Dreams in the Passenger Seat...

My dreams lately have felt more crystalline—clearer, more vivid, more consumed with messages and meanings that I wake still trying to decipher. I want to digest them, honor them, and somehow carry them with me… not to live inside them, but to let them live through me.

Just last night, I had a dream with my mom in it.
These portals are rare.

To find her and actually feel like it’s her—not a figment of memory or fear, not a shadow of who I once lost or wished to hold—but her. A residue of her spirit. A presence of her safety. A thread of connection that spans past, present, or somewhere far, far beyond.

She was there.

We were riding in a car together, coming home from a gathering at a school.

I had helped organize the event—something I’d taken responsibility for—and she had hoped there would’ve been recognition. Some acknowledgment of my part in making it all happen. But none came.

And in the car, sitting in the passenger seat beside her, I found myself explaining how so many of my beliefs are different from those we’d just been with. I told her how my mind and heart are attuned to something more honest and loving than the patriarchy… than bigotry… than the oligarchy that eats at us.

And how really, maybe we should be eating them—the rich and the systems that uphold this great forgetting.
How maybe love isn’t love if it can’t hold our dignity, our truth, our freedom.

I spoke to her about the confusion of being loved by people who still see us as less.
How can that be love?
And if it is love, how does it grow?
How does it stretch wide enough to welcome me, and her, and all of us in?

Because love without equity is performance.
Inclusion without reflection is erasure.
And I need more than surface.
I told her all of that.

I told her about the compass I carry inside.
The one that keeps me moving through limiting beliefs, beyond the status quo, into something more whole.

I believe I was made to stretch past the confines—and I believe she was, too.
I believe she still is.

She didn’t argue. She didn’t silence it. She held it.
And still, she looked at me with concern.

She told me how hard it would be to march to this tune, to follow that inner calling, to swim against the current.
She told me she worries—not because I’m wrong, but because the world is still catching up to the kind of future I belong to.

But I told her: there is no other way for me.

And in the softness of her eyes, I think I saw something shift.
Maybe even something release.
Like a part of her spirit exhaled—finally—at the knowing that I am walking a road she once dreamed of, but couldn’t take.

Isn’t that something?

The humility of the gathering. The not-needing of five minutes of spotlight. And yet, the knowing that the show goes on…

The ache for something more inclusive, more alive, more just.
Maybe she once hoped for the same for herself.
And maybe she still does.

And so we kept driving.

I liked being in the car with her.
I liked watching the pieces come together, whatever they were.
And even in sleep, I felt something settle in me—something like affirmation.
Like truth.
Like my own moral and motherly compass finding its direction.

She didn’t try to change me.
She just heard me.
Held me.
As we kept moving through…

So now I ask you, dear reader—how are your dreams speaking to you?

And maybe even more importantly…
How are you speaking to your dreams?

Or about them?

I think somewhere along the way we were taught—as young, tender children—that if we dare to speak our wishes out loud, they might not come true.

But I challenge that.
With love.
And with the kind of communication that is both tender and brave.

What if the dreams we are all hoping and holding…
simply need the courage to be spoken?
To be heard?
To be held and carried and believed in?

What if?

So please know—you can share your dreams with me.
And I am so deeply thankful to be here, sharing mine with her…
and with you.

on the horizon…

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