NIGHT & DAY

For years my life was marked/measured by the days, their events and circumstances, by work or by play, and by the emotional and mental conditions of the day.  But recently a strange transition seems to be occurring; the days are taking on an increasing sameness, while the nights are becoming unique.  How many times will I wake up because my shoulders hurt or I have to pee?  Will one of the dogs have to go out?   Will Patience poke me and tell me to roll over because I’m snoring?  Sometimes I wake up on my own and find that I am wide-awake at 3 A.M.  I may eventually fall back to sleep, or get up and go into my study and read or listen to music.  Or it might be a dream, one of the occasional profound dreams from which I awake, and then return to that intermediate state between awakeness and sleep, not knowing if I am consciously continuing the dream or not.

While the days are becoming predictable and, for the most part, under my control, the nights are just the opposite, and I approach them wondering what they have in store for me.

THANK YOU FOR TEACHING ME TO DREAM

I am posting a copy of the last of my 2013 Studio/Gallery 5 e-newsletters which I sent two days ago, followed by a few comments inspired by my daughter Sara's response.

DREAMS OF A YOUNG ARTIST

Oh to be young and fearless again.  Actually just being young again would do, but for the sake of this letter fearless has to be part of the mix. Encouraged by commercial success during my early years as an artist, I harbored ambitious dreams for myself.  One of them was to see my art on the cover of the New Yorker magazine.  I was convinced I could make that happen.  In fact I was so confident that I created a series of paintings, composed to fit the cover of the magazine and accommodate the text.   Eventually reality intervened and I never queried the magazine with my cover art.  (I learned that they do not accept un-solicited artwork.)  I later sold several of the paintings, but a few remain, resting quietly in a file drawer in the gallery.

    

       

        I am not haunted by the dreams that never made it, because so many did.  (I still think they would have made great covers.)  If you don’t allow yourself a dream, you can be sure it will never happen.  If you allow yourself a dream, there is always the chance it may happen.  The choice is ours, and I choose to dream, even as an old artist.

THANK YOU FOR TEACHING ME TO DREAM

Responding to my newsletter, Sara wrote this simple line:  “I love these dad.  Thank you for teaching me to dream.

The sentiment expressed in those 7 words – “Thank your for teaching me to dream” - fills me with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment  beyond my ability to describe.  Teaching my children to trust and to nurture their dreams was very important to me.  (It is probably more accurate to describe my role as allowing and encouraging them to dream rather than teaching them.)  The message is a simple one; not everyone can be whatever they want to be, or do whatever they want to do.  But everyone can try.  And dreams are both the foundation and the force that sustain these efforts.  These are not mindless, pie in the sky dreams detached from reality.  These are the dreams that determine who we are, and how we choose to live our lives, dreams that call on us to use all of our facilities to achieve our goals, dreams that take us from within ourselves into the world around us.

There are no guarantees or promises of success and happiness, and the satisfaction of knowing we made the effort may be the only reward.