It’s dark. Around you you can hear the breathing, snorting, coughing, popcorn-crunching mass that makes up an audience. The air is thick with hay and heat and expectation. The ring master’s voice rises above the crowd with in a baritone roar. A spot-light flashes on but it takes a moment for your eye to follow the light-ladder up, up, up.
There! Higher than you could have believed you spot the spangled leotard and crimson scarf around the neck of the acrobat. She’s standing on a platform where the stripes of canvas meet at the peak of the Big Top.
Confidence oozes from every line of her body. You can see it even from the bottom of the well of darkness where you sit. Fear grips your body for an instant- you see a mind-image of her body falling like a broken-winged bird. The fear dies an instant later. Her confidence is contagious. She will not fall. She cannot fall.
Instead she leaps, hovers on the edge of infinity, then catches herself with breathless ease.
High flying…
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Sometimes I get upset and don’t know why, so I pick the most likely of the things bothering me and fix on it as the “problem”. Laurie looked at me the other day and just said “Honey, all your nets have been folded up and put away. That’s always kind of scary, but you are learning great things.” And she was right. I’m not upset because of A, B or C. I’m scared because I’m standing at the top of the Big Tent and not seeing the safety that I’m used to.
But here’s the thing: I’m ok. I don’t need them anymore.
I am that acrobat- spangly outfit and all. Most people could not conceive that flying is possible unless they saw someone do it. It’s my job to be confidant and brave and to do what I’ve been trained to do. A convoluted way of saying “Don’t hide your light under a basket”.
I’ve left my basket at home and am hiking to the tallest place I can find. When I get there I’m going to light a bonfire.