Avalanche Protection Program -- Adventures in Self-Care
Adulthood is a potpourri of beauty and heartache, joy and adversity. It can be difficult and unexpected. In a battle for survival, stress and conflict accumulate and aggregate collect and congregate around our joys and triumphs. Love and loss, happiness and heartache, health and sickness, life and death, opportunity and struggle, bounty and poverty are the two sides of life's varied experience. All of which catapult into adulthood without precedent or preparation. The trials of youth, although heartbreaking in their own right, offer little insight or training for the onslaught of adult life. Bills, relationships, career, responsibility all enter stage right like a ready-made rite of passage. I call this accumulation the avalanche of adulthood in all its gorgeous complicated intensity.
I am a big believer in observing nature. There are so many profound lessons to be learned and extrapolated from her movements. Alexandra Witze for the publication Science News, writes, "Every avalanche is a battle of snow versus gravity, and gravity always wins. An avalanche begins when snow piles and its weight exceeds the load that the snowpack can bear." I'll break this down, when the weight exceeds the load that the ledge can bear, gravity wins. The cliff succumbs and the avalanche dumps. Imagine the snow lightly layering across the mountain's edge. Storm after storm, ever layering and packing with each passing day. At first the snow is imperceptible on the mountain's side. Then one fateful day, fine one moment and collapsing the next, the snow drops. The mountain surrenders, folds and breaks under the shear mass and weight of its burden. Likewise, life falls and showers across the landscape of our lives, layering more and more. Each time adding weight and mass. Until one day there is imminent danger of collapse. Sheer drop. Buried under piles of snow.
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I am a big believer in observing nature. There are so many profound lessons to be learned and extrapolated from her movements. Alexandra Witze for the publication Science News, writes, "Every avalanche is a battle of snow versus gravity, and gravity always wins. An avalanche begins when snow piles and its weight exceeds the load that the snowpack can bear." I'll break this down, when the weight exceeds the load that the ledge can bear, gravity wins. The cliff succumbs and the avalanche dumps. Imagine the snow lightly layering across the mountain's edge. Storm after storm, ever layering and packing with each passing day. At first the snow is imperceptible on the mountain's side. Then one fateful day, fine one moment and collapsing the next, the snow drops. The mountain surrenders, folds and breaks under the shear mass and weight of its burden. Likewise, life falls and showers across the landscape of our lives, layering more and more. Each time adding weight and mass. Until one day there is imminent danger of collapse. Sheer drop. Buried under piles of snow.
More...