Gay Agenda: Wedding Dream Jar

Things are rough right now, and the part of me I wish were smaller wants to write angry, complaining posts. Today, I'm resisting the urge and writing about something good, lovely, and kind: dream jars.

I've mentioned these in a couple places but never put out instructions or a full description.

When I returned from a semester in Ecuador, which was a great experience and something I had wanted to do for a long time, adjusting was a little difficult. One of the activities I did to help was scrapbooking (yes, #sobasic I know). I had scraps of things left and I don't remember exactly why, but I decorated a clean peanut butter jar, wrote other hopes and goals on the slips, and put them inside. I kept it for a long time, until after we got married, in fact. At some point, I got one started for Rebecca. At our wedding, instead of a sand ceremony or a unity candle, we dumped all the slips, written and blank, into a single jar, with this liturgy:

Rebecca and Erin, I invite you both to place your dreams in the jar.

Rebecca, please repeat after me: Erin, I will cherish your dreams, just as I cherish mine, that together, we might make our dreams into a reality.

Erin, please repeat after me: Rebecca, I will cherish your dreams, just as I cherish mine, that together, we might make our dreams into a reality. 

Why do this? Why not set the separate jars next to each other on a shelf? Because Rebecca is my helpmate. Because if her dream is to open a free clinic for the uninsured, and my dream is to see Detroit Public Schools graduate a higher percentage of students than the nationwide average, we don't pick one. We do both, together. We need to find a way to support each other, synergistically. If I didn't want to be her helpmate in all things, we never should have married. If she didn't believe in the beauty of my dreams, why would she link her life to mine?

And so, on some good days and on some hard days, we take out the jar, pour out the slips, and sort them - what have we done? What are we doing? What do we have left?

Buying a house in Detroit to renovate gets us started on so many and opens the door to more after. Finishing my MA, and her finishing her DO, accomplished one. Getting married accomplished one.

Not all of them are big things. One is to climb a mountain all the way to the top. One is to live somewhere with mountains and a beach. These aren't important because others would see them as significant - they are important because they help us live our purpose, they make our lives full, they remind us when we are lost that there has been good and will be good again, and life is both more and less than we imagine. 

And when new dreams surface, there are blank slips for that too, because we are not finished yet.