Miss the Ground

John is pacing.

There isn't anything wrong, really, right now. But a cancer diagnosis is like an earthquake; long after the shaking has stopped, you don't feel as if you can trust the ground. If there have been aftershocks, it takes even longer for your confidence to return.

Creative energy is a mysterious thing. While I know that positive developments occur when I feel positive, I also recognize that it cannot be forced. It is not so much that I find my center, again and again, when the earth has shifted from under me. It is more that I sit in the rubble and know that I am not happy about it, and wait in the knowledge that I will fall back to peace.

All we can do is cultivate our core and hope that good things grow, that when the foundations shift we will be dragged back to a good place by the gravitational force of the center.

Douglas Adams wrote that the key to flying is to fall and miss the ground.

But you have to practice, and that means falling and hitting the ground, hard, again and again. And you can't teach anyone else to do it. The only thing you can really do is meet people where they are, with unconditional love and acceptance of their unique processes of growth. You can be a soft place to land when the tremors hit.

And then they miss the ground.