Wild Dreams Coming True: How You Can Do it Too

I know what I’d do if I won a million dollars, and it’s specific, concrete and timely. There’s a property I’d purchase.

“Why do you want that?” he asked me, unimpressed with my monologue as I showed him the details in the real estate listing.

“There’s even the little bridge!” He looked away, his version of dropping it and leaving me to my own ideas.

Buying it would be ridiculous—unless, of course, I win the lottery or experience a life change that forces a complete reckoning of my situation. Perhaps they are one and the same.

On YouTube, I delight in watching a family in Turkey go about their daily lives. It’s largely unspoken. There are cats, turkeys, and all kinds of wildlife. Flowers bloom everywhere, and it’s serene to watch.

As well as educational. This family is off the grid, and everything they do is a new way of doing things to me. The way they make tea is a matter of inserting a flaming log into a tap-bearing inner-chimney-wielding vessel I’ve never before seen.

The first time I watched her grind walnuts, dried fruit like apricots, and persimmons, I was exploding with the cost of it all. “That’s like $500 so far! How does she afford this?”

I asked just as the leading man tossed a bucket of walnuts to a flock of chickens. Where I am, that would have been about a hundred dollars. “Akk!! I bet those chickens are delicious!”

Later, I watched how they afforded it. They picked from their walnut trees, their loaded orchards obviously intentionally planted, and also foraged natural fields of abundance.

That’s what I’d do with that property – I’d load it with trees and fields of abundance, little meandering trails, and scattered outbuildings and sheds.

Planting Seeds

Over the last few years of becoming a gardener, I learned to grow apple trees from seeds. I also have orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees. Whenever a pit or a seed is produced out of my kitchen, I read up on how to grow it, and it goes back into the ground as a hopeful experiment.

The magic of seeds stuns me every time. I know people say this about people and birth, but as a woman, I can’t separate the miracle from the potential personal sacrifice. Seeds ask little from me, and make bold promises in return.

When I bought “the tomato lover’s tomato” in the grocery store, I planted four seeds, and now have four plants. That’s the kind of frugal person I am – only years after having spent hundreds of dollars on plants and seeds.

My dream property is a hobby farm, and I’d hobby farm it for sure. An English version of the scene I watch play out in Turkey on YouTube. Greatness plants the seed of inspiration, but like the seed of an apple, you don’t always know how the final fruit will taste.

Whether I win the lottery or not, every sunny day I head outside to garden. I plant fruit trees and berry bushes, OSC’s Victory Garden, and protective flowers like marigolds. I’m practicing and learning in a way that the land ownership does not matter.

It is a victory to garden. Having a new appreciation for farming and where food comes from is a peaceful gift of patience, fortitude and creativity, for it takes all that to plant a seed that will nourish you.

Creating Comfort

I do remember the school lessons about seeds, gardens, and food, but I did not comprehend the gravity of it all, just like my old audience, who understood the words, passed the tests, and yet failed to internalize what I’d said.

We all have our time when the ah-ha strikes, when the seed of the lesson blossoms into a new way of being.

On Sunday, I was busy gardening when I noticed that my partner was entertaining a guest who’d arrived via boat and his employee was waiting for her water taxi to arrive. There were only two chairs on the dock, no one was sitting in “mine.”

Instead, his guest lingered between standing and sitting in his boat, and his employee sat on the ledge.

As I went around the house ensuring space for a third party, I already knew I needed more chairs on the dock.

I was late carrying them down, and our guest was already fishing. A Muskoka chair heaved over my head, I called out, “I brought you a chair,” for lack of something better to say.

“Oh no, I stand while I fish,” he said.

“Okay, very good.” I put the solid wood chair down and talked about fishing before returning to cleaning.

Later, as soon as I joined the party, he apologized. “I’m so sorry. I should have said immediately thank you. Thank you! That was so rude of me. You brought me a chair and I didn’t even say thank you first.”

I was completely caught off guard, and I loved it. Neither of us was used to this, and both of us were practicing our higher selves: I learning to accept appreciation, even expecting it; and he becoming less assuming of being taken care of.

An equality balancing itself out.

Celebrating Daily

My partner will be sixty in a few days and doesn’t want a party. His old friend, our overnight guest, told me that his best birthday party was his fiftieth.

He’d told his then-girlfriend he didn’t want a party, but she arranged a surprise party. The main surprise was that it was the first time his newly discovered sisters and the sister he grew up with were all together. A whole happy family.

Maybe he was telling me that I should arrange a party anyway, but I responded with a story of my own: my fiftieth birthday party, which he treated as if it were any other day. I shared my pain and bafflement, which I enacted with the lowered shaking of my head.

Then I said, “After that, I don’t care about birthdays anymore. When you are a kid, it’s the one day you get to pick your menu and your friends and do what you want. As adults, we get to do that every single day.”

It’s a freedom I don’t take lightly or for granted. I defend it.

I picked up a dead branch from the lawn. My partner said, “You can throw that in the brush pile.”

I looked at him deadpan and asked, “Do you think I really need to be told what to do with it?”

He apologized. While he works on his propensity to control other people because simply asking for what he wanted as a child didn’t work, I work on helping him notice when he’s doing it.

We are both growing in ways that would have made our parents proud if they hadn’t caused the dents that are currently being smoothed out.

Still, I think watching old people become new people is something to behold.

However, I wasn’t completely honest. It’s how I wished I felt about birthdays and celebrations, but like a child, I want to be heard and noticed, just one day.

Over dinner the night before, I shared a couple of stories about snowmobiling with my partner. The first one I told with pride about passing him and a few other men, and the second, where someone said to me, “If I’d known he’d slowed down so much, I would have brought my girlfriend too.” Fast men don’t get old, they just slow down.

After I told these tales, I was asked if I rode a snowmobile, like my own, not just on the back. Wasn’t I just talking about that?

When we were alone again, I asked my partner why people never hear me when I speak.

He too was shocked that I’d been heard, yet nothing had sunk in.

I told him that it was the bane of my speaking career. I’d speak for forty-five minutes, only to learn that no one had comprehended anything I’d said. They could repeat some words, significant points, and quotes they recognized, but if they thought I would say something else, that’s what they heard.

I believe distraction claimed many. I think many were thinking about their shopping lists, and I did nothing to interrupt their stream of consciousness or behaviour.

Disgustingly, I know that there were men in my audience who never intended to hear a word and were there for visual entertainment only, to put it in a way that maintains some respect for my body.

This is how I discovered you can’t change anyone’s mind – you can only find those who already agree with you, and want to know, “Now what?”

Creating Matches

Everyone digests life’s lessons, but not at the same time.

Incubation periods vary widely, as some are bred to say please and thank you from birth, and others are consciously working at it in their sixties. Lessons and timelines vary widely.

When you realize that communication is a matching game, not a creative activity, you can approach conversation more liberated. Say what you want, and I’ll say mine, and likely, you go your way and I go mine. Untouched. Unscathed. Unmoved.

Without the expectation that I will listen, reflect and if necessary, incorporate your words into my working worldview, game on. Let’s talk. I had no idea that the mantle I carried was mine alone. I thought we were all doing that. Now I realize it was just me.

I was malleable, a work in progress, open to the fact that I did not know what I did not know and sayings like, “You never know,” were a fixture in my world, and not because it was coming out of my mouth. It came out of the mechanic’s mouth, the attendant at the landfill, the cashier behind the till. Common people who are much smarter than the people who would never admit that they didn’t know something, and more couldn’t know it.

To posture behind having all the answers and being the only saviour in a crisis is so laughable except for the fact that this Prime Minister can’t even flip a pancake. If the crisis involved feeding people, you can exit stage left because that was an utter fail. Catching the wet side on the spatula? Does he not have the first clue?

That’s not someone I’d follow, not even out of a dark hole.

Pointing Ignorance

While we approach conversations as if they are a ping pong game of words tossed back and forth, remember that the worst thing that can happen is to assume that one happened. Words aren’t always received, and certainly not in the form or weight always intended.

Yet years later, words do land, and people change. This guy is trying to remember his polite words because someone made a point of pointing them out to him. “You know how you’re always on me to say please and thank you? Someone was on him, too. He wasn’t always like that.”

The first time I met this guy he barbequed for us. It was peameal and the hardest, driest I’ve ever eaten. No one said anything, but we continued to postulate why he’d done it. Was it a mistake? Did he think it was regular bacon? Was he punishing us?

This time, it was New York Strip on the grill, and when I said medium-rare, I kicked myself, knowing that I should have said blue-rare to get it the way I wanted.

How is this guy so confident in his skills while legendarily dehydrating everything? Because no one says a word.

“Thanks for dinner,” I said, and I was grateful. I kept all the rest of the “feedback” to myself, because unless it really matters, it doesn’t.

Let people be who and how they want, and I’ll never stop being fascinated by these examples of how people patently ignore reality.

That was one dry, tough steak, but if you’ve always been the chef, you may not know any other way they might taste.

The only way to dream is to give up the control, to let go of the reins, to let someone else take the lead.

Articulating Orders

For the last four years, every day I’ve asked, “What would you like for dinner?”

Last week I heard in response, “What would you like for dinner?”
It wasn’t even my birthday.

As a child, I got lost at the Calgary Stampede. I climbed into the center of a clothes rack and looked for someone I recognized. “All of a sudden,” my dad said, “Your hand was in mine.”

I can save myself. I always had. Why did it take me so long to realize that my stories spoke of a brave, strong, smart, determined little girl, and that was a good thing? Why did the goodness get lost?

Maybe it wasn’t a harbinger of success for a girl to be a thorn. My berry bushes have taught me that thorns are there to ward off predators, and I could have used those thorny powers at times, but now I know what power is – it is something to be honed and controlled with precision and accuracy, not ignored or diminished.

It is choosing the right words for the right audience at the right time. Words have power, whether they seem to bounce off other people or sting them where they already hurt.

Words can also lift people up and carry them for days. It’s my prayer to be able to do the latter whenever, wherever, and however I can.

Someone told me, “If you have nothing kind to say, don’t say anything at all.” So I bit my mean and nasty words.

Internalized, they infected me, and that wasn’t working. Excised and externalized, it was hard, harsh and at times horrid.

Now, I look deliberately for kindness. That’s what I needed to be shown. Not silence, but the other option.

Finding praiseworthiness when in pain is the trick of kindness.

Wild dreams can come true; they do. Pick one, say it out loud, and start seeing it everywhere.

People appreciate and sometimes even remember to act it out and say it out loud. They like, share, comment, subscribe and download to their heart’s content. They don’t quite get the content, and their questions are insightful, deep, and clearly rooted within the sparks of ideas that must be exposed.

A match made in conversation.

Thank you for thinking of me and for putting that thought into action. I know you could have done so many other things with that moment, that energy, that attention, and you picked me.

I am so honoured. Now, go make your wild dreams come true.

To Be Blunt and Direct

As I’ve learned that my message can be too subtle, too deep, too encoded in weird little stories with unclear morals, let me be perfectly blunt and direct with the steps you need to take to make your wild dreams come true.

Yes, here’s how you can do it too:

Step 1: Figure out what you want.

Step 2: Work your way towards it, relentlessly, completely, and totally.

If you need help getting there quicker, check out the downloads for the specifics. Ditto if you need the confidence that you are headed in the right direction.

Let me know if I can be of any further help. Sweet dreams!