Dreamers dream dreams

(Warning: Rant coming. " No offense intended. If you get offended in the course of reading this blog post, please keep your thoughts to yourself.)

"How, spite of your human scorning,

Once more God’s future draws nigh..."

I love this poem by the amphibian researcher (called a "herpetologist" HA) Arthur O'Shaughnessy (who reportedly died of a chill in his late thirties so wear your coat people)

Ode

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth...

The actual poem is nine stanzas and I've included the rest at the end of the blog post. I just needed to share my thoughts about dreaming. I love "We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams...For each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth." Actually, I love this whole poem. It's rich in imagery and it's fabulous. I wanted to share it with my thoughts on being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a woman going into a career in medicine. This has been a touchy topic for me lately as I'm in classes this semester which are heavily men - so heavily in fact that I'm the only girl in my physics class (well, was until three weeks ago. Random. Anyway.) as well as one of four girls in my Organic chem class. And I've had two encounters this week alone that have had me thinking about this topic.

We are taught by the culture of the Church that a woman should be striving always to be home with her kids. If for some reason you aren't that home-with-the-kids type, you better be trying to figure out how soon you can be. Heaven forbid you actually have a desire to work outside the home - especially if you don't have to be... Right? Wrong. The Family: A Proclamation to the World teaches us the doctrine of the Church and states: "Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children." Can you please point out to me where in that sentence it says your sole responsibility is to be at home with the kiddos? No takers? No, of course not. Because everyone is different and so is every circumstance. 

I want to be a mom. I want to take care of small-sized-spirit-citadels and teach them about the world. I want to expose my children to the wonders of the chemistry that makes up their world, the physics that makes magnets work, the anatomy that makes their knees bend and their eyes cross. I want to be able to teach them how to tie their shoes - how that is a fine motor skill. I want to teach them the power behind the enabling power of the Atonement of Christ and the peace behind the redemptive power there. I want to show them the wonder of prisms and the importance of self-actualization as a high goal in life. I want to teach children about the pure beauty behind the classics and the magnificence of perfectly constructed sentences, like these: 

From Susanna Kearsley's "Firebird" - if you haven't read it, shame on you, go treat yourself

From my textbook for Behavioral Psychology

And while I really, really, truly, achingly, sometimes desperately, want all of those things... I haven't been blessed with that yet (and maybe never. I don't know. Neither do you.) And alongside that stunningly gorgeous dream is one of almost equal importance - I want to be a doctor. I want to save lives. *GASP* Did I just put a career as equally important as raising children?! No. I don't have children yet. BUT I certainly did put them next to each other on my dream scale. Why? Because. Because I know God has called me to be a doctor. Just as if I get the chance, He's called me to be a mom.

 It is an awesome thing when the dreams you dream line up with the will of God. And no one can say what God's will is for another person. Not you, not that older woman in your ward who gives you the stink eye when she sees you've been married four years and have no children, that other older woman who gives you the stink eye because your children are too loud-and-oh-my-gosh-how-could-you-even-be-a-parent-when-you-can't-keep-those-kids-in-line-you're-going-to-that-one-place, not your mother-in-law, not the annoying kid in my class who called me undesirable to my face for being a single senior unmarried pre-med student, and not that other guy in my other class who mocked my dreams by saying "Oh yeah, you're going to get to medical school and just meet a doctor and then you'll be home with the kids." 

Excuse you?

...

Obviously, I have some thoughts about this topic. O'Shaughnessy said, "For each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth." My dream is that when I have children, especially girls but also boys, that when they triumphantly throw their tiny fists in the air and exclaim with pride what they want to do with their lives that those who are around them will cheer with them and applaud as they go about achieving those dreams. My dream is that those observers will see the dreams in those childrens' eyes and think, "You go girl, you achieve those dreams. How can I help you? How can we help you keep one hand firmly in God's hand and the other fervently reaching ever forward for more, for your dreams, for success?"

We should want that. We should all want that. So I say loudly to you, keep one hand in God's and reach with the other one! Reach out and grasp that dream and stomp on those who would hold you back, get their sticky hands off your ankles and get their inky words away from your thoughts. In 2nd Chronicles chapter 20, the Spirit teaches, "Thus saith the Lord unto you, Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of _(insert your personal barrier here)_; for the battle is not yours, but God's...set yourself, stand still, ... fear not, nor be dismayed for the Lord will be with you... Believe in the Lord your God, so shall ye be established, so shall ye prosper." 

- M.E.

Ode

By Arthur O'Shaughnessy

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming–
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry–
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.