Dreams and Realities
We all have dreams that fiercely flicker in the darkest depth of our being; they envelope us like string made of sunlight, spilling through a forest canopy to recover something precious from the Earth. But always we awake to sights and sounds that take us away. We rise, we wash, we eat, we travel, we work, we worry. And always there is that something, that compost composed of all that humanity has discarded because they did not believe it could survive. And because we did not believe in its survival, this precious something seemed to die. And all around us there was injustice: a billion people living on a dollar per day; wars raging in jungles, in deserts, in mountains; millions of human beings languishing in jails for drug addiction, dying from curable disease, despairing of tomorrow, their today filled with sorry; hundreds of millions lacking access to clean air, clean water, information, health care, good governance, good schools, and hope; an environment stretched its limits, struggling to satiate a boundless hunger…
Oh, but even though we thought it dead, this precious something had instead been accumulating beneath our feet. The rivers, streams, beaches, oceans, and even the pavements, the parking lots, the abandoned plots of land strewn about the world, all contain the soil of hope, of justice, of love, of beauty, of truth, and from that soil can sprout the world we all have sought.