Hold Fast Your Dreams poem by Louise Driscoll. Dreaming amidst suffering. (May 2013)

Susan's Thursday Note May 30, 2013
Lousie Driscoll Poem (written during WW1 on dreaming amidst extreme suffering)

Good morning.  So still to begin the day.  Perfect filler with a little coffee.  Little whosit learning that his mom isn’t where he practices his sword fighting on this early.  The angel of dawn has arrived.  How will we use the moments we are handed today as our gift?  I read a poem this week by Louise Driscoll who is famous for a poem entitled “The Counter” on little buttons falling to the floor and each clink is a soldier dying.  She wrote during WW1.  This is her beautiful poem on keeping the ability to dream.  To turn off your hurts and realities and go where there is beauty and individual dreams.  I absolutely love this poem and hope it now becomes one of your treasures.

Hold Fast Your Dreams by Louise Driscoll 

Hold fast your dreams!
Within your heart
Keep one still, secret spot
Where dreams may go,
And, sheltered so,
May thrive and grow
Where doubt and fear are not.

O keep a place apart,
Within your heart,
For little dreams to go.
Think still of lovely things that are not true.
Let wish and magic work at will in you.
Be sometimes blind to sorrow.  Make believe.

Forget the calm that lies 
In disillusioned eyes.
Though we all know that we must die,
Yet you and I
May walk like gods and be
Even now at home in immortality.

We see so many ugly things-
Deceits and wrongs and quarrellings;
We know, alas we know
How quickly fade
The color in the west,
The bloom upon the flower,
The bloom upon the breast
And youth's blind hour.

Yet keep within your heart
A place apart
Where little dreams may go,
May thrive and grow.
Hold fast-hold fast your dreams!

I loved the lines on what quickly fades…the color in the west, the bloom upon the flower, youth’s blind hour.  How time passes so quickly.  June 1st is the day of my dad’s accident.  Reminding me again of the beauty of each moment.  Each day my gift.  How my treasures I covered during the night are treasures today, but possibly not part of my life tomorrow.  Below is another beautiful quote on the soul of those who we’ve loved that have died.  One of my favorite sights each year is to look across the cemetery before Memorial Day – to see little dots all over placing flowers and cleaning stones and just being present near the body of someone they cared deeply for.  To see all of the flowers across the landscape.  To try to imagine all of the stories between who is placing the flowers and who they are placing them on.  I find peace in that scene.  Memorial Day.  Memorial Week.  Always memorial day when you miss someone. 

Do not suppose, my dearest sons, that when I have left you I shall be nowhere and no one.  Even when I was with you, you did not see my soul, but knew that it was in this body of mine from what I did.  Believe then that it is still the same, even though you see it not.  Cyrus the Great (580-529 BC)

Have a beautiful day.  Even if your beauty is only in your dreams.  As Louise Driscoll wrote during a horrible world war with so much pain, she encouraged the ability to dream.  To leave behind some details and go into other worlds.  I love this.  Thank you for again letting me enter your Thursday.  The angel of dawn has appeared with her gift at our door.  We will write tonight our epitaph for the moments today.  Will we have words worthy of inscription?  Will we sit?  Will we read a poem?  Will we notice the new beautiful Iris?  Will we kindly say goodbye to the tulip that faded?  Again…from the poem…what quickly fades.  But always a new gift from our Creator.  The new gift being in a little bud.  Thank you for helping me have our store – how much you matter.  If you need a place to get away from your own reality – always know you can walk and be given a smile and surround yourself with authors and stories you’re invited to enter for inspiration for your next dream.  Susan

Latin for this week:
somnium - dream
ad perpetuam memoriam - to the perpetual memory
animus - soul