What's Worse Than Living Out a Busted Dream?

#020 Here Come the Hungry Bears

If you asked me how I envisioned my life as an adult when I was a child, I’d have told you that I wanted to live on a ranch to raise two basketball teams of children. I saw myself taking them all on horseback rides daily, milking cows and scooping up chicken eggs from the coop. It was one of only a handful of lifestyle dreams I’d conjured up then.

But when this childhood dream partially materialized when I was nineteen years old, my romanticization of a gigantic family fizzled fast and it left me vulnerable to hastiness and what the I Ching (易經) calls, the hungry bears.

My last summer as a teenager sent me to the deep, mosquito-filled woods of Louisiana to celebrate the Fourth of July with the extended family of a few folks I knew then.

Photo by weston m on Unsplash

Beautifully tall trees and their electric green canopies filled every neighbor’s front and back yard. With each of the neighborhood homes hidden, the street we were on felt like a dense, dewey forest.

As the youngest adult female in the company of so many that July, the older adults passed on their collective ten children to me to watch for the duration of my trip. Most of the children were under the age of ten, so I had them sit together around a table to draw and color. Then, in a moment of coloring along with them I suddenly felt that wrinkle in time when your childhood dream lines up with your reality.

I tasted the moment of mega-motherhood I thought I wanted.

I observed the sharp contrast between my role, and what the men there got to do. The men maintained their independence and freedom, carrying their masculinity with a carefree pride that gnawed at me either with a type of envy or agitation. These men paid little attention to the little ones. And they chuckled amongst themselves as they darted out of the door, quiet and selfish about where they were going and for how long. I felt locked indoors, and I began to fill with resentment about my maternal position in that house.

The sampling of motherhood was like prison, and I began to want for the adventure I saw freely given to men.

I felt overwhelm and a lack of fairness, and an expectation of domestic duty. I certainly didn’t like what it felt like to be tethered to so many children. I didn’t like that it felt as though I lost my freedom. I didn’t like the repetition of telling the children that their confusing and colorful drawings were, “So awesome! Keep drawing baby…” so that I didn’t puncture their tender imaginations and sensitivities.

Hours later that Fourth of July night everyone was greeted by the darkness, and nearly thirty of us hurried outside for a home-made light show. The men had returned with bundles of fireworks, and six packs of glass bottles of beer. We found our seats on foldable butterfly chairs. Soon enough we watched empty and transparent green bottles get meticulously placed all around the concrete driveway.

Drunk, a few of the men dropped bottle rockets and sky rockets into each jar. Drunk, they lit the fuses. Drunk, one man tripped over a bottle, which fell into the other nearby bottles like dominos, aiming the fireworks at the children and everyone else outside. The sizzle of the fuses became a frightening countdown.

Drunk, the man laughed and rolled on the ground, unable to turn the bottles upright.

In a flash, I next heard a roar of frightful screams, coupled with drunken laughter. Parked cars on the edge of the driveway and inside the garage, with tanks full of fuel left me worried for mass explosions.

I took refuge behind a tree. I watched the children dart inside and in all directions trying to hide before time ran out.

The symphony of fireworks burst off next.

(This is nearly what happened ↓)

Rockets launched horizontally into the bushes and front of the house, exploding wider than we were tall or wide in familiar golden and green bursts. Children and adults screamed and laughed in what felt like a slow-motion film of mayhem. Explosions in red and gold jolted up through the tall tree canopy into the sky. Pulses of light beamed against the backdrop of chaos below. Thankfully, no one was hit by the debris.

In the peak of chaotic joy though, I had to reckon with the totality of the childhood dream I saw playing out right before my eyes. It was not a dream that I wanted after all. At nineteen, everything about mega-motherhood felt like a burden. And if my dream wanted to birth itself in the company of the folks I knew then, I was on a trajectory of terror and regular nights of drunken stupidity.

Sometime in the last ten years or so I read somewhere that the purpose of our first three decades on Earth is the time in which we’re supposed to dream. Then, in the decades after, we’re supposed to execute those dreams. It’s not that I don’t think adulthood makes us incapable of dreaming. It’s that perhaps those dreams, dreamed together, act as a North Star.

Around our twenty-ninth birthday the planet Saturn returns to the same spot as the day you were born. This event is a somewhat commonly discussed concept in astrology known as the Saturn Return - the beginning of fulfilling those dreams.

For those that don’t do much dreaming or imagining, the bucket of dreams carried into adulthood might be a tad-bit shallow.

Unaware of this then, I didn’t tap into the remaining decade of the dream force field available to me after my dream of mega-motherhood collapsed. Instead, I held to the handful of dreams that remained.

And what happens to you if you find yourself without enough dreams of your own when it’s time to cross that threshold into adult land?

Well, I must have begun to reek of the “shallow dreamer” after my short summer stay in Louisiana because for a few years a certain type of happening began to occur, repeatedly.

The first, and unfortunately not the last, was that I got picked up in Dixie Land. Sussed out by a married Cajun couple who selected naive little me out of all my other coworkers.

I was twenty-something teaching in the public schools in the mornings, and selling carpet and rugs at my second job at night. When the couple handed their business card to me I thought they were ordinary customers who were extending a real opportunity.

We exist to help live better, healthier lives.

Unbeknownst to me, the hungry bears had arrived - the people who drain your energy and who are power hungry. Or, they could just as easily be called dream snatchers.

I thought they were nice.

I thought they liked me.

I believed the words they said.

A week or so after our first encounter the married couple invited me to their ranch land in Tennessee. They put me up in their guest house for a weekend. I disregarded my body’s warning signals… The coughing that wanted me to say less. The runny nose that asked me to run…

They told me I was going to gain financial freedom.

Be my own boss.

Make residual income. Make passive income.

They told me that I was going to be a diamond - I was going to become a wealthy business woman if I just followed their instructions to sell $300 worth of food and goods to people each month.

I hesitated. But they knew what to say to quell my hesitation. And they knew where I worked. I entered their multi-level marketing business scheme fronting the money for my new business. I downed energy drinks, ate food bars, swallowed multi-vitamins and multi-minerals to the tune of $300 each month. The only great part about this monthly expense was that I went down a rabbit hole learning about mineral deficiencies in modern humans, and I became a bit obsessed with the powers of zinc and magnesium.

As part of my training they drove me to the outlet shopping stores to pick up other people, just like they’d done with me. To encourage me to work harder - to be more successful at recruiting others, they took me to the parties of some of the local diamonds and told me that I too could have what I saw.

Other people’s dreams for me seemed nice enough - good enough.

But I knew they weren’t mine.

Maybe the wife noticed this. She pulled me aside and asked me what big dreams I had. I struggled. Then she did the thing I don’t think that even I expected - she told me to dream big.

However, I found it incredibly difficult to tether my big dreams to MLM success.

Shortly after that assignment, I understood that an introvert like myself had no business with the MLM’s of the world. I’d started to grasp what was trying to tether itself to me, and suckle my energy.

I quit.

But what I wonder about now though is whether I might have warded off these hungry bears, and the many that came after them, if my own bucket of dreams had been more full. Are our own dreams, and the pursuit of them, that which protects and nurtures us? Do dreams act as waking signals to keep us on track? Or was I just someone who was more content in believing in others’ dreams for me?

Thank you so much for reading. Many thanks to the Foster writer collective for its writing container, writing circles, editing, and so many other beautiful writer resources.

In our modern world turning to a spiritual journey is a sacred rite of passage with an infinite number of paths to explore. Being well-prepared before embarking on this journey is what I wish I had been equipped with so long ago. If the idea of being well-prepared for your spiritual journey resonates with you, then I invite you to join the waitlist for my upcoming course. The nature of your role in the universe is not to be underestimated.