Be Brave, Have Heart

All you can do is reach, jump, and run full force toward your dreams. Do not worry if they think you’re ridiculous. You probably are ridiculous. The secret is; we are all ridiculous. But the difference is that we are not all courageous.

The difference in you, you little dreamer, is courage.

It takes courage to pull your heart from its cage. The ribs will ache to bring it back. They will cry and twist and complain. They will let the wind howl mad through your bones, and tell you that you are not solid, you are not good enough, and that this is dangerous business.

And your bones will be right. It is dangerous business pulling your beating heart out like that. Open to the elements of wind and rain, and time.

I know you’ve stood a thousand times and felt the wind pull through you. But you were not swept away.

You must run for your dreams. Run for them until your knuckles bleed. We are made of mere moments. Whole people pressed together out of memory, hours and instants. One, a first kiss. One goodbye, and too many tears. Still another filled to the brim with hot pancakes in some mountain town with winding roads twisting out your name.

Go. Go wherever you must.

Courage is only a moment, a single step somewhere else. The world loves to tell you that you are strange, you are foolish, and you will fail. Well, I am foolish. I am completely ridiculous, because when I stare at the big blue sea sometimes my heart sings, and I am late for work to finish the tune. I am foolish because sometimes when the wind blows a dream out across my world, I wait whole days there to revive my parched soul.

There is a profound vulnerability in admitting your dreams out loud in the daylight hours. There is the most beautiful honesty in stating the simple demands of your heart in a masquerade world. That feeling, there, that bare and stripped down shaking. That is your courage starting up. Keep going.

I’m not talking about some ‘standing at the top of a mountain declaring your many facets of awesome to the birds and the breeze, and being all self-assured’ kind of courage (that stuff is nonsense, really.)

I’m talking about the quiet persistence of your single heart’s beating.

The shaking. That strength that grows from bones in those long, silent hours that pass like storms across the span of you lying in bed at 2am.

The times in the night

when the walls don’t rattle

they sit too still

and you wake up without a dream to tell

your intuition

still asleep

These are the times when you know you’re so very far from home. But home is just a space in your heart, kept quiet by this wide world. Full of all the impossible dreams, the unobtainable things. These times, when they come, you should run. Run to the ocean, to a forest, to a country. Run to a dollar bookstore if it makes you feel as warm and fuzzy as it does me. Run out of whatever tight shell has a chokehold on your bones. Go.

Let them call you crazy, mad, foolish. I hope you are all of these. Out tumbling wildly in your perfect mistakes and re-tries. We are made of mere moments. One moment, one step. What separates fear from courage?

Movement. One tiny step filled with intention. One word spoken out of authenticity or love, can crumble mountains… or raise them.

Have heart. Have heart. Have heart.