Gillian Holloway

I grew up in a rural setting, surrounded by the best of the everyday world. We lived on property that adjoined the McKenzie river in Oregon. I lived in a messy but idyllic world of horses, dogs, kittens in the barn, and long rainy seasons by the fireside where I fell in love with books. These early passions are still my foundation. The most important truths I know come from nature and from our collective wisdom and wanderings.

I was a fantastic student in early life, and a fairly unimpressive one in college. I could seldom find a place to park, and this mirrored my frustration at feeling there was essentially no place for my gifts and perspective. I settled on pretending to be content--that seemed the best bet, given that actual happiness and fitting in appeared to be out of the question.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell said that we must be attuned to happy accidents in our lives because they often lead us into the life we were meant to live; not the life we have settled for, or strategically selected: the life we were meant to live. That gentle truth should be etched in every mirror so that when we see ourselves, we also see our possibilities.

While studying psychology in graduate school I began attending dream-sharing groups. We discussed the dreams we remembered, brainstormed about what they might mean, and then zeroed in on the beating heart of the questions that really mattered to us in the moment. I drove home each week from those groups feeling as if my soul had been washed and air-dried in a summer breeze. We did not always find perfectly tidy answers, but we did something far more important: we asked the questions that really mattered. There, I found the language of my unique, messy, non-judgmental, x-ray vision soul. My habit of looking into and through, rather than "at" things was no longer a learning disability, it was a gift. The off kilter way that dreams reflect life, without obscuring the interconnections, the spirit, and the meaning of events, this is the way I think and feel. Essentially, through a whim of exploration, a happy accident, I found my life.