Follow That Dream

There is a street sign here in the Yucatan that says exactly what it means. No metaphor required.

FOLLOW THAT DREAM, teal and white, bolted to a plain pole outside a fence painted with tacos and skincare and aphrodisiac hot dogs — the sacred and the absurd sharing the same wall, the way they always do when you’re paying attention.

I stood under it and pointed up, half-joking, half-not. Because that’s the trick of a dream worth following: it rarely announces itself as serious. It looks like a street sign. A stray line in a book. A city you weren’t planning to move to.

We tend to talk about home as a place we’re moving toward — the destination at the end of the dream, the reward for finally arriving. But home was never a location waiting for us down the road.

Home is what happens when we stop outsourcing ourselves to a place, a title, a version of arrival that keeps receding the closer we get. The walking doesn’t end when we get there, because there was never a there. There was only the return — to center, to self, to the person doing the walking.

That’s what makes following the dream feel impossible. We keep looking for the map before we’ll take the step, when the step is the map. The dream doesn’t clarify itself from a safe distance. It clarifies itself in motion — in the leaving, the relocating, the pointing up at a sign you didn’t put there but somehow needed to see.

So if it looks impossible, that’s not a stop sign. That’s just what a dream looks like before you’ve caught up to it.

Maybe the walk is part of the practice.

~ Timothy