Dreams Can Come True

When she was a child she lived in a war zone. Not literally, of course. Her world was bordered by a dusty, dirt road and crab and croaker filled creek but to her it was as dangerous and unfriendly as the battlefields of the Korean War from which her Uncle Bill had just returned. He’d given his army knife to her mother as a souvenir. Some nights when her mother and father’s verbal attacks were accompanied by pushing and shoving and flying fists she was sure the blade of that knife would end up protruding from her father’s hairless chest.

Her family never shared meals at the yellow Formica table that was pushed against the wall of their tiny kitchen. The surface of the table was covered with half finished crossword puzzles, overflowing ashtrays, and chipped mugs holding cold coffee. She and her sister ate in front of the television set. Her mother ate standing in the kitchen after she’d carried her father’s plate to the bedroom where he’d retreated with a paperback novel and a beer.

If she’d had friends she would have been ashamed for them to visit the modest house where cooking smells hung to the shabby drapes in the cramped living room and the smoke from her parents’ cigarettes had turned the walls a rancid yellow. But she had no friends.

As she grew older the anger, the poverty the filth that filled that little house displaced her, created a wall between her and the rest of the family. In order to deny the meagerness and rage of that house she had to abandon her family. She abandoned them emotionally long before she left them physically.

As a young woman she tried again and again to create a house that could hold the love, abundance and beauty she’d longed for as a child but the harder she tried the more miserably she failed.

It wasn’t until she’d almost given up trying that she realized she’d that her dream would never be reality until she’d forgiven her mother and father for their failings and herself for being ashamed of them and abandoning them. The guilt and blame was blocking her vision for herself.

She remembers the moment when this happened. She was in a beautiful room in the hills of Pennsylvania surrounded by men and women who had been strangers a week earlier. It was one of the last group meetings of the Adult Children of Alcoholics treatment she had reluctantly and desperately attended. They were each to give their answer to the question: What is your vision for yourself when you leave Chit Chat?

She raised her hand first. She’d been preparing the answer to that question her whole life. “I am going to have home where my friends know they can enter without knocking. A home where there is laughter, love and honesty. Where meals are shared around tables laden with meals prepared with thought and attention. Where I can feel safe and speak without fear.”

She went on and on. It was as though a plug had been removed and the words just flowed. Her vision was so crystal clear that she even began to describe the Christmas tree that would stand in the living room of the home that she had not even bought yet.

It all came true. The house, the friends, the meals even the Christmas tree. Forgiveness was the key that opened the lock for her and there is one truth that she believed to the bottom of her carefully manicured toes:

When the soul wants to have an experience of something, she throws an image of the thing ahead of her and then enters into it.

Meister Johann Eckhart