So I stand at the cliff’s edge looking down on familiarity. I look down as far as I can see, to the fears, the hurt, the shortcomings, the broken hopes and dreams that were swept away in the waves that still crash into the shore. Waves of repetition, like worries in my mind, with a spray of memory that lasts but a second before circling again to rejoin the ocean’s enormity.

My head hangs down looking below my feet, to the shoreline where centuries of movement show no stopping aside or moving backward. Mountains of sand and rock moving upward with vines of seaweed entangled. I see my faults and the painful roads I chose that washed me to shore, weakened and powerless.  I cannot fix these broken hearts or mend the fences that are not mendable.

So I look up at the clouds, through the air and mist, at the sun that is so powerfully radiant. I feel the air blow through my hair, I close my eyes and for a moment my head is finally clear, forgotten is that mortal world and all its meanings, highways and street cars, polluted air and gravity, all these things we call progress that will become our legacy.

I look up again and I see the empty space and nothing more, no path or road, no guide, but plenty of room for dreams and hopes. Time stands still now reaching into the parts of me that still need such reaching, re-claiming the parts of me that I had owned as a child when the world was an endless road of possibilities and fantasy that were lost in the twist and turns that separated me from my roots.  

It’s time to fly now as best I can, to take this leap of faith off cliff’s edge and expose my shaky wings, with the hope of jumping forward and not back, with no guide other than myself.