What to do, while cartwheeling through space?
I note the flashes of ground below as I spin, measure geography and points of entry, planning a landing spot as if I had aileron and rudder with which to choose. Elaborate mapping, as if I had more control than just continuing to breathe and keep eyes wide. Tears fall upward, and the occasional crash into cliffside or boulder, the whip of branches across my face, are welcome: I am grateful for that violent sense of self in unhelpful space.
She has released me, her face another flash of landscape, concern and love a series of snapshots that bring comfort and fresh grief. I am alone again, in between; motherless, awake, alive, unsure. I am no longer what I was, am not yet what I will be, and in between, this long, long fall, in which I am all, and nothing.
Objects fly through the air, stars wheel through the universe. All fall eventually. If we become obsessed with definitively mastering the decline, we are lost. If we achieve peace within the intervals of rising and falling, we find grace.
(Arthur Chandler, On the Symbolism of Juggling: The Moral and Aesthetic Implications of the Mastery of Falling Objects. http://www.juggling.org/papers/symbolism/)
