The courage to pick up and carry one’s dream is the heaviest lift a person can ever engage in. All our lives we skirt the issue, beating about the bush, living shallow, easy lives. In the deep recesses of our minds we get glimpses of what we want. What we really really want. Sometimes is it not formed with great clarity. Sometimes it is hazy. Sometimes it is just incomplete.

But every once in a while we do come across it with vividness and clarity, as it lays bare all its dimensions and its full consequence.

It is in these brief moments that we come face to face with the most momentous decisions of our lives. Where we have to pick it up or let it just sit there, perhaps to be visited again, perhaps not. Each time we come back its colors have faded a little bit more in direct proportion to our missing courage. We may get a few such chances in all our life, if we are lucky.

This perhaps is the most fundamental differenece between personal fulfillment and not.

The Jewel

in the deepest recesses of my being

where mind and heart meet

lay, the shining jewel

yet untouched,

pristine

I labored on

shoulders drooped

ploughing time’s fields day after day

yoked

to life’s burdens

in flashes

in glimpses

in moments of tired contemplation

briefly, rarely

did I ever see, the light that shone inside

so tired I was

so harried

never did I stop

to gaze at it fully

or dare add to my burden to carry

at last one day

when time had stalled

in a lucid moment of inspiration

I picked it up “The Jewel”,

that was my Dream

it weighs much

my Dream, it does

yet my shoulders do not droop now

in labor of love

I toil

no more do I slave

in endless cornfields of time

each moment now

a sprightly journey

of purpose

in the deepest recesses of my being

my mind and heart

now lie in embrace,

melded into one

in the bright, intense heat of

My Dream