When Pigs Fly

While hiking at Lime Creek Nature Center this week, my wife and I took advantage of a situation that has become somewhat rare: the opportunity to talk to our daughters while on a hike. Since they've acquired biking skills, they vastly prefer the exhilaration and freedom of pedaling to our daily destinations. As we were trekking on muddy trails on Sunday, they had no other option but to walk next to us and tell us what's on their mind.

I love what's on Elise's mind.

Elise is our dreamer. She dreams in full-color, with bright, bold, certain strokes. Her mental paintings are never quite finished; there's always something to add to this corner, or a different color to mix here, or perhaps a better outline. But she is not afraid to paint.

She told us she's going to be an art teacher, no question about it. It's a mathematical certainty in her mind today. I offered my verbal assent, telling her that I was on board with that because it would make it easy to do RAGBRAI together if she had the summers off. But I was using the wrong paint-brush for this dream. No, she informed me. That wouldn't work. She'll be offering art classes that week for people who aren't on RAGBRAI. Probably kids. In fact, they'll be camping. She might have to borrow our large tent for them to all fit in, but it will be a week of art. And the plans kept tumbling out of her mouth, steady and out of order and bubbling, and I knew she could see it, see herself in it, this grand and specific dream.

I hope she draws a picture of this one. She usually draws a picture of the plan. Last year she started talking about this tree house her and her friend would build so that they could play there and keep the boys away. Again, this was a plan I could get on board. Then she showed me the drawing she had been working on.

You can see the strategic pulley-system, the rope ladder, and the list of supplies ready to fill it. The two of them have no tree big enough, no contractor on stand-by, no money, no materials, and no time. Yet there it stands. She's even made up formal invitations to announce it's grand opening to their friends. It's as real as anything I've ever built in my life.

My daughter is a dreamer, and it is perhaps what I love about her the most.

Adults like me need a dose of dreaming now and then. Maybe even more often that that. For a dream has life in it, much more so than do all the obstacles and limitations that we allow to fill our mind and dominate our sight. Dreams like Elise's dreams assume the best of the world. They are born of eternal optimism and are fed by a steady diet of images, fuzzy images, not entirely clear but real enough images somewhere in the back of our brain where we can see ourselves in this dream and we like who and what we see. 

Most dreams will not be discarded. Rather, they will fall by the wayside, unknowingly jostled out of the mind by this bump or that breeze, never to return to the journey. They will be replaced. They most likely will not come to fruition.

But the joy in painting in painting the dream! In speaking it and breathing it and sharing it, ignoring the critics and the obstacles and the laws of science and finance and the time/space continuum. I am unsure of the practical benefit. But I do know the effect on the soul.

I leave you with this. One of our favorite children's authors, Sandra Boynton, wrote a song in which the lyrics pierce right to the heart of this, and Ryan Adams was kind enough to provide the vocals. The video of the song, entitled "When Pigs Fly," is here. May we all look for the winged swine in our lives.