The Badgers
To imagine a community garden,
and people growing food together,
and nobody being lonely,
and the earth becoming
a little more like heaven -
an act of courage is required.
Courage to speak a dream into a world that replies:
"Badgers!! You need to think about the badgers!"
For between us and the kingdom of God
stands a prosaic menagerie of obstacles:
paperwork, fire-doors, fences,
every tepid form of despair, and
"Oh, but we couldn't possibly!"s
(Someone even carries a conviction that Jesus
ought to have thought more about licensing laws
before he turned water into wine)
And so it is, that a simple dream
becomes a daring, that feels like an undoing.
But, dare it anyway!
Just ask any seed.
They all start off in the dark,
splitting their own coat open
on their way to something new.
And not one of them
first thinks about the badgers.
I’ve just been at a gathering called Landscapes with lots of very wonderful people, and space to be, think, and create. I wrote this poem in response to someone’s story from the first night, to read back to them over breakfast on the last morning.
When you share a dream, you are sharing an imagined future you don’t know how to reach. It’s vulnerable. The person telling their story said they experienced imagination as a “dismantling of your skills”.
On the other side of the person sharing, is the person receiving. I’m inclined to think responding well to someone’s offered dream is a spiritual discipline. Far easier than entering into someone’s dreaming, is to point out the many and various (likely highly obvious) reasons that something couldn’t happen.
(an aside: responding well to an offered dream is not a spiritual discipline I’ve shown much promise in, but I hope to get better!)
There is a kind of order that prefers us unable to weep, and unable to imagine. If nothing is worth mourning, then nothing needs to change. And if nothing else can be pictured, the way things are is the only way they can be. To get past that, we need to collectively practice grieving and dreaming.
If you feel so inclined, please do tell me your experiences –
- of dreams you’ve had and pursued, and how they were responded to by others at the beginning;
- of people you know who are really good at dreaming;
- of people you know who you would trust to respond to someone’s offered dream;
- and, what makes it hard for you to dream?
