January 2025. My then-fiancée, now-wife and I showed Muir Woods to two transplant friends who hadn't seen it before, followed by a jaunt up the winding cliffside part of Highway 1 to Stinson Beach. I opened the back of my camera at some point in error. Light licks at the edges of some images, nearly obliterates others. Sometimes when the tourists are in the way of the photo, it means they are the photo, you know?
On a foggy late-summer day, farewell to a house I lived in for a long time but hadn't lived in for a long time. It looked more beautiful than usual that day, nearly empty, filled with diffuse light, recently repainted with the floors refinished (and more) to get ready for sale.
A farewell that didn't turn out to have been a farewell after all, after my father changed his mind and moved back into the only house we ever all lived in.
A farewell to my mother, moving several states away after 40+ years in San Francisco.
This was the evening after the moving truck came and went, the evening before my mother and her sweet kitty left with my big sister. Zinnia was a bit at loose ends in the nearly unfurnished space, trying to understand it all, I expect.
The movers hadn't been willing to pack some spillable items (cooking oils, hair products, etc.). My mother was fretting slightly about what to do with them. I said I could use some of them. I still laugh remembering my sister pressing the whole box of them into my hands, saying with a smile but a heavy emphasis, "Just. Make them. Go away." We have that mega bottle of vanilla extract in our kitchen still.
I stood at the back window and remembered the many, many, many times I had looked out at the ocean here, or in the ocean's direction on these foggy days. The five-story building that went up when I was in elementary school, painted a glaring coral color, that filled one of our western windows instead. How we grieved the old view. The breeze coming off the Pacific into my bunk bed on warm nights, the traffic noise that one could almost, with a great deal of effort, mistake for the noise of waves breaking.
When it's clear, you can see the tiny bumps of the the Farallon Islands on the western horizon. On the clearest days of all, not just the southern but the northern Farallones, and Point Reyes to the northeast. The spray of the surf visible from more than a mile away, on wild days.What a wide sash of blue, blue, blue that we climbed the hill behind our house to see better on sunny days. How it turned a glancing silver in certain lights, or the mysterious streaks of paler gray-green on its surface that I found so enchanting. I think now perhaps it was the shadows of clouds too distant for me to notice.
"There is a skill you will never do. It may require more strength than you will build, more flexibility than your body can manage, a specific kind of coordination, timing, or momentum that is outside of what you'll develop. We like to think of ourselves as limitless. But this is a mistake. We will always be able to continue to grow, but we grow like oaks, up and out and down and sideways, in accordance with our environment, our genetics, and our experience with previous growth. We don't grow infinitely in all directions at once.
"Many of us hate limitations. We rail against them and push into them, HARD. And sometimes to great effect.
"And sometimes, we put so much of our energy into railing against a limitation, pursuing a skill or a trick or a goal -- that we fail to grow into the soft places where we can have more success.
"I'll be the last to tell you to take the path of least resistance. But I'll be the first to tell you that what sets you apart as a performer, and as a human, is the beautiful variety of what comes naturally to you. Lean into what works, what feels good, what you do that no one else does. Strive for excellence AND don't smash yourself against the rocks of a skill that isn't coming.
"It's a hard balance to strike, it's even hard to explain. But if you needed permission to work on something different, or to soften your intensity where it's only frustrating you, or to spend time playing with that sill arm movement you like to do. This is it!"
- Janelle Peters / @cirque_psych
I keep returning to these thoughts. I'm not a performer, just someone who likes to move and, both separately and relatedly, keeps needing to learn not to rail against limitations.
I hadn't experienced that in such a physical way until I started recreational circus. Aerials are physically strenuous enough that I found I could quickly ruin my whole evening if I didn't know when to quit trying, when to leave a skill alone that just wasn't happening for me. I'd get more and more tired and more and more frustrated (which is hardly a combination that leads to breakthroughs, huh)...
Anyway, I was grateful for this perspective and copied these words down into my aerials notebook. Circus specifics aside, maybe they'll resonate with you too.
