One of the houses I lived in growing up was built on glacier land.  There was an underground river that ran deep beneath the land, but in places it burst up into springs.  When the snow melted, and the river was as swollen as a kiss, you could hear the water in the house.  

Some days I feel like I can still hear that, the current, the movement underneath everything, that makes it all grow.  Drought years you could stand on the high hill above our property and see the green where the river flowed underneath because the grass didn't dry there.  And other times, in drought years, I'd go straight down to the actual river, and put my feet in to feel that cold, cold water, though I knew better than to swim too far into it.

I'm always fascinated by what drives people to do things.  Motivation can be written up into all the red and black and white titles that you can buy at the airport, like it is a series of things that lead to success.  I don't know about that.  To me it has more to do with gut and heartbeat, the subtities that are still in us from being hunter gatherers, a sense of rain, a sense of snow.  

When I do something that is physically challening, and it intersects with music, something shifts in me.  I can hear that river, I can hear it roaring in my ears.  I may not be the best, I may not be good, but something is happening.  Sometimes, I think, you have to be brave enough to do the things you aren't very good at but you love to be great at the things that you know you are good at and sometimes take for granted.

It's humbling, making a space to talk entirely about skating and it's intersect, when speaking frankly, I'm not that good and I may never be.  I know this is the point where I should say I have no fucks to give, but that would imply I have fucks to give about other things.  I quite simply don't. The last few years have been so humbling and difficult, disappointment bordering on humiliation for the attempt at things I've hoped and dreamed for....the bitter metallic taste of failure.  

These moments are punctuated by the absolute highs of those successes where, for a moment, an hour at least, you think, "I was right all along!"  But somehow success never stay with me as long as failures. I think it's because I learn more from the failure than I ever do success.  There is no quote in a neat box that will pop up on any social media that will salve those wounds.  I hurt where I've not achieved at the things I loved, but I'm still here.  As one of my friends pointed out, "This is what it means when you're making this a career.  It means you keep throwing yourself at it even when it's not working."  And that's on the low days, when I'm a the sunken end of my garden of thoughts, struggling against the crespulcar sky that is my area of the country, relentless.  On a sunnier day I could tally my successes, but long ago I decided that I had no one to impress.  I do what I do and what matters most is... did I do it?  Did I finish it?  Did I try to do my very best?

I am teaching myself, in between writing this, how to spin on skates with one toe lifted and the opposite heel lifted.  I'm blasting music and for the first time, truly grateful that the back room of the house is pergo and not the 1950's hardwood that is throughout the rest of the house.  I keep falling, I get up, I worked all day, I keep trying to write this short story though I've not published one in years, though the toddler woke me up all night, though I'm tired, though my words stumble and I can't quite get the story right.  And so I skate, fall down, get up and write, and in between, parent.  Which in this case means sitting her safely in the center of the table with coloring book.

This isn't an organized space, I've decided it's not perfect.  Things won't wrap up into little packages and deliver a message. These are liner notes, thoughts thrown down into a welcoming white space in transit, between train stations, graffetti on a wall inviting commentary, relevant or not, scrawled beneath it in pens of each individual's choosing.

So you tell me, how does it work for you, then?

yours from the roomette compartment -

QRC