Dream Walking
My Meandering Mind Helped Me Live Fully!
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 43 seconds
Since I was a young child, I have been dreaming not at night but during the day.
Most, if not all, of my childhood dreams never came to fruition.
However, since Jan died, my walking has increased in both the distance and the creative dreaming I do.
As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Only ideas won by walking have any value.”
After sleepwalking through the last two weeks of hospice and the first month or so after Jan died, my perambulations have intensified my brain’s default mode of mind wandering.
As Shane O’Mara‘s In Praise of Walking describes, mind wandering is “the repeated interrogation of autobiographical memory and a focus of attention from the immediate environment.”
On my early grief walks, my mind focused on doubts about Jan’s love, not the truth.
Walking sans headphones, I was able over time to accept that Jan’s love was transformative and that my only way forward was to share her passion as Merrit Malloy‘s poem Epitaph commands us,
Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.
One step at a time, the vision of Jan’s Memorial Garden formed in my mind, and bringing Jan’s spirit with me became a reality.
Neither my thoughts nor my footprints will be long remembered once I am gone.
But if, in some small way, they help keep Jan’s name alive and help repair the world, my meanderings will have been worth the thousands of steps I have taken.
I will always walk daily, and Jan’s love will never die!
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
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A Future Walking With Jan’s Spirit
My sound test on Zoom is a simple chant.
I test the microphone by saying, "I love Jan! I miss Jan!"
The message proves the microphone works and adjusts my frame of mind, so I am ready, willing, and able to host the Zoom call.
Yet, the change in the atmosphere does not fill the gap left in my heart since Jan died.
The OMordy Quotes help me put into perspective my circumstances,
What's destroyed can still be rebuilt, what's lost can still be found, what's broken can still be mended, an end is not always the end, it can also be a basis for a new and better beginning.My life with Jan has been erased, and I cannot simply mend my brokenness.
Day Dreamers
My Meandering Mind Helped Me Live Fully!
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 43 secondsT. E. Lawrence‘s quote explains the difference between dreams of the night and the day and has helped me to accept that I am a daydreamer.
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
