I+++ title = “Falling” author = “ellis” date = 2024-12-17 draft = false +++

And you will know exactly who you are, forever, by knowing what it is that you love.

• Mark Helprin from Winter’s Tale

Perhaps you have dreamt of falling and awakened with a start, heart racing, sweat beading. When one falls, grasping is a reflex action. Any thing more solid might be a target, a savior to arrest, to slow, or to cushion the fall. But for what does one grasp when all surrounds, the life and comfort one has known, fall away?

When the sands shift, when the tide turns, when the cliches cascade down, where does one find steady ground?

Change came so quickly. Ways of life, long-held, comfortable and productive, more or less, disappeared overnight. In a world that delights in labels, a new one of frightful gravity appeared: essential. Sadly, essential implies expendable. And so others—the self-declared essentials—made determinations that destined many to ruin, a war of a new sort on a battlefield no less inhumane.

A father speaks wisdom, in a compelling litany of virtues, to a son in Kipling’s If. Perhaps each child is rightly due a dollop of parental wisdom, a sharing of things learned and believed true. However, when the world around seems built on quicksand, perhaps a question performs a higher function than the most poetic statement. Years ago and over and over again, Bo Diddley asked, Who do you love.

From love we arise. Through love we are found. Falling into love.

Who do you love?