I feel like a broken record that only plays very nice songs. A scratch in the vinyl that adds resonance to the piece that it plays. I keep saying the same glorious things about making things for ourselves and the simple ingenuity in just doing what we’ve prescribed ourselves to overthink. But don’t let that convince you that I don’t know sad songs. There are days when I can’t make my joyful melody sing. But more often than not, it takes no time at all for me to remember how it goes.

It’s the ballad of a girl who shed her limiting doubts like an old husk. A girl who simply did one thing, and then another. A girl who did it afraid. She sings now from a place up high, one that she only reached by putting one foot precariously in front of the other. Nothing is “all figured out”. There are more precipices to climb, but they look like humble anthills compared to what we’ve scaled before. The truth willed out after all this time, that if you seek something out, you’re likely to find it. If you ask for help you’re like to receive it. All that you think is impossible or too large a burden is likely within your grasp or in reach of someone who is tender hearted.

The arrogance of man is believing that they might be the first. That no one else has dared such a feat or felt such a way. And if nothing else in this world has humbled me so, it’s the realization of how infrequently that is true. Someone has always walked this way, someone always knows the proper footholds. The moment you stop believing that something can’t be done is the moment it becomes the most possible. And I am a broken record spewing this tune into my ashen world because I have seen what minor phoenixes have sprung from pestilence and death. The world is built and reborn in our image, a people who stopped believing that they can’t have what they seek.