Surrender. I am not exactly sure how to do it.

But this butterfly sure seems to know how. Opening to the moment, fully accepting and allowing the Divine to enter.

I want to follow its lead.

I am healing a painful leg injury that has allowed me to walk only a little ways on the Trail for the past month. I want to go further, but my body decides the distance I may travel right now.

Looking for the doorway out from where I am at, this image of the butterfly spoke to me. It is one I took this past summer when the flowers were in full bloom and the butterflies fluttered.

Lately, I notice I keep trying to get better before I begin to write or photograph again. I want to give a polished presentation rather than reveal myself, raw and shattered by the duration of this healing episode. If I wait for perfection though, I might sit this dance out and wait forever.

This moment is all we have, as the guidance goes.

I am an artist, and I want to share beauty. But more deeply, I am a writer, and story is the container that holds me, my life, and all things together — it brings me back to my heart. It all started when I was young, telling it like it is (a mixture of fear and excitement) to my mother who was my best audience while she was here. https://streetlightmag.com/2018/04/23/listen-carefully-by-karrie-bos/

I am a writer for the same reason I loved figure skating in my youth. One edge, one line, and then another, becomes an idea, flowing, turning, gliding, soaring, freedom. The pen can make all the same marks as a skater’s blade. Three-turns, crossovers, forwards or backwards, you can move in whatever direction you choose. Oh, the places you can travel. And you can twirl, too.

Yes, the blank page is a sheet of ice, a bit slippery sometimes with all that open expanse and no road signs, but there is no true freedom without exposing our core, including our painful foibles and falls.

Especially our falls.

And I know this to be true: That in her falling, she flew.

~ KB