the opportunity to see all of this, and then I mourned, and felt the stretching and the discomfort. Then when I was through, I rested once more inside my dreams with renewed confidence and courage that this is where I should be.
Hopefully from the above challenges, you can see moving slower doesn’t remove life’s challenges altogether for those are surely where we have our greatest chance to grow and evolve. It just gives way to more freedom of movement - movement toward acceptance away from overwhelm. You know the overwhelm. The overwhelm that drags you kicking and screaming toward the edge of your window of tolerance, defending and projecting all the way. I can now see who I become in those moments, and that person can be cold and unfeeling, sometimes cruel, but nonetheless, a survivor. One I am grateful to since I am still here on this earth. Yet, I also know I can be more. I can handle the fear while staying in my heart and in my body. I just have to immerse myself slowly and let my nervous system get used to the idea. I need to find space to take deep breaths and unwind remembering that I can still actually breathe. Breath is freedom. Breath is the discovery of our resilience.
Now as we move out of Winter into Spring, I can feel a deep shift in my body. We are now preparing to plant seeds - all kinds of seeds: physical and metaphysical. After utilizing the deep winter to engage with our dreams and renew our commitment to them, we are about to start bringing the next phase of our vision down to the earth plane.
What is it you ask? There is much more to come, but for now I will be brief.
We figured out how to open one more short-term rental for the summer months only. It will be an off-grid forest cottage called Cocoon Cottage. I just recently completed the mood board for it (see below). We’re really excited to bring this vision to life.
With the opening up of this cottage, I will also begin exploring my intuitive nudges to host individual retreats for people who are hearing their soul calling and are on the wanderer’s path to discovery.
We will also be introducing Nadair Maine this Summer where we will offer elopement packages (including ceremony officiation, photography, and lodging) where couples can elope into the deep intimacy of nature and each other.
As I consider all of this energy rising within me, I also face feelings of complete inadequacy to actually build what we have said yes to. I see now how life moves us to the edges of our own understanding of what's possible, but we have to take the offer of naming our vision aloud and proud, while simultaneously leaning into trusting the process - then put the vision on the funeral pyre and light the fire so we can see what rise from its ashes - which becomes the portal into and beyond our wildest imagination. This is where I go. Who’s with me?
