Nature Mysticism, Dreams, and Where the Rubber Soul Meets the Road

As I shared yesterday, I have been revisiting my “dream” goals for this part of my life.

In the process, I have discovered how my conceptual model of personhood applies to myself and how it impacts my waking-life dream goals.

I will save a fuller explanation of this for a later post.

However, one of the discoveries is that my lived personal mythology, expressed at the character level of my personhood model, provides a certain set of orientations that guide my choices and resonance with some dream goals over others.

One of those orientations is the idea of person-place fit.

For most of my life, it seemed our culture didn’t take this into account or assign it much value.

However, I think that is changing and has been changing since at least the middle of the last century.

Another part of this orientation is derived from my spiritual and philosophical beliefs.

I was raised a Christian, and still am, but I also have a Romantic and Transcendentalist view of the bigger mystery we find ourselves living through.

Nature—or a place and its natural ecology, environment, and landscape—has a huge impact on our lived experience.

The concept of nature mysticism, as written about by Emerson in Nature, Thoreau in Walden, and Novalis in his quest for the Blue Flower, has, I think, become a more acceptable point of view in today’s zeitgeist.

However, I suspect that most people, myself included, don’t fully appreciate or comprehend the relationship between themselves and their place in the world.

Nature mysticism, in practice, brings about a sense of awe, transcendence, and unity with a reality much bigger than the individual subjective worldview from which we tend to operate in day-to-day life.

Dreams—whether the kind we experience while asleep or our waking dreams expressed through our longings, desires, goals, and aspirations—share similar characteristics.

The “big dreams” we remember are often memorable because of the numinous nature of their content and the feelings and ideas they evoke within us.

Awe, dread, fascination, and wonder are key elements of why a big dream lands for us and stays with us.

What I have discovered over the last couple of days, as I have revisited my own big life dreams, is that the ones which resonate most deeply evoke these same feelings and experiences.

Pursuing an encore career as some sort of musical artist is perhaps the most awe-producing, fascinating, mysterious, and, at times, frightening dream goal I have.

Pursuing a radically designed lifestyle that puts me out on a Highway to Yeah—where I continue the process of an authentic becoming, aligned with my deepest values and expressing the freedom to live my truth—is another dream that ranks right alongside it.

That is where this soul’s rubber meets the road.

We all have a “secret sauce” inside us that wants to come out.

I hope you discover yours.

And I hope these blog articles help you do just that.