I am fal...all..ll..ling. I don't know why or how.
Like a glass bottle released from a hand.
Like a dandelion seed blown by the wind.
Like a feather fallen from a falcon.
Like pine cones from the pine.
Like an avalanche, like a waterfall falling
in a great cascade of words and tears and promises.
I have leapt from the building of normalcy.
Muttering words of encouragement to myself.
I have no particular direction. I am drifting through clouds.

Perhaps it is flying.
Not the mad panic flutter of a flame's false hope ready to die with the next breeze.
No, this is floating soaring drifting beautiful and melancholy all at once.
This is dreams of gossamer wings flooded with tears.
The moment when all I can see is the big picture far below
and the freedom of not being part of the daily grind.
It is sunsets and wind storms.
Bending to the breeze
Knowing I will never be deterred from the direction I choose to head.
The leaves falling in autumn and the steam rising in the morning.

The world around me fades in and out of view.
Crinkled cellophane that distorts and bends the light,
but for brief moments lies flat to show everything true and clear.
I understand little.

I know mountains are beautiful.
Pine needles are slippery underfoot and make climbing difficult.
Rivers can move boulders and mountains or mountains a boulder at a time.
There is a throne on the Big Thompson river in the canyon
that waits for my childhood princess to take her seat knowing she is surrounded by love.
I-5 stretches along the West Coast tracing dozens of memories of run away escapes
in both directions.
I know I will travel that road dozens if not hundreds more times.
Shuttling myself to various pieces of home.
Running from various pieces of entrapment.
And I will struggle each day to speak the truth and write more lies,
or the other way around.
It runs both ways

like the sky that sucks upward and pushes me back down.
Like the breath in and out,
slow or quick,
It is always in and out.

Copyright © 1997 wendi loomis The Seasons Change