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And then I realized the thing that was stifling me, was fear of moving forward. My own continuation of holding myself back.

That way indecision has of keeping us captive in a state of staggering paralysis. Clinging to what’s old and familiar, even if it has never truly nourished us.

I had to cry out

all the ways I thought my life should be before I could allow myself to move towards a falling more deeply in love with the way of things. Keep taking barefoot steps along a dirt earth path, even if it only allows visibility up to 200 feet away.

Shake myself free

from the need for approval in the form of outside validation, because only we ourselves are the ones who hold our own dream.

Surrender came as a laying my sword down, forehead resting against the relief of cool silver steel while my body ran and my feet made tracks over pavement and parched grass able to do nothing

but receive the wide open sky shining from overhead.

Braids beating against my back, sternum pulsing in an early September Indian Summer’s heat. Ninety one degree sweat pooling on my forearms a messy and welcome release.

I leapt. Grabbing hold of my own hand that morning in order to still reach the outstretched fingers of fellow word alchemists planning to gather in the Hudson Valley in a few short months to continue to give birth to their own books and beings. While ecstasy flowed equally through my bones, the way it does in the choosing of oneself.

And it seemed that everyone I walked and ran by that morning was smiling, as if to cheer the world on, and welcome in the subtle stirrings of their own inner revolution.