I recently wrote about the law of attraction, which basically states that you attract into your life the people and circumstances that harmonize with your dominant thoughts. I have always put a great deal of faith in this principle. The idea of it is terribly fantastic:
your dreams will come true.
It's been a while since I've lost myself in a grand-scale, future-changing, drive-your-life, consume-your-imagination kind of dream. Somewhere in the process of defending a dissertation, taking several exams on a weekly basis, boards, more boards, moving, working, etc. I fell out of the dreaming habit. Or I might have been too damn tired.
I know what happens when you fail to create a life through your dreams: the result is stagnation, frustration, restriction. It's terrible and I want to avoid it. So I've forced myself to list my goals and the like but the exercise lacks passion. It has been a half-hearted effort because I haven't known what I wanted outside of te really fundamental things like Tim & Ada. Like so many things, it's an organic process: you can't rush the creation of a good dream.
Thank God, it looks as though the dream-free dry spell is officially over. The re-awakening started with the birth of Ada. It's impossible to not have a child and have dreams for them, to imagine your life with them, to visualize the home you want to create for them. Since then I've been stretching my dream muscles and the pieces are starting to fall into place now. Oh, beauty!! Movin' on to better things...
Portland. Who knew? We arrived yesterday few expectations. Tim has an NIH grant-writing workshop so Ada & I are on our own to explore this city that our friend Katie has called home for a grand total of 5 days. Today we walked Tim to his thing and went on to walk around downtown Portland. Ada fell asleep so Mama kept walking.
What I found was a breath of fresh air: this place has real good energy. I like it here. People smiled at me and my child. This is a departure from our trips through the Castro where the best we can hope for is to be ignored but typically we are glared at while "
breeder" is mumbled under breath. Nobody knocked into us. I wasn't cut off even once. Common civility reigned.There was cleanliness. I saw only 3 homeless people and none of them heckled me for money. There is a humility to the people here. I'm not one for much sparkle or flash. I like good people. Real people. From what I've seen it wouldn't appear that the vast majority fancy themselves as the exception. I half expected for little singing birdies to bring me a coffee while little bunnies put slippers on my feet.
I learned something about myself today. I was leafing through a real estate booklet and I saw a beautiful craftsman style house, so common here. My first thought when I saw the picture of that house?
I love it. My second thought?
I could never live there. I caught myself thinking this.
Why not? I asked myself. Then I realized....when I see a house like this - a house that a FAMILY lives in I see all the stability that I have always craved. Somehow, in my mind to live in a place like this you have to have some kind of stable family history to give your efforts some credibility. It's ridiculous, I know it is. But there it was, unearthed from my psyche by a real estate magazine. I can examine that thought now and have decided to dismiss it altogether. If I want to live in an old farmhouse then that's exactly what I'm going to do, damn it.
Our first full day in Portland peaked with a picnic on the soft, green grass under the shade of a tree next to the Willamette River. It was a perfect day.
The other thing that I love about this city is how I feel here. Dreamy, is how I feel.
