My all-time favorite movie is Field of Dreams, the whisper of the universe telling Ray that If he built it, they would come. He had every reason in the world to not build his ball field, yet at the end of the movie there it was.
Ray had family and friends who all thought he was crazy. He had his home and his livelihood on the line, and yet he couldn’t escape building the field. Along the way he had many roadblocks, things were happening to him that he couldn’t understand, things that were unexplainable yet he continued. Eventually, his passion rubs off on his wife Annie, and with the support of just one person, he is driven to continue with this plan that even he doesn’t understand.
There are many thought-provoking elements from that movie that can be taken and applied to our own lives.
What is it that you long to do that seems crazy to the others around you? How crazy are you willing to look to make your whisper a reality? Do you have that one person who will support you when others turn away?
If you recall, Ray becomes annoyed and angry when after putting so much work into the field he is told that he can not partake of all it has to offer, he is not invited into what lays beyond the outfield grass. All his work and effort he is told has a stop point. Of course he is hurt and confused by this. After all his work he feels slighted and begins to shout “What’s in it for me?”
My thoughts when watching this film, and that clip impaticular is that it’s much like raising our children. We do everything we think we need to do, working tirelessly to fulfill dreams that are not ours, and in the end we are asked to stay back out of the corn so that the dreams they have can be realized. Sad at first, we struggle. Empty nest is real and hard…. but if you can look at the fact that we are not meant to go on all the journeys life will hand our kids, if we stay behind we realize our own dreams have been waiting for the noise of the uninverse to quiet down so we can discover what else there is for us. Our passions continue long after we are asked to step back from the corn. If you’ve been looking for the universe to sent you a sign, if you’ve been waiting for your official invite to find your passion…
Well here is your invite.
Today I invite you to find your passion and listen to that whisper, start dreaming or better yet start taking steps toward enjoying your pie. It will be a journey that we go on together as I don’t have it all figured out. I have many ideas and most of them scare the heck out of me. I wonder will people think of me as they thought of Ray, am I just a bit crazy about making my visions reality.
If you follow through with my Field Of Dreams analogy, you know that at the end it wasn’t the field or Shoeless Joe or even Terrence Mann that mattered. All along the universe had been drawing Ray to his Father for a simple game of catch. It took a lot of twists and turns to get him to the point where he could have that game of catch, but he followed through with each crazy plot twist. In the end, this field that he built that others felt would be his demise, brought hundred if not thousands to the field all for their own reasons. The movie played out that way, but so did real life. It began an unexpected pilgrimage to Dyersville Iowa by many who loved the movie. I was one who made the trip to Dyersville. I have sat on the bleachers and pondered life. I’ve watched a pickup game of baseball being played by others who had also made the trip.
For years I had a plastic tube of dirt from left field on my desk, and I held on as long as I could to the ear of corn that made the trip home with me. I think most of us look to fulfilling our dreams and think that it’s complicated and just out of reach- well I myself am going to think of Ray. I am going to imagine that there will be some folks around me that think I’m crazy and think I should be satisfied and that I am putting too much emphasis on something that they can’t see the value of. But if Ray can take the farm field and turn it into a ball field so that he can make amends with his father who passed decades before what isn’t possible?
So what do ya say? “Do you want to have a catch?”
I have a lot of dreams and most have been put on hold while I raised my family, this was intentional as nothing I have ever done in life has been more important to me than the raising of my kids and having a strong marriage. But as the name of my blog implies, there is more pie- I do not have to share this pie and I certainly don’t have to give it away entirely. I can pick up a fork and partake and see what happens.
Till next time, Erin
