Spring is unfolding its wings all around us—the earth is green again and ripe for creation.

What would you like to become? What would you like to bring to the world?

Filmmaker Velcro Ripper states in his documentary Occupy Love, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

What does this mean?

It means it’s time to step out of the identities and containers that have been forced upon us and begin, really and truly begin, to make ourselves in our own likeness.

Designing an authentic life is a creative and daring act—a wild yell of exuberance into the face of a society which does not recognize individual soul. Moreover, it is a way that we can midwife ourselves from this world and into the next. We will do this birthing with the tools we find in our hands, with what our life experiences and woundings have taught us, with that tiny glimmer of a spark we thought we lost long ago.

We will find our way by dream-light. We will find our way by taking leaps, by being vulnerable, by sighting and then catching and taming our dreams—these feral creature-visions we thought had run away from us.

We never so much as reunite with our dreams as we do stumble or trip over them. Usually some event or circumstance in life makes us stop, and plunges us into a state of exile; of being in between this world and the next. Often this state is accompanied by depression, what empath Karla McLaren calls “the stop sign of the soul.” This signals that the way in which we have been living is no longer serving us.

It must be replaced with something that is soul-making—the light of a dream.

In order to find our way out of this awkward, in-between place, we must pay attention to the threads which run beneath our lives, that create meaning out beyond the edges of our vision, out past the thousand things we cannot see.

How we follow these threads will be by looking for excitement, by being archaeologists for excitement, by excavating the places that shine only faintly until their glow is large enough to illuminate the room.

Unearthing a dream is a quest.

We can begin to sight its tracks along the ground by looking for a thought, feeling, activity or experience that shocks us alive and ignites us even for a moment with a kind of electricity, making its absence noticed when it is gone.

Cultivate spaces of openness, of wordlessness, of longing and keep watch—the thing which we are seeking may arrive when we least expect it.

We could be driving down the freeway, our faces soaked with tears, and realize we have missed our exit. We were lost in a memory which had come to us from childhood when we filled three notebooks with plans for a summer camp we wanted to host on our parents’ farm. They said we were too young, and we forgot about the notebooks, but then somehow, they came back to us in this moment.

We then remember our friend in Quebec who just bought a farm. We imagine we’re leading groups of kids over the hill and up to a line of trees, followed by goats with daisy chain necklaces.

All of this in an instant.

“Tell me, what will you do with your one wild and precious life,” asks the poet Mary Oliver.

Well, I ask you: What would you dare?

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Apprentice Editor: Alicia Wozniak/Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Flickr / HKD