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Toni Giselle Stuart's avatar

ah Kirstie, I always come to your posts at just the right time. I listened to your reading of the poem and it touched something me that helped me cry today. I really needed that. I have been struggling to surrender to a very big and sore change in my life. But your idea of practising falling as we walk, is helping me to maybe find a different way of letting go.

thank you for writing, and thank you for sticking with Substack and sharing your work in the world. it is helping at least one person, on the southern most tip of a continent, to heal

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Carolyn McCurdie's avatar

Love the tenderness in this poem. Something here about our inner resources, that we or at least, I, often pay too little attention to, tending more to look outwards. But conversations like this, one aspect of the self in dialogue with another, can be, as this shows, so powerful, steadying, enriching. We do have reserves of wisdom that creative work, and playfulness can reveal.

And I love the painting. That the surfer is a mere suggestion of a being, almost not there, a dream figure, but the strength in her paddling, her determination, are clear. By contrast, the butterfly is concrete reality, the strong dark outline of the wing, the black dot. Offering the surfer some sort of certainty. Invitation. Fall in this direction. These butterflies Kirstie!! How they glide in and out of your days. What a gift!

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