The Boundless Joy of Falling

Is 2021 already falling like this, dear soul?

A wall of impenetrable rock reaching the sky. Slippery footholds. No tether to break a fall.

It’s easy to crane our heads and tell ourselves we can’t reach the heavens. The view is far-to-impossible from the ground. But when we gird ourselves with the right tools, the best training, optimal instruction, we can shift our focus from demurring to doing. We can use fear as adrenaline to carry us through any crisis, over any wall, across any void.

Keep going, dear soul. You are stronger than you know.

She believed she could fly.

She didn’t heed the people at the top of the trail, the ones who said she shouldn’t jump because she would fail. Instead, she ran to the cliff edge and hurled herself toward sun stars clouds. For a few shining seconds, the wind suspended her between earth and a universe of possibility.

Right before she splatted at the bottom like the coyote in RoadRunner cartoons.

A few believed enough to help her. They tended her bruises, set broken bones, sat with her while she healed. When she set out for the summit on the first day she was able, they didn’t try to stop her from falling. Again.

Because flying means failing. Falling. Splatting. And getting up. Again and again. Until one is light enough to touch the sky.

Throwback to greener pastures.

I snapped this photo on my first full day at NES Artist Residency. Nestled in a rocky cove along a jaw dropping fjord, I stood in this green space, considered where it gave way to black and wet and unfathomable depth. Mountains cut the horizon like a jagged fence, soon to be obscured by mist fog sideways rain.

I planted myself in this carpet beneath our star. Savored the fishy stink of the factory, the tear of rust at my fingertips, the light breeze on my cheeks. And I believed in myself again. In my words. In my brain’s looping ability to reknit itself. And in the sheer power of a woman’s will.

This spot will be frozen the next time I see it, but an altered state won’t stop me from creating. Life never fails to inspire, no matter how unrecognizable. I celebrate every opportunity to put myself out there, however I fly or experience falling.

Recent Reads Friday: The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff @pamjenoff

I promised I’d read another Jenoff book, and this one did not disppoint. An abandoned suitcase and a grisly car crash set the main character on a quest to find out what happened to a dozen WWII era women. Using her resourceful nature, she traces the fate of the women in twelve pictures through concentration camps, orphanages, and post-war Europe.

A superlative historical novel with women as the focus.

Get your copy HERE.

➡️ I purchase every new book featured with my own funds. I do not offer endorsements in exchange for a feature. My opinions are honest assessments of books I read, enjoy, and believe worthy of your time. Creators cannot create if people fail to support their work with actual money. I am doing my part to support worthy writers in many genres and career stages.

Look at my face. Crescent pose with quad stretch is focused pain.

Not only am I balanced on foot-and-knee. The front of my right leg and hip screams as it lengthens. This pose is the ultimate picture of multitasking.

I suck at multitasking. Some days, I consider walking while thinking a sincere accomplishment. I never met a rabbit trail I could resist, especially I happen upon it when I should be writing pitching selling.

Which is why I practice this pose most days. Maintaining balance while stretching into discomfort is a challenge. Away from this space, this is a picture of my life. I force myself into foreign situations because they make me grow. Try new things because they are the way forward. Create because I can’t help it.

Whenever I wobble, I breathe. Adjust. Lean into the stretch. And I emerge refreshed, ready to conquer my next assignment with ferocity and heart and humor. Even when I’m falling.

Have you seen the movie Midsommar?

I watched this horror the night before stumbling upon this church. Set back from a gravel road. Nestled in a green field between two walls of snowcapped basalt. The oldest sod church in a country of sagas.

Midsommar is a parable about the power of faith. To comfort and soothe. To give lonesome souls family, a tribe, a place to belong. And to offer hope to whoever craves it.

But it also shows how people pervert faith by falling, tormenting, torturing, and even murdering in its name. In the movie, everyone who says this is not my faith dies, because those are the rules of the group. No one is allowed to reject it and leave, free to believe other faiths or to have none.

Midsommar is a picture of what right-wing evangelical Christian Nationalists are doing to America.

Under the guise of standing up to imagined persecution, they are determined to stamp out any faith but their own. They long for the 1950s because white people were supreme, Black people stayed in their place, homosexuals hid in closets, and women stayed home, kept their mouths shut, and bore babies they did not want.

Faith should inspire us to be better humans. It’s a tool to cope with being alive. Why does faith turn so many into monsters?

I received this good advice recently.

In 2019, I took myself apart.

Okay truthfully, I fell apart.

But rather than throwing myself back together, I sat with broken pieces, damaged goods. Considered each shard and scrap and contraption. Scrubbed and polished what I could salvage. Reassembled those pieces slowly strategically methodically. Trashed the rest.

I’m the most imperfect soul I know. I often say and do the wrong thing, even after much self-reflection. I’m still learning how to use a truckload of new tools. My muscles ache from all the unfamiliar buckets I carry.

Isn’t that what growth looks like?

There’s no shame in sitting with your faulty parts and pieces. No problem with taking a time-out. Give yourself a good scrubbing, a healthy spit-shine. Emerge into the rest of 2021 more YOU than you’ve ever been.