A $700 Donkey

The thing about leaps of faith is that you really can’t know where they’ll take you. The not-knowing is pretty much the whole point. And while it’s one thing to know this, it’s another to understand.

The risk of death is certainly, and always, there— there’s no guarantee that we’ll come back as the same person who first peered over the edge. There’s no guarantee that we’ll come back at all. When we leap we don’t know what world lies before us; in flight, life and death dance, orbiting each other until one becomes the other. Inevitably the wind catches us on our descent, and we rise and fall in rhythm of whatever we’ve given ourselves over to. This space between the ground we left and the ground upon which we land becomes something sacred. It is the doorway into a fuller expression of ourselves, and by passing through it we risk everything we’ve ever known.

Earlier this summer I took a leap, from California to Cabo, knowing the window was small but that I might be able to slip through. The initial fall was beautifully smooth, with just the right amount of butterflies and mostly good fortune. But upon landing in Mexico I was hit with a $140 import tax for my water housing (that’s a new one). The work that I was hoping would line up fell through (in hindsight I don’t think it was actually ever there), and suddenly I found myself on an accidental vacation, $700 in the hole— money I didn’t have in the first place.

So there I was in Cabo, enjoying it surely, but also just waiting for time to pass so that I could get back home and try to recover my losses.

And then this donkey came up to me on the beach. and we chilled for a minute. and it let me snap this photo. The more I look at this image, the more I feel it speaking to a part of me below my conscious awareness. It brought me to tears, it made me smile, and I don’t exactly know why. But the donkey feels like a blessing, like a divine visitor on my own flight into the next unknown. A gentle companion in this strange world of becoming.