New Futures are Made in Such Moments

With Jonatha Brooke, by Susannah ConwayI remember worrying that I wouldn't find it in my little town--the cassette my aunt got me hooked on while she was visiting.  The Angel in the House.  It was a good album, but the first song in particular stayed with me like a dream you don't want to forget.  It was being with my aunt, it was playing together, it was all the things happening to me at that age that I didn't understand.  And like most things that wrap up some truth in a way you can swallow, it stayed with me and became a part of me. It traveled with me along the way.

I did find the cassette in my town, and when I found the mp3 a decade later, I found that both my sisters remembered it fondly, as well.  So Much Mine, the opening song, was a coming of age signpost for all of us. It lives on every mix CD we've made each other since.

All of this was with me last week, as I sat in front of campfire by a lake in New Hampshire, just a few feet away from Jonatha Brooke when she started singing this song.  My aunt, my sisters, my mother, my teenage self who felt so off the beaten path that she had a hard time believing she'd really find the things in life she longed for.  I held my presence there, in the flying embers and the blowing smoke as something rearranged beneath me. Or was it within me?

Moments like this, in which pieces of our past or our truest longings wrap around and find us in this present place, build my belief that there really is a future that wants me.  Not the kind of future that is manufactured, but the kind that is dreamed.  Not a future I make, but one I receive.

New futures are made in such moments, when we allow ourselves to reach out and embrace the people and places that have been calling to us all along.  When we believe, this moment is for me.  When we say to the future that is wanting us, Yes, I will receive.