Dandelions and Dreams

by | Oct 16, 2024 | Blog

Dreams are meant to be like holding onto a dandelion. To loosely hold on to the stem while you gently blow on the seed head, allowing the seeds to float through the air and land where they may, and then you let go of the stem.

We’re not meant to hold on for dear life, because then our hand is closed to the opportunity to hold onto another stem and to blow more wishes into the consciousness of the universe.

But sometimes with dreams comes loss.

Loss and feeling powerless are powerful co-conspirators.

Loss is something we all experience, and it’s hard when it feels like people go away either literally or metaphysically. The pain is exacerbated when trying to hold onto a dream becomes a pattern.

I recently said goodbye to someone very dear to me. I’d seen it coming for many months, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to process the loss while caring for my father in the last months of his life.

Then, last week, about a month after my father took his last breath, the grief hit me like a wall of sorrow. I saw a social media post by the person and my psyche finally had the bandwidth.

This friend is someone with whom I shared a deep level of intimacy, conversations, wishes, dreams, challenges with boys, giggling like young girls while we watched childhood cartoons. There was an innocence and purity, and I was able to experience things with her that rarely felt safe in childhood.

What I realized is that I’d been holding onto a dream of what our friendship was,

not what it had become. Someone who’s ideals no longer resonate. The feeling she’s been consumed by dark energy.

Yet, who am I to project my thoughts on her experience? This may be the exact path she’s meant to go down. It doesn’t mean we’re meant to continue to walk alongside each other though.

But letting go, especially with someone I love, has been a hard pattern for me to fully understand. Until this year.

I realize the source is from when I was 3, when my mother was hospitalized for 3 weeks. She wasn’t the same when she came back. There’s been a deep yearning for the dream of the maternal relationship that went away. A dream a 3-year-old could never articulate, yet the energy of it lived deep within my body and psyche.

I realize the dream with my ex-husband was what was so hard to let go of. Even after I walked away from the chaos of his alcoholism.

Holding onto a dream past its logical end is how we create our own suffering.

We’re not meant to hold onto the dandelion stem and wait to see which of the seeds germinate.

The thing I realized though is that I did experience the dream with my friend, my ex, even with my mother. Even if only for a short period of time.

Sometimes our dreams show up in unexpected ways.

Years ago, one of the intentions I made for my business was to be able to support my parents in their elder years. When I set the intention, it was more around being able to financially support them.

More profound, through all of the challenges, was to be the primary caregiver for my father in his final months. He’d set his own intention of what he wanted for his journey and I was able to fully support him up to and through his final breath.

Our dreams came together.

So, this experience last week as I mourned the loss of the friendship, also enabled me to process other loss from my life and spend a few days feeling all the feels that came up.

I could have tried to cling on and shift the friendship into a way that might have made me feel better, but I know that I am powerless to change anyone other than myself.

What I can do is send love to her, and hope that she finds the way that she is meant to find, knowing that our paths have now split. At some point they may come back, but

I won’t hold on to a future that I don’t know is possible.

Holding on would be unhealthy for me, and keep me tied to a dream and a relationship that no longer exists in the present.

So yes, loss and feeling powerless are powerful co-conspirators, and we get to choose how we move through them.

My journey with my father taught me deeper levels of how to detach with love.  Of how to fully honor someone’s wishes for their journey and support them through it, while separately experiencing my own feelings of grief and loss.

Last week I didn’t feel powerless, even while experiencing loss. I see and honor that we are both on our own paths, and those paths no longer move in the same direction.

The beautiful thing through all of these relationships, is that I experienced love in all its forms. That love will continue to express itself within me, for all of them, on this journey we call life.

We all evolve.

Sometimes it’s not that dreams are meant to die, it’s that we’re meant to let go of them while we’re experiencing them.

This way we get to pick up a new dandelion stem and allow the seeds to float to where they’re meant to land. Because there’s new dreams to come in. There will be new losses with some of those dreams, but

there will also be exquisite love to experience.

Stephanie B. McAuliffe
Latest posts by Stephanie B. McAuliffe (see all)

Related Posts

Get in Touch

Follow Us