A friend was retelling his first encounter with glaciers. He was awestruck by the magnitude of these frozen sheets of ice. He would describe seeing a crevasse and thinking it was large, but then he realized the fissure dwarfed the giant people mover. To consider this ice before him was hundreds if not even thousands of years old, boggled his mind. He tried to describe the hues of blue as the light hit the glacier from different angles, but our vocabulary doesn't include the words to capture the beauty. He had been waiting a lifetime to experience this encounter with nature and discovered it was worth the wait.

My father owned a tour company while I was growing up and I would often ride-along with him. One particular memory of a dream to encounter nature going wrong was with a group of Japanese tourists coming to visit the Grand Canyon. Visiting this National Park was to be the highlight of their trip to the US. Sadly, the day of their visit, the canyon was socked in with clouds. As we stood on the canyon rim and looked out, it looked like someone filled the chasm with cotton balls. My father had many talents as a tour guide, but cleaning the clouds out of the Grand Canyon, was not one of them.

What did you want to see or touch?

What did you envision as a child? Did you want to pet a snake, ride a submarine to the bottom of the ocean, swim with dolphins, walk on Mars, swing with monkeys, ride a horse on the beach, climb El Capitan, or steal the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow?

The purpose of our dreams is to spur us to action when we awake. Pursuing these childhood desires allows us to unearth our earliest memories for our interests and draw from who we were before the responsibilities of life squashed our ideas of what is possible. Start digging and make a dream come true!

Going Further? What nature dreams have you realized? Was the experience as you anticipated? What surprised you about your experience? What experiences do you have yet to accomplish? What stops you from pursuing and what is one step to overcome? Will virtual reality get you closer to achieving your childhood dream?