Dear Trying,
Today I take a lesson from the birds, specifically the flight of a bird- the White Breasted Nuthatch. The nuthatch would easily be as featured on calendars and greeting cards as the chickadees had they such a lyrical and onomatopoeic name.
It flies thus: first, a slight dive, a little dip, then it flaps forcefully, swiftly, into an upward climb, reaches a point (who knows where this point is?) and then descends, falls, actually, in a graceful slope. Then, up it flaps again. Lots of birds fly like this - I am still observing just how many birds, give me another 20 years and I will give you a more complete list.
The message, I thought, from my porch on my skates, was to ascend and fall; not as you might have thought, to fly, so much as to dive, jump, leap up, and then fall in a bell curve. Yes. Flying is not so hard, but falling might be....
This led me to consider how small is small. Just what is small? How big are the details that the devil is in and we are not to sweat? For me to do anything at all, I have often had to push hard against the awareness of details. Details impinge ceaselessly. I just don't seem to be able to get off the ground with them.
