Visioning: Creating the Life of Our Dreams and a World That Works for Us All

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you

Don’t go back to sleep

You must ask for what you really want

Don’t go back to sleep

Rumi

Ever hear of the horse-in-the-desert game? My friends and I used to play it at parties back in high school. One person squats on all fours in the middle of the room and a blanket is thrown over them. Someone tells them, “You are a horse in the desert on a very hot day. Take something off that will make you cooler!”

Being under a blanket in the middle of someone’s living room with lots of people around can throw off the mind’s ability to think quickly and rationally. Take something off that would make me cooler? The blanket isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind, unfortunately. A few people have been known to take everything off, so that they couldn’t even come out from under the blanket. I remember I was under the blanket at a Halloween party and I was dressed as a gypsy. I had sequins over my eyebrows and I started taking them off one by one and passing them under the blanket, which was greeted with a lot of groans from the crowd. I finally got so hot under there that I lifted the blanket up so I could breathe for a minute. Everyone thought I finally got it and they started cheering. Well, that’s one way to get it. The girl after me got it right away. I later heard that the girl before me kept saying, “I can’t!” because she only had a leotard on. (Those of us waiting our turn to go were sequestered in the kitchen.) The boy before that had to have it explained to him while he wrapped the blanket around his practically naked body.

It’s simple, it’s apparent, it’s staring us right in the face. It’s so obvious that we can sometimes miss it completely.

The whole game of life is like that—and it is a game, isn’t it? Well, yes, sometimes it’s more like a giant jigsaw puzzle or universal hide-and-seek when it’s not the horse-in-the-desert game. We have the memory of who we are encoded in each and every cell, in every fiber of our being. And yet we’re only now starting to wake up, only now taking the blanket off on an extremely hot day to drink in the refreshing remembrance of what we’ve always known but pretended we forgot, only now realizing we are children of God, in whom God is very well pleased.