to dream with eyes wide open

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to find the beauty in winter. I love hibernating, if you will.

It’s when I come home to myself.

I go inward. I tune out the noise. I tune out the world.

I rest.

This is a necessary part of the cycle.

Of seasons, of humans, of life.

Winter is sacred.

But there’s something about Spring.

Something even more dreamlike than the winter we emerge from from. 

It brings out feelings and senses in me unlike any other time of year.

It’s a feeling of anticipation.

Restless excitement.

Like something beautiful is right around the corner.

Like anything could happen.

It’s an urge to leave our comfort zones, and wander.

It’s the desire to go out there - anywhere - and test out everything we absorbed during our months of hibernation.

To try our new selves out, to feel how the sun feels in this skin.

Spring brings out a specific curiosity in me that I can only relate to being a kid. 

Springtime feels like youth.

I think that’s what me, the hippies, the stoners, the crypto kings and their influencer girlfriends are really doing when we all head out to the desert every April.

We’re all just chasing our youth. 

The freedom of being a kid again. 

What it felt like to be made of magic. To be awestruck at a leaf on the sidewalk.

To experience the world for the first time.

To fill the entire sky with your dreams and wholeheartedly believe in every single one. 

To dream with eyes wide open.

To learn to embody our who we truly are, we must look to who we really were. 

Who we were at the very beginning. 

Who we were in the Spring of our lives. 

So follow the homesickness you feel for your soul and let it guide you back.

Because youth was never gone, just lost. 

We were so deeply connected to our real selves back then. We were, for a short period of time, completely soulful.  Pure, good, innocent, hopeful. We had no choice to be anything else yet. We were too fresh from the heavens. 

I think we miss that. I think we miss who we were before the real world got to us. 

A homesickness for who we are supposed to be. 

What’s fascinating, is that we are all unified in this yearning. Our pull to return to who we once were as children. 

And because this feeling is so powerful, so universal, I have to believe it’s simply another necessary part of the cycle. 

It’s nature. It’s human. It’s something we can all hold on to. 

We find it on spontaneous road trips. 

When we dance like our bodies want to dance.

When we sing our favorite songs loudly and passionately. 

When we laugh until until our bellies hurt. 

When we stay up all night and pay for the consequences another day.

We find youth when we admire the stars, when we name our favorite trees, when we make a life long friend after one great night. 

When we run like the wind, just because we can.

At the end of the day, life is one short trip.

But for the truly young at heart,

it’s all just one long dream.

Don’t wake me up yet. 

indy