Moxi Roller Skates launched a challenge, posted yesterday evening on their Instagram.  It is the #MoxiSummerofSkate challenge and to win you must post a video or photograph of you skating every day for 90 days.

Want to win a pair of #moxirollerskates ?!?! Join our #moxisummerofskate contest! Skate every day for 90 days this summer and we will award 2 lucky winners a pair of Moxi Lolly #rollerskates each

To participate, you do not have to already own a pair of Moxi Roller Skates. This contest is for those trying to win some! 
To win, post a photo or video of yourself roller skating every single day for 90 days! Tag us and use hashtag #moxisummerofskate and on the last day of August we will announce the winners. Good luck and happy June 1st! Our first day of the contest! Need some motivation? Check out @_legs_ progress! She couldn't wait til we started so she got a jump on it a couple of weeks ago and is doing her own 100 days on her story.

I saw it late yesterday and hadn't quite realized their last day would be exactly 90 days and I started today. It's no matter, I love skating and I'm on my skates every day anyway.  What better way to use my rusty editing skills than some fun skate videos?

I don't do as many tricks, as I'm focused on more dance skating and I like to solo skate a lot, with my music in, but today was a hard day.  I have contractors at my house - the amount of imbedded sexism I faced today felt insurmountable, but of course it wasn't.  Still.  Strugging against that is exhausting.  You may win, or better, shift things a few degrees with the hope that those small inches change the trajectory, but it really takes it out of a body and a measure of soul too. 

It was great to lay that aside, and move around on my feet a bit.  Not pictured in the video is that there's a new threshold going out the door and I'd forgotten that and gave my body a good wrenching. Thank goodness for judo, I must say.

It's been a great small evening, spent luxuriating in the bath and cruising the hashtag for skate videos all around the world.  

I'd have more to say but all my words had to be used up as hammers today. There are times when skating has to be what it is, and maybe my video below will explain a little better, for those who don't skate.

It's inevitable, when you skate, that at some point you will fall and hit yourself, your body on the pavement.

I am grateful for my father who taught me to fall.  

I've been stalled in skating... a few days ago on Twitter I said, "Why not rennovate the house during a press tour?" and that's really been quite the issue. Inches thick dust, a confrontation with possessions that usually reside, possibly retired, in closets, all in the open and questioning their own extistential existance. 

Yesterday was long, in good and bad ways.  I took my son to judo, and as he was done, I slipped into the adult class, to my shock making it simply through the warm ups and into the grips and holds.  My son studies judo, my father teaches it.  I myself am a brown belt, but I have not practiced regularily in years.  Sill muscle memory and sheer animal intelligence prevail.  

That night, as I was driving back, my sitter texted me.  Like a drug dealer knowing when her client needs another hit.  "Hey, need any help tonight?"

And just like that, it was on.  It didn't matter that I'd worked ten hours, that I'd just done a two hour workout and was drenched with sweat, that that was my second work out for the day, I was ready to go.  I managed to get home, hastily eat an apple, and dig out my skates.  I did not have my indoor wheels on my Lolly skates, so I pulled out my Hello Kitty Skates, a limited edition skate by Moxi that I'd found by sheer chance on ebay.

I met with my skate buddy and we drove off towards northern lights, swapping stories of our days (we could not be more different professionally) and swearing at the traffic.  The whole communte north is a festering of frustration, raw nerve ends that irritate.  We made it with just an hour to skate, but better than nothing and as I glided out on the floor I promptly stuck one skate pretty  much inside the other and flew forward.  My skate partner is quite a bit bigger than me and well seasoned in derby so I didn't actually manage to knock us both down, he served as a sort of solid human wall.  But I found that I was still warm and alive from judo and quite unafraid of falling.

Even though the skates were stiff, and new, and the wheels aren't my favourite type, by a few laps I felt an ease skating that I haven't ever felt.  Dance moves I'd stumbled over weeks before were fluid.  I wasn't avoiding the floor, or the inevitable crash, I was prepared for it.  The saying in judo is, "Maximium efficiency for mutual benefit," and that applies to how you fall as well.  It was the best hour of my day, my week, it was unsurpassed, actually, and it was, quite simply, what I needed.  

Freedom comes in many forms and many tenors.  For me it's less about the pressures from the outside than the darkness on the inside, of self regard, of a a relentless drive for professional success that can be quite pensive and difficult to carry at times.  I find freedom in a shifting perspectives.  There's not a part of my life I don't carry with me and know the shape of, and regard as part of the mosaic.  Skating is no different.

And it's a simple answer to the next morning's process, when writing comes as it does so often lately, with little difficulty.  The organizational social geometric structures I compose for work, my own pages of words for pleasure and my own projects. I am certainly tired, and a bit sore, but there's nothing in me that scares away from that kind of difficult.

It's fairly easy to carry the falling metaphor to a conclusion and so I'll allow you to walk it there, as docile as it is.  It doesn't make it any less true.  I feel often I can do the most difficult things because I have the knowledge of how to fail, break, fall down hard, repair, solve and rebuild.  I think of this too, in the shockwaves that follow Manchester.  I think of it because yes, it is all connected.  All of it, everything.

From the ground upwards,

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