crutches
What’s a crutch? What’s a strength? What’s the difference? Is there any? Are they one and the same thing? Are they polar opposites? Antagonisms? Are they two sides of the same coin? Or the same being dressed in different clothing?
You build a rhythm. You make routines and rituals. You find your footing. A cup of coffee made a certain way, in a certain mug, sat in a certain place. Scissors perched in just the right corner, in just the right reach. Rulers, pencils, paint and glue all right where you want them in just the right way. A groove of a path paced repeatedly in the welcomed wear of comfort and familiarity. Movements you could make blindly in the grace of muscle memory.
But, what happens when the system stops serving you? When the things you built to hold you up start holding you back and you don’t know how to let go? When the walls cave in, the bottom falls out, the center gives way, and you can’t bear to leave?
You make all the right gestures. All the right moves. You say all the right words. But the spell won’t cast like it did before. The magic won’t happen the way it used to.
Sometimes the most devastating questions you can ask yourself are: what now? What next? How do I begin again? What do I do?
There’s something that happens when you’re stripped bare of well-worn safety and security. When you’re forced to face a new direction. An unknown horizon. A place on a map yet to be filled in. When you begin to redraw the lines of essentiality.
You start to see the world differently. You wonder and wander tenderly. You learn not only new methods of making, you learn new ways of being made.
Sometimes your crutch becomes your strength. Sometimes your strength starts to crumble. In the unexpected gift of limitation you begin the work of discovery.
May the stripping away reveal the most essential parts of your being.
May you find solid ground in places you’ve never thought to stand.
May your strengths and crutches and the loss of them always grant you the gift of a new beginning.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
I choose to believe that incredibly beautiful things can be made in the aftermath of what we thought we wanted. Sometimes we think we need one thing to be true in order for us to find comfortable joy. And a lot of times that thing we think we need is in a direct reaction to something we were told we could not have.
It’s easy for us to think in pendulum swings.
But I want to believe that there is a beautiful thing to find and nurture in the in-between. Something that doesn’t look like what we thought we wanted or what we were told we needed to have.
And if we continue to move gently and purposefully toward the things that make our heart feel warm and make us feel more like ourselves than ever before.. even if it looks different than another version of ourselves pictured… then that’s what I think living and loving looks like.
In the unexpected gift of limitation you begin the work of discovery.”