Never stop dreaming

As I live through the sometimes dark and blustery, often cold and inhospitable, New York days of winter, I feel down sometimes --- which is a feeling I know is universal to human experience, although knowing that doesn't make momentary blues easier to bear.

The other night, though, as I stopped at a street corner in the Bronx, where I live, I had a cosmic epiphany, of sorts.

In this magical moment, as the ink black sky was dominated by stellar diadems, as the Little Bear twinkled knowingly in the seemingly close farness of celestial majesty, everything made sense. As I wrote in a poem in the 1970s, called "Weightlessness," it all seemed part of "the Great Cosmic Affair."

Everything fit together. All was right. It felt as if an ultimate, benevolent power was embracing me for an instant that seemed a lifetime, in a forever moment of unimpeachable grandeur.

As the richness of the feeling receded to a warm glow, I slowly made my way back to my house. I began to reflect on the seemingly long-ago bitterly frigid winter days of my youth, when I would sit outside in the backyard of the old house.

I would be in a chair, with a 60x Tasco telescope my portal to the moon, the stars, and to all the infinite beauty that reminds me now why, grounded in earth's soil, we still can't stop dreaming of moonbeams and fairy dust, shiny stars and the wonder of the heavens, a happier life and a better world.

We will lose our footing, from time to time. We may, at times, feel weighed down by gravity, responsibilities and the passage of years. We might even forget to look up, now and again.

But then something will cause us to cast our vision skyward. Some small grace will be bestowed on us, some simple blessing will make itself known. Then we're back in the joy of knowing that hope, like the universe, is endless.

Dreams, like the horizon of space, are boundless. Love, like the capacity to wonder, is as spacious as our hearts allow it to be.

Hope, then, will always flourish as long as we believe in ourselves. As long as we believe in the life-giving power of love. As long as we have faith in our ability to conquer, or transform, any obstacle that's in our path.

Never stop dreaming of moonbeams and fairy dust, shiny stars and the wonder of the heavens, a happier life and a better world.

[Adapted from a commentary that appeared in Better Nutrition magazine in February 2001]