Cup board Landscape

Story and Painting by Lehan Ramsay

Following a dream seems to be something you can only do if you have expendable resources. Every day I find my ideas for change giving way to small compromises. I can taste failure again. Still, I must be getting somewhere. You can’t have failure without change having already occurred can you? There must have been some tiny shift already.

At some point in the last five years I began to recognize the taste of failure. Something I did gave me a response that clearly indicated that I should stop. I recognized that I should stop. I thought that I should stop. I stopped. And then suddenly a rush of something else. SO WHAT? And I stepped over the line. Since then it’s been one failure after another, years of them.

People said things. Mostly it was People who had said don’t give up, just don’t give up. But now they were saying something else. You shouldn’t have, and you should have, and of course. They were right. Of course. I listened, they were my tongue pushing on an inflamed tooth, I let them push and I pushed with them. Of course. But I had already crossed over. It was just a tooth, and I was still alive. The thing about failure. We think there is nothing on the other side of it. Once we have it we are annihilated by it. But no, not annihilated. Just reduced. Reduced in form, substance, and power.

People had good reason to be annoyed. This was, after all, the point at which they could be expected to step in. Their support of me had failed because I had failed. Now for anything to succeed they would need to take up the cause, gather together, push. What me? They said. It’s got nothing to do with me.

I’m tiny! an ant, waving my antenna and legs wildly around, nobody can see me any more I’m so small. Down here the big things are so far away and unapproachable. But an ant also has the advantage of being too small to press down on the aching tooth and send out waves of you have a nerve pain. The People have departed, there’s no fun to be had. It’s just me and all the small things that an ant can see. Down here there are still things to challenge. You don’t get whacked like you do with the big things. People don’t think the small things are important, not worthy of such fierce protection. So I can practice. Perhaps down here I’ll find something to bump up against, and instead of just getting whacked, something will answer my question. So What?

Sunday Best (for her)

Sunday Best (for him)

Paintings and story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

Sometimes our dreams are like sleet. Cold and thickly slow. But I’m lucky I guess to have nothing to begin with, rather than to put everything I had in and still find it cold and thickly slow. I’m almost at a standstill and I’m foggy with boredom in here. People said: you should have saved money. And instead I thought that if I kept on doing what I was supposed to be doing, I might reach somewhere. So I paid those kids – those graduates of my school – from my salary to come here one afternoon a week and do projects with me. When they didn’t bother to do anything because they couldn’t see the point I tried really hard not to chide them. I was just paying them so I could teach them. I figured sometimes a teacher just had to pay for their own development. I worked on my study at the university in Melbourne, and I took up a new craft, painting. Working with diligence, two-and-a-half years, one-hundred-and-forty paintings. But that wasn’t my dream. That was my investment and my life-saving.

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

When you need a car, or you need a job, you should take what you can. Not having a car can be just annoying, and not having a job can lead to death by starvation. That’s not what I’m talking about here with the Settle-For-Lest. The Settle-For-Lest is what you do when you are afraid to lose a dream. You really want to do this, or really want to do that. But it might be big – too big – and the consequence of gaining it might be that your dream gets destroyed in the rubble of reality. So you avoid it, you find an excuse. Lest you get it. Getting a dream is much worse than having a dream; I can tell you that from experience. And I am convinced that you know that feeling. Any small thing we pine for, however momentarily is a danger.

That’s why I am so happy with my red shoe dream. Not the best shoe. Just the best shoe that I could want. My feet loved those shoes. I loved my feet with those shoes. And if I were to forget about them, I would also have to forget that I had feet. Never notice them, never see them. Always have some generic nice picture of what my feet were. Forget about how I had feet that had those shoes on. And forget about the person I was when those shoes were on my feet.

Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay

I guess that my forage into the World of Red Shoes gave me my first ever standard.

I can never be satisfied with a good red shoe. Even a great red shoe. This shoe I liked wasn’t the best shoe in the world, not the most attractive, not even the reddest. My professor at university spent some time talking about immanence. A kind of glow, a kind of spirit. When you know it’s good, and it’s right. What my red shoe did for me was to give me an example of something that I could hold up as a standard for what I really wanted – my immanent shoe. I had always had trouble really knowing what I wanted. So easy to be submerged by what was there, to believe that inside of that group a choice needed to be made, or the fear that I would get nothing at all.  There’s nothing at all wrong with nothing at all. It’s just waiting, and sometimes waiting is not a finite state. Maybe you can see that this was a revelation for me? And it stands with me now as a solid, companionable post that I can lean on when things get tough. I really have nothing better to do, and I like that red shoe. So I’m happy to keep looking. And wait.

My doctor said: so you are free then? Of course he wasn’t talking about the shoe, nor was he trying to make another appointment. If you are free you hardly need another appointment…I was surprised, I hadn’t realized what freedom was. It really wasn’t what I expected.