When A Dream Ends, Living Begins.

            I only have one good memory of going to synagogue as a little girl and that was during the High Holy Days at Temple Emanu-El. I remember dancing with a group at night, hand-in-hand with heads thrown back. We bounced to Middle-Eastern melodies in the warm sweet air of their courtyard’s garden and I dreamed up the Holy Land. As amber lamplight reflected off the slick peach stones of their fountain, the walls of the ancient world expanded across a marbled desert. But as I grew up this image became entangled and pinned with symbols and history, enhancing the mystery but burying the joy until it was deeply lodged in the clay of the ancient world.

Walking back from the Kotel at night, I fall into conversation with a young woman from Venezuela. I tell her that I’ve stepped into my dream and want to run out of my skin. She tells me the story of a soldier who was caught with a grenade in-hand. In that moment, every instinct must have told him to throw it away, but he clenched and blew off his own arm instead of risking the lives of those around him. That soldier became a veteran who told her, When a dream ends, living begins. The dream will take you far, but the dream is only the drive and it cannot sustain my life forever.