Do your dreams still know where you live? Can they find you?

Sitting at the Padaria Reis Magos taking my tiny coffee in the brilliant August sun… staring out at that ocean the color of dark lapis and sparkling aquamarine— shot through with gold light and white caps. 

I fly out in four hours. 

What a glorious summer it’s been… balconies open to the breezes through the days and nights, waves on the shore below weaving through my playlists as I sat writing my second book. 

I should mention, cold showers were my AC on the hot days, and just shorts and tank tops even at late night dinners down the coast. 

I unexpectedly formed more family here on the island this time. Already my Michael and Elle–my German Psychotherapists, and a few others… but now I have a community of Madeirans, Russians & Ukrainians, South Africans, Germans and even an American … 

And… 🥁🥁🥁 (drumroll, please)  I have a Portuguese ID number and bank account! No small feat for a summer on the island. Even Petra, the bank manager working with me, was astonished, telling me emphatically, “You must be a very good person!  Everything works like magic for you!”

So I sit here with that perfect line of the horizon dividing the sky and an infinite sea of possibilities in front of me. And I think how many years I ached to live in my own home, abroad. It’s very close to coming true, this dream of dreams. 

I am surrounded by people in this little community who picked up their lives from far points on the globe to live in a new world. To find and to make a life and community in a paradise for themselves. 

So many moments in these past years of extreme discomfort. Of feeling often stuck, landlocked, life-locked. Adapting to the unexpected full-stops. Having to take the short steps for survival as an entrepreneur through a pandemic. The short steps to build stronger health. 

I will tell you I struggle so damn hard with short steps. 

But how can I tell you, too, arriving this summer and all the conversations with strangers and new friends giving me exactly the perfect information I needed at the perfect moments to move my dream forward…   All I did was answer the extreme ache inside, this past March, to book my summer here no matter the sacrifices. 

It’s hard to let go to the flow of life and dreams when security hangs in the balance. But oh how unimaginable the adventures and the miracle-leaps that occur. 

It’s been two years of arrested movement… only to have the timer of life suddenly ring for the event you didn’t know was always coming. Or maybe I did. Maybe we do. 

It’s just difficult to trust our hearts when our eyes are seeing the same routine happening each day. Still. There are the moments I unequivocally said YES. And I know for sure, we must pay close attention for those moments. And we must take the deep collective breath before destiny or providence, and declare our YES. 

I have said since I was a teenager, I would rather not live than to be inconsequential in my life. When we lose our dreams, we begin our slide toward death and inconsequence. 

Dreams are more precious than we ever realize. The dreams we have? They find *us*—not the other way ‘round. This is why I ask you whether your dreams can find your single unique address on the map of human life?  Our dreams arrive, then exist and live inside of us. They go quiet and disappear if we ignore them. 

Be honest enough to dream, and to listen to the dreams that enter in… Our dreaming is a gift no matter who we are.

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