It’s like spending your entire life on a mountain, only there’s no nice professionally graded pathway dug in for you, it’s mostly a cliff wall and below so much distance inviting you to fall for minutes before the earth breaks and collects your body. You press your back along the rock wall and inch, inch, inch cross the narrowest outcropping of rock which is all you have for stability. You know—or you believe so hard you’ve convinced yourself it’s a knowing—that if you keep going long enough and don’t fall you’ll find a plateau, a nice grassy area with fresh water and enough to eat, and you’ll be able to rest and maybe even live, but until then you have to cling and keep surviving.
But days and days exhaust you with effort. For many moments you wonder if there’s relief in letting it go and being done with it. You doubt there’s a plateau at all. Who told you there would be one? Why did you believe it? But you have to believe it.
And then finally the effort tenderizes you to softness. It’s not so much a giving up as it is almost an intuition, now is the time to let go, and if you ignore it then your foot finds a crack to stumble upon and spill you into the abyss. Only you’re not falling. A lift of warm air keeps you aloft.
You would imagine this to be a wonder, a delight, a rejoicing, but all you know at first is bitter resentment. How could I have been so wrong all this time? How have I wasted these years in this endless fucking effort and terror when all I needed to do was the one thing I worked so hard not to do?
Was it a mistake? You’ve seen people fall. You’ve seen the horrors they become from their slippage. What if the chasm was only giving back what you gave to it—trading horror to terror, giving release to surrender? Perhaps you were a fruit clinging to the branch. Plucked too soon would have been a tragedy. You needed that joining so your tree could feed you until you’d ripened and could let that connection delicately snap so you could fall, easily, easily, into the hands of sky. Another birth, a new life in an old world, a new self in an old body. Everything is new.
