Two Walls and a Roof (54 page)

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams”.

This inspiring quotation was given to me years earlier by my son Kyrl, who noticed my sadness and despair after I returned from a particularly sad trip to America
. E
ven though I myself could see no way to happiness then, he bel
ieved in the power of my dreams
for me, an
d I end this account of my life
with the proof of that power, when we finally took my journey of dreams.

America has always attracted me. This attraction began with me reading about Huckleberry Finn and his adventures along the great Mississippi River. As I grew a little older and read more about America and its vast land mass, especially the Western part of America, I began to develop a longing to see certain parts of that country
,
especially the area around the M
idwest and the great Mississippi. Later still, when we began to get free entry into Big Kyrl
’
s cinema, the Wild West became an area I deeply longed to see ‘before it was gone’ according to Kevin Costner in
Dances with Wolves
, my favourite film of all time. But above all
,
there was one area that had a really powerful draw on me spiritually, and that was the Monument Valley area on the Utah-Arizona border.

We have all seen this amazing place in numerous films, especially the cowboy films of John Huston and John Wayne. The movie
Stagecoach
is one of the most famous early ones
,
and
Back to the Future
a later one. There was never a time when I saw that vista, composed of the tall Buttes and the Mittens set against the backdrop of a deep blue sky
,
that my heart did not skip a beat, and it still does even today
.
I simply love the place. My only explanation for this longing is that in some past life I think I must have lived there
. A
psychic once told me that I had lived many times with the Bird Tribe.  Every chance I got to see a picture of that area I took it, a
nd I would just stare at it for
ever, hoping to someday go there. One of the most famous road photographs in existence today is the view from North to South
,
looking into that famous valley
on Highway 163. It was there that Forest Gump stopped running, and I wanted to stand where he stood, and have my photo taken on what I believe is one of the most historic roads in the world.

For as long as I can remember this was a secret dream of mine that I kept to myself,
believing that if I told people
they would say it was totally impossible, and in so doing somehow make me believe they might be right. However
,
I kept it alive within myself, and daydreamed of going there a thousand times as the years pas
sed by.  About twelve years ago
I began a dream journal;
not a journal of dreams but a
secret journal of my most hoped-
for desires. In this journal I placed a picture of a man in a blue shirt and black pants walking on that famous road in Monument Valley
. T
his would be me some day, I hoped. I had found the picture in a magazine and I studied every detail of the picture, even down to the tumbleweed that was blowing across the man’s path. I made up my mind that somehow, someday I would be the man
in that photo
.  I had no idea how it might happen, or how long it would take, but I kept the dream alive all the same. Then almost ten years ago I began to thin
k that it might happen for real
because of JoAnn being an American.

Since meeting JoAnn, and probably bec
ause I was growing older, I
drifted away from reading electronic books to reading a more spiritual type of literature
,
and my whole outlook on life has begun to change. I began to study more and more about who we are, and what we are, and I came to the conclusion that the whole area of Sedona, and especially Monument Valley, had some spiritual significance for me.

I started to make my comput
er screen
savers show different pictures of Monument Valley and Arizona
, as well as my dream car;
a red Corvette. This area of America was becoming my obsession. I studied the maps, studied the satellite images, drove the valley from space
(
thanks to Google
)
and I saw the rock formations known as the Mittens from a hundred angles. I read all about Goulding’s Lodge and Harry Goulding who built a famous trading post, and who later convinced John Huston to begin the whole movie business in the valley. Then later still I read about a new
Native American hotel known as T
he View. It’s an eco friendly hotel, and orientated so that every room faces east. This beautiful building is owned by the Navaho and is built on their sacred grounds
.
I wanted to stay there.

Almost every week in some
guise or other
I would do some research on the internet and learn a new tit bit of information
. A
s my knowledge grew, so did my desire to be there. Even though I had been to the USA many times since meeting JoAnn, we had never ventured south of Missouri.  When I finally told her of this place that I so wanted to see, she said it was just a desert, and who wanted to see a desert, preferring the beautiful lakes and forests of her home state, but I longed to be in that desert, and I knew that we would go there together.

The big pr
oblem had always been my belief
that the cost would make it impossible for me, and rather than be crushed by a confirmation of my fears, I always chickened out when it came to just checking it out.  I dearly wanted JoAnn to be with me on that trip, desert or not, and so for
years more I continued to dream
as life passed me by. One day I woke up and I was sixty years old.

Every year JoAnn returns home to her family for some months, and this parting is always very hard on us both. Usually within a week or so I get terribly lonely and long to be with her in America. It was during one of her extended visits, when I was feeling very low, that once again I returned to my computer and the Valley.

I had been reading
one of my many spiritual books
that were all beginning to point me in a particular d
irection. I was learning about c
onsciousness, and how powerful this kind of thinking could be for us all. The teaching seemed simple, yet very hard to put into practice. It basically says that in order to achieve o
ur dreams, all we need to do is
to first develop a burning desire for our wish to be fulfilled, then imagine as often as possible, especially before sleep, how we would ‘feel’ when we realized our desire. Consciousness
,
or the Universe
, or the God that created us then takes over and
handle
s
the details of how it will manifest into our reality. The guarantee for success seems to be that our desire must benefit
all that it touches and be love
driven
, w
hile the guarantee for failure seems to be a belief in fear and a doubting mind.
 
To take this kind of teaching on faith is incredibly hard to do at any time, but for someone coming from a logical and scientific background
,
it
’
s almost impossible as it smacks of being a daydreamer, not a doer. To even begin to gra
sp the concept
had taken me well over ten years, and I was still somewhat
skeptical
about it until recently.

So on a beautiful summer
’s evening
while sitting alone with my laptop, and missing my Punkin, I decided to test out the teaching.

In complete faith I returned to Arizona in my mind and turned on my laptop. I decided to dream big, and re
-r
ead my dream journal, which I had a devil
of a job finding. As I read it,
I realized that not alone had I wanted to walk in the Valley, but I also wanted to see the town of Williams on Route 66, and have my photo taken beside the train that took tourists on to the Grand Canyon. I found tha
t I had drawn two stick figures
standing on the platform on a photo of the train station. On a whim, I decided to include the town and the train and the Grand Canyon in my big dream. And if I was going to go mad with the dreaming, I may as well do it in style, so I also included a trip to Meteor Crater
where thousands of years ago
a vast explosion took place as a result of a meteorite strike. I felt that we should also go to Sedona, and Flagstaff on Route 66, and to top it all off, we would return to Missouri by sleeper train, crossing America in the style of rich people. All of this just came to me as I let my imagination run wild.

The more I imagined about this amazing trip, the more I became convinced that we just had to do it, but not in a rushed way. We should take our time, at least ten days, and stay in old Route 66 motels whenever we could.  I just knew too that we would stay in Goulding
’
s Lodge where the movie stars had stayed, and I was equally sure that somehow we would sleep on the rim of the Grand Canyon
,
ideally in a log cabin.

Of course this was all just a massive daydream on that evening, but I did get a map drawn out, and began to make a plan, all the time assuming that money was not a problem, which it clearly had to be.
 
In line with the teaching, I ignored the financial problem, trusting in a power within me, or beyond me, I cared not which.  After hours of fun, playing with every kind of possibility, it became clear that the best way to have this grand adventure was to fly to New York, and then on to Phoenix. There we would hire a car at the airport, and drive the rest of the trip, using Flagstaff as a kind of base. On the last day we would drop off our car, and get a taxi to Flagstaff tra
in station early in the morning
for our twenty three hour sleeper train journey back to Kansas City
,
Missouri. Then after spending a day exploring Kansas City, we would take yet another train on to Washington
,
Missouri
,
and there be picked up by JoAnn
’
s family, and be taken home to Steelville.

I became quite sure that
it could now be done physically;
financially was another matter entirely, so I decided on a ‘feeling’ to challenge my fears and cost the whole trip.

The i
nternet is the most amazing invention. I was able to find out quite quickly that this dream trip would cost about three thousand five hundred euros all in, plus about five hundred was needed for food, and that cost seemed a lot less than I had ever imagined it would be. There was never any doubt in my mind that my dream trip was worth the money, but I still could not contemplate the idea of going into debt for my dream, and I had many more pressing calls on that kind of money. Yet I remained faithful to the teaching, and adopted an air of ‘I don’t care, if it’s to be, then it will be’ and that night I went to bed on a high.

During the night I woke from a dream where I saw JoAnn and I sitting on the road, watching the morning sun rise slowly over the Mittens.

When
I switched on my laptop at work
I was greeted by my screen
saver of Monument Valley, the road, and those beautiful Mittens
. I clearly remember thinking
I dreamed of this place last night and ‘I’m going there this year’. I was feeling a kind of certainty, the same kind of feeling I had felt before our Seville adventure. This feeling was very strong and reassuring, yet gentle
. T
hen the phone rang and I began my day
’
s work.

Lunchtime came round
.
I went home for my bit of food and saw my post on the floor. There was a letter from the taxman, as well as a few bills which I decided I would not open till later, not wanting indigestion for the rest of my day. I ate my sandwich and sat in the sun, and then on a whim I opened the tax letter. To my absolute astonishment, disbel
ief and shock, there was a cheque
inside it. It was made out to me for the huge sum of….. three thousand
,
seven hundred
e
uros approximately. I had to check and double check that it was an actual cheque, not some kind of tax demand. It was indeed a cheque, and it was for the exact amount I needed to comfortably pay for my entire dream trip, with some money to spare, as if the taxman had said
, “B
y the way
,
have a drink on me”.

The tax letter explained that I had been overpaying tax in the Tiger Economy times, and to their great credit they had reimbursed me. This refund came at a
time when everyone feared claw
backs of every kind, and we were in the middle of the worst recession in history.

I’m not ashamed to say that I thanked God over and over, as well as the taxman. I thanked my spiritual books, and the Universe, and everyone who had passe
d over in my family. Once again
I experienced yet another extraordinary miracle. All I needed then was to find the spending money and food money
,
and suddenly I remembered that earlier in March my wonderful colleagues at work had made a collection for my sixtieth birthday. They had very kindly presented me with five hundred US dollars, and had written on my bi
rthday card the words ‘
for your next trip to America
’
. That money was still in its envelope in a drawer beside my passport. At the time of their presentation I had resigned myself to the fact that an American trip was impossible that year, and I had totally forgotten all about the money. Now the icing had just been poured all over my cake. I became very excited and just wanted to spread this great news, so ignoring the cost, I called JoAnn in America and told her
to ‘prepare for the desert’,
that we were going on the trip of all trips.  When she asked me how we planned to pay for it all, I just said that a miracle had happened, then I hung up and went back to work on a cloud.