Steadiness comes from being held by the earth, by the water, by a community, a friend, a lover.
Steadiness comes from being held by myself: a hand on my gut, a hand on my heart.
Steadiness comes when my heart and my gut are aligned with my mind and my body.
Steadiness comes with noticing the shaking of my body, from not stopping it but allowing it to continue, from breathing into the discomfort that comes with that lack of control.
Steadiness comes from my breath, from deep down in my body, below my gut; from sitting up straight, from engaging my core, from feeling the strength at my center.
Steadiness comes when I feel at one with myself.
Steadiness comest from the deep knowing that before I believe in any of the socially constructed realities that I find myself swimming inside of, I believe that I belong to the earth, I believe that I am of the water, I believe that when the air from the sky fills my lungs the very essence of life is simultaneously captured and reborn in each of those moments.
Sometimes my steadiness is so strong that it can become the ground that others walk on. Sometimes, when it’s at its strongest, it can become the ground I walk on myself. And every once in a while, when I am at my very most steady, I can allow myself to release control completely, not to fall into another’s arms, not to rely on their steadiness, but to float with them, blending ground and air, spinning together, creating a centrifugal force in which I can simultaneously be held in place and in motion.
I was twelve or thirteen when I learned that steadiness can come from being in motion. My friend Libby and I had just stepped into the cool air of a summer night in the mountains, a perfect foil for the thick air and loud music of the Friday night dance party - a weekly tradition at our summer camp. Standing at one end of a large soccer field, we looked up at the stars and just started spinning. After a few minutes we started spinning across the field. It was not a race, it was simple, joyous, the most innocent version of childhood play.
We found it so exhilarating that we turned it into our own Friday night tradition. Each week we would take a break from dancing and spin ourselves dizzy. Inevitably, somewhere between half and three quarters of the way across the field we would veer off course and end up collapsing on the ground, the earth spinning below our backs, the sky rolling in circles above us.
Or perhaps it felt the other way around. Perhaps we, in those moments, understood what it truly meant to be upside down, stuck to the surface of a planet, rolling its way through space. Perhaps in those moments we were free from the story of up and down. Perhaps those moments were the closest I ever came to knowing what it is like to be one with the earth. To feel so steady on the ground while everything around me was spinning and rolling, tumbling and turning.
Perhaps that physical sensation prepared me for the emotional turbulence that has come for us all in these last years. Perhaps it is because I know what it is to be stuck to the surface of a planet and look out into the vastness of the space it is hurtling through, dispelled from the notion of which way is supposed to be up, that I can stand today, on that same earth, while story after story that I was supposed to believe, crumbles and disintegrates before my very eyes, and know that the steadiness of the earth upon which I stand is not going anywhere.