a dream being lived into reality.

then. now.

inside me lives the dream of a ten-year-old girl. it is a sunday morning and this girl is curled up in the blue chair that sits next to the windows in her bedroom; she wears a long white notre dame nightshirt and her father's old yellow bathrobe. she looks out the window at the forest and the hill she cannot see behind and the big rock in middle of the front yard and she closes her eyes and begins to dream up a story of a girl and her horse as they walk through this forest, the leaves crunching beneath their feet and their breathing the only sounds. this little girl sits in her bedroom and she creates stories from the dreams inside her head, inside her heart. and some days, she opens her eyes and begins to write. on this day, she writes. a girl. a horse. a ghost. characters are born and come to life with each letter written on the page.

in this blue chair, the girl daydreams and sometimes turns those daydreams into sentences and snippets of stories....she dreams...she dreams...

this girl, she dreams an anne shirley sort of dream as she wishes to turn the daydreams into stories that will find themselves typed onto pages of a book that will be bound and appear on her grade school's library shelves. however, for the next ten years, when asked what she wants to be when she grows up, her mouth will answer lawyer or doctor, depending on the day, but her heart will whisper writer. yes, each time, her heart will whisper writer and she will pretend she cannot hear.

a few years ago, this girl, this girl who is me, this woman who i am found herself at a moment on her path where her mind was quiet enough to hear the daydreams of a little girl.

(i'll say it this way) a few years ago, life shifted in such a way that my mind was quiet enough to finally hear the whispered dreams of that ten-year-old girl who is me, the whispers i had somehow forgotten how to hear. life shifted and i found myself reaching in to find a way to make sense of these shifts and i heard those whispered dreams and i began to pay attention.

and today, in this moment, i find myself living this dream, this "i want to be a writer some day" dream, into reality. this dream is being lived into reality because a friend, who happens to be an editor, believes in me and the stories i have to tell enough that one day she said she envisioned me writing a book that would invite others to look inward at the journey they are on and how they can tell their stories through creating and photos and words.

i am writing a book. a book about looking inward toward the journey that makes up who we are and then putting what we are learning and finding and sifting through out into the world through creating and writing. several amazing contributors will be sharing photographs, mixed-media artwork, and poetry that illustrate this inner excavation that becomes the glimpses, the self-portraits, of pieces of who we are.

a dream being lived into reality.

i will be sharing more about the book as the process of writing it unfolds over the next few months...

and i really just want to say thank you. thank you for being on this journey with me...