The Life Cycle of... Becoming. Anything at all. (Or A Short Summary of Growing Up).

You didn't know what to call it then, but you can look back now and call it what it was: innocent idealism and a fuck ton of work.

You can't blame a young person. In fact, you should applaud her. She'll need the echo of trust after she wears herself thin, decides with her body that she's meant for something else, and then plunges, accidentally, into the terror of liminality, teetering between faith and doubt, not knowing how or when she'll land again, two feet on the sturdy ground of love.

Hovering is a particular kind of suffering; a forgetting that you belong.

It can last far too long.

And then there's what comes next: remembering, beyond your mind, that which you have no proof of actually knowing, but can feel in your bones. The pulse connects the clues like magnets. Magic. You are pulled back in.

Nameless and easy. Like breathing. Like dying. Like the rising sun again and again. Like that which doesn't depend on should but is born from a raging mystical desire. The energy of fire, burning all that's not truly alive.*

It strips you down until it fits. So well you can wear it like a calling.

You move into warrior-realism. You survive in your finest for the dignity of your tribe. Asking the buffalo to lay himself down, offer himself for your consumption, you exchange his energy for your creation. The simple and difficult and profound.

You risk wanting something honestly enough to embody it. You aim for the third eye of mystery. Pull the bow. Shoot.

You're not afraid to devour your destiny.


*Goethe: I praise what is truly alive, what longs to be burned to death!