Is it Time to Harvest the Truth of Your Childhood Dreams?
Can you remember your childhood dreams? Not the "What do you want to be when you grow up?" that adults ask children, although, that can be helpful too.
Do you remember the actual living dreams and beliefs of your unlimited child self? They are a goldmine of truth and an ancient pathway for your spiritual adult self.
What was your "I believe...?"
I believed that I could communicate with animals and plants.
Now, I know that it's true - it was true even then, I was just an impatient four year old and incapable of giving plants and animals what they wanted.
Nibs wanted me to pet him nice or leave him alone.
It was very simple, but boring. Nibs was a senior cat and was equivalent to a tired adult who works all the time and just wants to nap on the couch.
My four year old self was not satisfied with this and would instead entertain myself at his expense. Nibs and I were not close.
I felt connected to every animal or insect that accidentally found itself in our house.
I have a confession. I love flies.
I know, they're so gross to most people. But I love them, especially the bottle flies. They're fat and round and beautiful and shiny. Whenever a fly would be trapped in the house I would put out a little bottle cap of crushed cookie and a bottle cap of water.
It was the best that I could do for them and I've been feeding animals and insects where ever I can, ever since.
…there was a bit of a problem when I lived in Brampton though.
The bottle flies kept coming in through a hole in the screen but couldn't find their way back out again.
I enjoyed them at first.
They were bright and cute and preferred the cat food to my own food. Quickly though, there were too many.
WAY TOO MANY.
Sometimes I would paint, and my studio lamp would be the only light on in the house. Eventually the flies would be there with me, circling around my head with their incessant, irritatingly pitched buzzing.
Eventually there was a fly armageddon.
I am not proud. They wouldn’t leave.
I asked nicely.
Because of my belief in communicating with animals, when I was younger I wanted to be a veterinarian. That ended quickly though. Even at an early age I knew I couldn't stand to euthanize animals that didn't need to be, and I couldn't stand to deal with cruel or lazy or ignorant humans when it came to animal care.
I suspected that to become a veterinarian would require a hardening of my heart and I was afraid of what that would do to the rest of my life.
I wonder how my childhood belief that I could communicate with plants and animals would have evolved had I been taken seriously or asked simple questions by any adult in my life.
Why do you think you can do that?
What do you think that means?
Do you think you could do that as a job?
How could something like that help in the world?
Where do you think that would be most useful?
And maybe most importantly… does it make you feel happy?
Make it Real
My decisions these days are impacted directly by the dreams and beliefs of my childhood. Beloved Presence is plugged in to the belief that we can all communicate with plants and animals.
Beloved Presence is the name that I gave to the feeling of connection with the world that I've had since childhood and the catalyzing of my belief in Animism.
I'm sure as a young child I wouldn't have been able to answer those questions, but being asked them is planting the seed. It lends legitimacy and value to the deep truths we knew as children.
Deep truths that get lost on the way to adulthood.
✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️📕✏️
Journal Time
✏️ Spend some time and reconnect to your child self. Connect to the smells and feelings of your carefree unlimited self.
✏️ Write down as much of what you can remember about the types of childhood dreams you had. It doesn't matter how many or if they were day dreams or night dreams or you played make believe.
✏️ Get as specific as possible with specific moments in time and how you felt about them.
✏️ Connect to your body today and see what resonates with your life now.
✏️ Ask yourself the questions I posed above - what kinds of work are you doing now and does it resonate with anything you believed in your childhood dreams?
✏️ How do you feel about it? Feel your feelings Luke…
Thanks for reading!
Be gentle with yourself because no one teaches us how to live this way. No one teaches us how to use all our Presence and Being to find our Selves in the world and the Work that we will do.
No one teaches us how to rely as equally on empathic intuition and body sensation as we do logical rationality. No one teaches us how to make sense of these intense desires to share deep truths that we only partially understand. Be gentle with yourself.