Hold Fast To Your Dreams...

The following two pieces may not be enough for a Blog entire, yet are both oh so powerful.  May you be inspired, for if you believe you are, you will be.  

Hold fast to your dreams,

For if dreams die,

Life is a broken winged bird
That cannot fly.

              -Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Langston Hughes was a beloved African American poet and writer from the Harlem Renaissance to his death in 1967.  I discovered him through the above poem, when I was fourteen.  And I needed him.  I was struggling with what life could hold for someone like me.

My home life as a child was a very unstable one due to alcoholism, violence, and the insecurities my parents had with the dwarfism.  This was many years before the Internet and all they were told about the dwarfism when I was a baby is I would be perfect for the circus.  When as a child all I could see of those like me were The Munchkins, and the actor Michael Dunn, who was well known for his role on Wild Wild West, it is very isolating.  But they were all I had to identify with. 

This didn't stop me from having friends though, or letting my height challenge keep me from doing what everyone else was doing.  I was determined it wouldn't.  However, outside my circle of friends, I had to deal with the insidious constant ridicule and meanness of both kids and adults.  With little help from parents.

Then one day I came across the poem above.  I found all I could on Mr. Hughes whose work became my lifeline.  And in so doing, I learned in great depth the terrible discrimination African Americans had faced and were enduring.  

All this coinciding with the events of the Civil Rights movement and demonstrations of the 1950's and 1960's.  I read all I could about all of the lives of African Americans both past and present...and somehow, I felt less alone.  Our challenges were different, and yet, the same.

So in feeling less alone, I held fast to my dreams, and my determination to fly.

Hold fast to your dreams, my dear ones, and soar.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest 

in it today.  Embrace heaven.  The gloom of the world 
is but a shadow; behind it, and yet within our reach, is 
joy.  Embrace joy.
                                                  ~Fra Giovanni

These words below were found on a gravestone here in the south, of a lady who passed away in 1865:

"Ever she sought the best, ever she found it."

The stone also indicates she died of a fever.  She died 
as the brutal Civil War was ending...when the south had lost the war, was shattered, destroyed, humiliated, and in poverty.  She herself, may have lost family, and everything she owned.  And yet, those who knew her, and loved her, had the words, "Ever she sought the best, ever she found it," engraved on her stone.  Why?  Because she lived those words...embraced those words, uplifting those around her.

Think of the sheer courage to be found in those words, 
the hope, the dignity, the purpose.  And happiness.

Most of all, think of all the treasure pouring forth in the words.  They are saying what we look for in life in the midst of our challenges, we find because the direction we choose is ours.

Remember the blog I wrote recently on those two very powerful little words, "and yet?"😃  They go hand in 
hand with this.

Search for the best, my dear ones, and strive to reach beyond the gloom. 

Ever we strive to seek the best, ever we may grasp it.