Growth

Your base is firm, large. Supple leaves burst from your stalk. You’ve rooted to rise up and stretch towards the sky. Boundless energy carried you upwards as you siphoned nutrients from below, from the sun, from the air. An interconnected web of information, shared on a subtle current of waves, energy, through ether.

You’ve grown wide and limber, reaching towards a height, an edge, a peak and then…

you tip.

Your base can no longer support you, your foundation begins to give way. You lean, blindly, and begin to fall. You don’t know where you’ll land, if you’ll be supported by some unseen foundation that will hold you up as you lean over as if in a drunken stupor, stunned by the limit to your existence that you had not seen.

But sometimes, many times, too many, so many times, there is nothing there to catch you.

A forced grounding, a crash landing, you find yourself once again on the ground. You lay there, spent. You may gaze upwards at the height from which you once stood, achy from your descent. All the preparation, all the time, all the effort, and you find yourself in the place where you had started.

But things are different.

Now you know. You know what it was to stand tall. You’ve amassed knowledge and resources that you may either retain in full, hold onto in part, or these things that you’ve learned to cherish may ebb from you and return to the larger pool of existence.

From here, you may feel spent, decide to let go completely, and give yourself up to sensations of pain, loss, anger that wracks your body in waves that smack the shore of your psyche like sorrow.

From here, you may writhe around in passion fueled by an insatiable desire for life, for action, for some kind of movement, any kind of movement that counteracts the sudden stillness. From your now broken base sprouts or roots or vines may reach out to grasp at anything supple enough to allow entry so that you can continue to do. Blinded by your desire to act in some way, in any way the direction will no longer matter, no longer will you aim to grow up; you may now reach blindly forward or backwards to exist in cycles of past trauma or to move forwards into a future carrying unresolved past pain.

From here, you may accept that a part of you is now broken irreparably. From this place you may just shift. From the same base you may continue to incline your head once again towards the sky and gaze upwards no longer tall, now humbled; no longer reckless, now grounded; no longer unsure, now resolved.

From experience, from hurt, from pain, from truths before unseen, from loss, and from the joy of having once tasted a height that is now left open for others to fill in you root and continue to rise.