My Outlandish Dream

I have this far-fetched dream about owning a hermitage - a small cottage, set in a lovely location, with a beach near by, to walk along and pick shells, long views of trees, a small patch of vegetable garden. It doesn't have to be big - in fact it has to be small - just one room for a single bed, a chair, and a table, for writing, eating and working. A small kitchen and a small bathroom - that's all.

This day-dream of mine has been building inside me ever since I had a dream, I think about 4 years ago, of walking along an ocean on a moonlit night, everything touched by a silvery sheen, pure, peaceful, a flock of graceful swans descending from the heavens, a pride of lions standing in the water swishing their tails, a brilliant white, every single one of them. At the end of that walk, I reached a cottage, my small cottage on the beach, and that was the end of the dream.

All my life, I used to pride myself in saying I had no dreams - and it was true, I didn't have any, until this dream came along. And once this dream took form in my heart, I opened up my heart to my other dream that I had never acknowledged, always shushed it away - to become a writer. So I built a dream of a life I'd like to live - to quit my job, buy a lovely little hermitage, become a recluse, and earn my living through writing.

But the problem is that I don't have the courage to indulge in my dreams. I have fears about quitting, living alone, with no help from anyone, to be able to let go and run away from it all. I think I have those fears because I don't have a bridge between the real life I'm living now to the dream life I wish I could build. How do I quit my job without another one lined up? How do I make a living out of writing? Do I really have it in me to work that hard? Even if I did, who would read what I write? Who cares what I write or think? All these questions crowd my mind and I come to a dead stop - I repeat this pattern over and over again, and so I stay in this same job and same place year after year.

For the first time today, I've had an idea that I don't really have to wait till I retire to buy my own hermitage. I can may be buy one now, not to retire in, but to retreat from my daily grind now and then - as a way to experiment, to build that bridge from my real life to my dream life. Now I don't know if I have the courage to pull it off, nor any idea where to start this whole project! But if I could go buy that perfect little cottage now, oh my!

Thanks for reading! Do you have wild, outlandish dreams that you could hardly dare to dream? Have you done anything about them? Feel free to share them here, if you'd like. If you want to see more of these tiny homes, all the pictures on this post are from tinyhouseblog.com. (If anyone thinks I'm violating any copyrights, let me know and I'll remove them.)