...man is never so much himself as when he is actually part of a dream, never so lost as when it disappears and there is nothing to look forward to.
- Sigurd F. Olson,  Reflections From The North Country

Something hidden.  Go and find it.
Go and look behind the Ranges--
Something lost behind the Ranges
Lost and waiting for you.  Go.
-   Rudyard Kipling, The Explorer

 In Lansing Michigan I interviewed and paddled for a few hours with Verlen Kruger and his wife Becky.  He discovered canoeing in his early fifties, abandoned a successful plumbing business and over the next twenty years went on a number of multi-year expeditions, which included canoeing both up and down the Mississippi River, the entire length of the Pacific Coast, up the Grand Canyon, around each of the Great Lakes and down the Amazon River. The word "dream" came up, and I asked him about the significance of dreams in his life.  This is what he said:

      "At a seminar once, a young man came up and handed me a slip of paper that read: "Happy are they that dream dreams, and have the courage to make them come true."  That has stuck with me ever since.  You have got to have a dream, an idea, a concept.  And then you have to do something about it.  There is no big merit in just being a dreamer.  But there is a lot of merit to dreams.  If you are just willing to go with some of them, things happen.  Some very outstanding things will happen to people who dare to dream and dare to do something about those dreams. You may think you know where you are going, but you can't know where a dream is going to take you.  It takes you to places you never thought....

      And then, later in the interview: "There is no simple answer to why I go on these trips. Some adventurers will tell you why they do it, but I don't think they know themselves.  Some will say because it was there.  Or the challenge.  The excitement.  The adventure.  There is magic to some of that, but there is more to it.

      "Why must the goose fly north?  Ask the arctic tern why he must go from the top to the bottom of the world every year.  As for us humans, we must do the things that free us from our limitations.  I am doing my own thing.  My own way.  My own time.  I think that's legitimate.  I am doing what I must do to be true to myself and my nature.

      "I think it was Kipling who said:  `Something is hidden.  Go and find it.  Go beyond the ranges.'  There is something you are reaching for beyond the horizon, something maybe you can't see.  Maybe something beyond your ability, but still its worth reaching for. Many people might tell you that what you want to do is impossible. People who haven't tried.  Haven't been inclined to push in those directions.  Even the fact that we exist should tell us that we are created for something.  We exist for a reason."
- Heron Dance interview, approximately 1995.

When Henry Thoreau was five, his parents, then living in the city of Boston, took him eighteen miles into the country to a woodland scene that he, too, never forgot. It was, he said, one of the earliest scenes stamped on the tablets of his memory. During succeeding years of childhood, that woodland formed the basis of his dreams. The spot to which he had been taken was Walden Pond, near Concord. Twenty-three years later, writing in his cabin on the shores of this same pond, Thoreau noted the unfading impression that "fabulous landscape" had made and how, even at that early age, he had given preference to this recess--"where almost sunshine and shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene"-- over the tumultuous city in which he lived.
      - Edwin Way Teale, The Lost Woods

The mightiest works have been accomplished by men who kept their ability to dream great dreams.
- Walter Bowie

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
     - Eleanor Roosevelt

Everything Comes At A Cost...

      I was passing through Calgary, Alberta just when Dave Olesen was in town qualifying as a bush pilot. Dave is wilderness guide and Iditarod dog musher. He is also an author of two books, including, most recently, North of Reliance about homesteading with his wife Kristen in a remote area of the Canadian sub-arctic -- over a hundred miles from the nearest road. Dave is living his passion and I asked him if he had any advice he might give someone thinking about following a dream: "When you are fleshing out your dream, realize that it is not all going to be pleasant. It is going to have moments when you will wish that you had chosen otherwise. Its going to have frustration. Its going to cost you. That's a clear lesson that you learn in the wilderness and on expeditions -- everything comes at a cost of energy or resources or other choices that you cannot now make. You have to go into the thing with that in mind so when it does start to cost, you are not shocked and you don't abandon your dreams."
- (Heron Dance interview, August 1995).

The advice of the poet: "Be truthful to the dreams of thy youth."
     - Friedrich von Schiller

”What are your deep dreams? Write for five minutes.” Many of us don’t know, don’t recognize, avoid our deep dreams. When we write for five, ten minutes we are forced to put down wishes that float around in our mind and that we might not pay attention to. It is an opportunity to write down, without thinking, wishes at the periphery of our perceptions.

This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too — going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico — and they will be in black and white. It will be harder to avoid them.
- Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

Carefully observe what way your heart draws you, and then choose that way with all your strength.
- Hasidic saying

“I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." The sentence (by Thoreau) has the power to resuscitate the youth drowning in his sea of doubt. I recall my exhilaration upon reading it, many years ago, in a time of hesitation and despair. It restored me to health. And now in 1954 when I salute Henry Thoreau on the hundredth birthday of his book, I am merely paying off an old score--or an installment on it.
- E. B. White, A Slight Sound At Evening

I used to dream at my desk at the Vermont Historical Society about waking up in an Indian village in Central America.  I imagined I would have a thatched hut, under a palm tree beside a lake.  The year dragged on and on and on.  Lo and behold, one day I woke up, and I was on this dock that I had made in this Indian village in Guatemala.  I had bought a $750 house in a Mayan Indian village in the jungle and was living in a canoe culture.  There I was under a palm tree on a Monday morning dozing in the sun beside a beautiful lake in the jungle. 
- Ethan Hubbard, author (First Light, Grandfather's Gift), Heron Dance interview from the mid-nineties.

 Imagination rules the world.  It is like the Danube. At its source it can be crossed in a leap...I abandon myself to the most brilliant of dreams.
      - Napoleon

It is not only my dreams. My belief is that all of these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry, or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It is as simple as that. I make films because I have not learned anything else. And I know I can do it to a certain degree. It is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves otherwise we would be cows in the field.
- Werner Herzog, from the film Burden of Dreams about the making of Herzog’s epic film Fitzcarraldo.

For a few months I wrestled with the dream of cycling alone to the tip of South America.  Then my dad told me that when he was in the Army, he and a friend were going to buy a sailboat and sail from Seattle to the Panama Canal.  But, instead of just doing it, they decided to postpone it, and then he met my mom, and that was that.  He said I'm afraid if you postpone your trip, you won't do it. That is probably the greatest piece of advice he ever gave me. . .
It’s always disheartening to meet someone who tries to discourage you from your dream.  I ran into many, many people as I was planning my trip, and when I was actually travelling, who doubted that I could succeed at it.  And they didn't hesitate to tell me that I would fail.  Told me that I was crazy and stupid.  I can remember meeting a guy in California and telling him about my trip and he just laughed at me.  He didn't believe I was going to succeed at it.  I don't think he even believed that I had already completed about a third of the trip.  That was more a reflection of him.
Having enough of your own inner momentum to blow those people off is one of the big challenges in life.  To listen to some degree, but to be discriminating enough, and strong enough in yourself and clear enough about your own direction to be able to say that that person doesn't think that I can do this but this is what I am doing. 
       There are talkers in life and doers.  A lot of people talk about doing stuff and never follow through.  I knew that I didn't want to talk about this trip and then not do it.  If I entertained this very seriously at all, I needed to make a very clear commitment to do it or not even to play with it.  It was scary--a huge commitment.  Once I made the decision, knew I was willing to take the risks--the unknowns of riding a bike through South America--then it was easy.  Pulling the trip off was relatively easy compared to wrestling with the internal dialogue, the tension of opposites.
        There is the fear of making a commitment to do something like this--to know that you are going to encounter parts of yourself that are completely unknown to you.  That you are going to encounter external unknowns that you can't anticipate.  To decide to set off on a journey that you know will challenge you on every level, in ways that I have never been challenged was kind of scary.  To decide that that was what I wanted to do--that I was willing to face the consequences of those kinds of unknowns.
- Jeff Casebolt, former Outward Bound Instructor, Heron Dance Interview

There is nothing that upsets me more than people who say I wish I could pursue some dream.  We all can but we have to make the sacrifice.  If you are not happy, try something different.  If you dream of doing something different start.  Make the first step.  It can be a small step.
If you stay where you are, the only things that will happen to you are the things that have happened in the past.  When you take the first step, you enter into the arena, where all things become possible.  But if you never make the first step, those things never will appear.  When you start the process, all kinds of things happen that would not otherwise have happened.  But you have to start.
- John Amatt, former Outward Bound Instructor, author. Heron Dance interview. 

All my life I have been a seeker, and I continue to be one, but it is not to do with religion alone.  In canoeing, you also have canoe slalom.  My life has always been like this:  when I went through one gate and had achieved one target, one finishing post--say crossing New Guinea on foot, or Borneo or Tibet--my mind, before crossing the finishing line, my mind is already thinking ahead on the next gate.  Like you do in slalom.  My life has always been like this.  My life has been built up in many chapters, and now I am eighty years old.  When I finish one thing my mind is already on the next thing.  My wife wrote a book of my life, there is one chapter called "Have a Plan, And Stick With It."  So when I had a plan, I never veered off.  I kept going with it, to carry this plan to its end.
       There are different kinds of ambition, but do something exceptional.  Have a plan and stick to it counts for all ambitions.  Do something with your genius--whether it is in your brain or your feet.  Develop it.  Do something and develop something.  Have a plan and stick to it.  Don't quit.  Don't swerve.  Keep the target in your mind.  If you are ambitious you can succeed in so many ways in life.  My grandchild is fanatic in exploring engines.  He is now in Switzerland developing new engines.  He is absorbed by that.  This is good enough.  The main thing is to become something more than average. 
- Heinrich Harrer (Author of Seven Years In Tibet), Heron Dance Interview.

We made the Raptor Trust work with a lot of energy but no money.  Whatever there was available, Diane and I used our person fortune, which is very modest.  We put it in to doing this.  Until 1981 there was no money.  Whatever was there I put in.  For the first ten years.  In the last ten it has been a little better since we became a non-profit.  We didn't solicit any money in the 1960s and 1970s.  We just funded it ourselves. 
      We committed to do it.  I am a personal stick-with-commitment person.  I made a commitment to a woman.  I've still got her thirty-seven years later.  I've had one job, one woman, one commitment to the birds all my life.  I don't bounce around very much.  I have that kind of a focus.  Good or bad.  I couldn't change it if I wanted to. 
- Len Soucy, co-founder with his wife Diane of The Raptor Trust, Millington, NJ. Heron Dance interview (Issue 1, “Birdman of the Great Swamp”).

A lot of people expend a lot of energy making excuses of why they can't do things.  If they expended the same amount of energy figuring out how to do what they want--setting dates--and go with it, they would have realized their dreams before they realized it.  They have the idea, the moment of inspiration, but they let things set them back.  I have perseverance.  If I decide to do something, I don't even recognize hurdles.  I just go around and keep on going.  Or you see obstacles and you back off a little bit and sneak around the corner.  You just keep moving.  Just like climbing mountains.  Failure is fine but fail fast.  Fail at a huge rate.  Make fifteen mistakes a day, and do two things right.  Not on McKinley though.
- Robert Anderson, mountaineer, Heron Dance Interview.

We don't tell people our dreams in Lake Wobegon, because they might laugh at us and make us feel bad. So we keep them hidden in our hearts until eventually we forget about them.
- Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

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