DREAMERS ARE SEARCHING
Rex Burress
In this day and age, dreamers are not merely thinkers planning inventions and trips into the great unknown, but includes various illegal foreign kids trapped in America by unfortunate political circumstances and dreaming about what their future could be.
There was a time when a dreamer was like Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla discovering the wonders of electricity, or Thomas Jefferson sending Lewis and Clark on an expedition into the unknown land west of the Mississippi where it was thought there might still be dinosaurs. The list is long of exploratory and inventive thrusts into a world yearning for discovery.
Even naturalist Henry David Thoreau got in on the dream issue. He said:“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
One of those outstanding dreamers and creative artisans was John Muir. A dreamer equates to one using their imagination to conceive stories, art, plans, or watch nature as Muir did, in learning about the wonders of the world we live in.
To that extent, Muir envisioned making special natural places into protective/protected parks...the “Father of our National Parks...who had a conservationist-zeal extending from his Wisconsin farm boyhood days, all the way through a lifetime of exploring mountains and deserts, creating some ingenious inventions in his youth, to his last days on his Martinez, California farm.
Even in Muir's Midwest farm days, he revered a small lake near his home and later wanted to preserve it as a park, putting him among the first advocates for the dream of establishing public parks, culminating in the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1903.
To be sure, other visionaries were involved in the legal details and designating Yosemite's protection, including Abraham Lincoln formally signing Yosemite Valley as a park placed under the jurisdiction of California in 1864. But “It takes a village to raise a child,” and it takes a community of conservationists and advocates like Muir and Theodore Roosevelt to commit land for a park! Yosemite Valley and the full park was not unified until 1906 at the urging of Muir and the action of Roosevelt. There is always a flame of some one person's inspiration, visions, and ideas leading the way.
On a smaller dream-scale, in 1886, another tree-lover, poet Joaquin Miller, bought 70 acres in the Oakland, California hills and planted 75,000 trees to reestablish a forest to fulfill his dream of preserving “...The all-glorious tree.” About 415 acres were added by the City and the Redwood League, forming today's Joaquin Miller Park, next to Roberts Redwood Regional Park and Redwood Canyon of the Eastbay Regional Park District, part of a park system crowning the ridge cradling the cities.
Both of my kids have had their dreams, Ben probing the skies as an astronomer, and Rebecca pursuing designs as a landscape architect. Becca showed me a 'dream' landscape-rendering she had made in landscape school at Minnesota, of an imaginary park design re-creating a burn area. She had included her dream-ideas of ponds and plantings, much like imaginary nature-farms and ponds that I had sketched as a boy, and named them like Lewis and Clark naming their discoveries. Everyone has dream-scapes; some put them into art.
A dreamer is someone like impressionistic artist Vincent Van Gogh painting Starry Night and proclaiming, “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream...I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”--Albert Einstein
“Dreams are the Windows to the World” [In Catalyst office, Oroville]