Bounding Barricades
"If we spend our days scaling walls then when do we ever soar to our dreams?"
What if every barrier in society was a physical barricade? Transport the pictures in your head to the images of sandbag walls from wars past, a raised drawbridge casting a daunting shadow, or walls like the graffitied concrete sections of what stood in Berlin. What if every day we had to scale the barbed wire to become the people we wanted to be? Imagine those spray painted walls and realize how easily each concrete section becomes a shirt with a dripping design that holds the powerful words of self-expression. We scale walls every day. The walls that were once watched by a snipers eye are now managed by a whole society’s vantage point. When are we encouraged to scale walls, break barriers, and be ourselves? What class teaches you to teach yourself? When are we asked to create the words that define our own worlds? We are faced with these decisions every time we make the same choice as someone else, without asking ourselves the same question. That is a real trench where we so often throw our thoughts to die.
If we spend our days scaling walls then when do we ever soar to our dreams? How hard is it to choose a cloud in the sky and realize that it is ours? We are free to bounce from one cloud to the next; to change its shape and its direction. We are the sculptors of the wind. We are the dreamers by day and the doers by night, when our imaginative actions of the night could be the efforts of our hands by day. We spend so much of our energy and emotion building barricades around our passions and our goals instead of breaking through them and jumping free amongst our authentic desires. Challenge yourself to transcend what you thought were walls, climb into your cloud of attainable imagination, and let your heart align with the being that you are when you float free!
A blanket of nebulous thought runs through your mind now. This is the journey through a daunting fog into a hazy mist of new perspective; a personal view struggling to focus on something attainable. Color in your clouds. They are only white because they ask for your brush to give them hues of purpose. Give them identity: a giraffe, a car, a garden gnome… odd shapes in the sky asking for history, meaning, and motivation. Hold on to one cloud at a time giving yourself time to claim it as your own. Give your dreams definition and drive in your life. Evolve something that seems unreachable into something tangible in your life that you can own and treasure. Your dreams don’t have to float above you or cast a shadow over your perspective, instead allow them to illuminate the path in your life towards the objects and objectives that define you!
Guest Contributor: Kody Maynard
Kody is the Program Coordinator for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Allies Resource Office at the University of Northern Colorado
You can contact Kody at his office: 970-351-2906 or www.unco.edu/glbta