Bio-diverse Dreaming

24 Feb, 2025

A number of people in my life (including possibly me... TBD) are currently buying homes. Something I've been hearing over and over again from friends is how much of a roller coaster of emotions the process is. You peer into a future -- what would our lives look like in that house? -- then begin to get attached. If you make an offer, you select a possible path of many, and anxiously wait to see if the seller is interested. Much of the time they are not.

Rinse and repeat. Dreaming on loop.

In American culture we are constantly steeping in different parts of an ideology of "The Dream." This includes defaults like concepts of linear time, the typical American Dream story, monogamy, career and many other offshoots. This leaves us vulnerable to the idea that there will be The One -- the one person, the one house, the perfect job, the perfect timing -- in a way that can narrow our dreams.

And it's not only these cultural stories, but also self-protective measures that might make us narrow our dreaming. For every heartbreak, not only are we in pain over the person/place/thing we lost but the future we lost. A story ends and we need a new one whether we like it or not. The more times we fall in love, try out a path, or otherwise avail ourselves to a possible path, the more times we will have our hearts broken.

These days, dreaming feels less like a light at the end of a tunnel and more like a forest. Each path, each dream, like a tree I'm planting. If one dies, no matter how painful that death, I can at least feel secure knowing I have some future waiting for me in the forest. It helps me to be able to grieve the change in future for what I've actually lost and with whom instead of focusing on my lack of a backup plan. I can mourn, and keep walking, taking stock of everything that's there. Asking what is ripe for this moment.

This practice of cultivating many options and paths at all times at it's worst stems from a distrust in the climate, context, and institutions of this moment and functions as a survival skill. But at it's best, it feels expansive, acting as a spiritual practice in imagining different and better things.

When faced with narratives of "The Dream," I prefer: "A Dream." One of many possible dreams.

I don't know for sure how well I'd be able to tolerate the roller coaster of the home buying process. There are moments where I hide myself in a corner inside of me on purpose to limit how much I will be devastated, and there are many more moments where I feel trapped in exactly that corner and dream of being bigger and filling the whole space of dreams. Narrow, widen, narrow, widen. If I'm being honest, I'd probably be a wreck, have a ton of fun, lots of anxiety, and boundless glee. ¹ To move from dreaming to scheming is full of polarity, complexity, inter-dependencies and compromises. Just like the forest, there are so many animals, textures, soils. So many things attached to and surrounding the seeds I plant. But that messy social thing is what makes the dreams worth dreaming in the first place.