This is What the Leap Looks Like

Lately, I’ve been going through a great change in my life. A career change, a life change, an identity change. Like most change, it’s hard to say when exactly that change started.

Part of it began five years ago, when I first got pregnant and my life simultaneously expanded and dissolved. When the chronic pain condition of my early twenties came back, and I was humbled in a way where, when I think about it now, I literally smell dirt—low, rich, dark, necessary, made of soul matter.

Or maybe it began three and a half years ago, when my daughter’s dad and I decided to transition to co-parenting. When the life I pictured turned into a life only my soul could envision, and I just had to trust that the dream still existed, bigger than I could see at that moment.

Or maybe it was almost two years ago now, when Hurricane Helene tore through our mountains and the river rose up to take my apothecary of twelve years back to the earth, composting along with it a long-trusted, known version of who I used to be.

I don’t exactly know when the change began, but I know I’m in that middle of that leap to another side now…

Because this is what the leap looks like.

The term “leap” sounds lovely—weightless, buoyant, graceful in flight, and yet that is not usually how leaps feel.

When I’m in the midst of a leap, some days I wake up and legitimately do not know what I’m doing. Sometimes that can feel humorous, sometimes it’s liberating, and sometimes it’s terrifying.

Other days, the excruciating ones, the ones that were clearly designed to grind me into some kind of alchemical brew, I wake up and think to myself, I actually do not know who I am. And that feels like both a death and an invitation to live.

The ground beneath my feet is nowhere near as solid as it used to be. Income shifting, visions slipping, relationships swaying and solidifying into something entirely new. Friends who I used to talk to every day I don’t speak to for months, while other friends show up suddenly in my life, cackling with me until late into the night.

I can’t see the future like I used to. Or, I can, but only a step or two ahead—like hiking down a mountain at night by headlamp. I have to trust the whole wide waiting dark world to hold me.

What I do see is my own patterns—loud as airplane lines across a blue sky. Like how that heart sinking feeling I get before I share my feelings with my sweetie is coming from the part of me that believes I’ll never truly be loved for who I am. It’s so impactful, and painful, and obvious, these moments of seeing, that I can literally feel the electric current of realization run through me as I understand all at once, and with heartbreaking tenderness, so this is what I’ve been saying to myself all this time…

Sometimes I’m so hopeful the world feels more radiant than it ever has, and sometimes I’m inexplicably crushed.

I don’t know what comes next, not truly, or only in glimpses. But I know this feeling of weightless free fall, no tether, no support, is the sign I’ve been waiting for, the moment I’ve been praying for.

Because this is what the leap looks like.

The leap looks like being ungrounded for a moment. It looks like not knowing where your feet are. It looks like glimpsing the whole wide world before you for a second, before only being able to concentrate, blindly, on the unrecognizable blur of something new coming towards you.

It looks like having no idea how you will get to the other side, but knowing that you cannot reach it if you keep even one foot pinned on the ground where you are.

So you leap.

I first saw this in an intuitive reading I did for someone years ago. She was going through a lot of change in life—a divorce, a move, leaving a church, ending a career—and she felt like she was free-falling off the edge of existence. It seemed, from the outside, that her life was falling apart, but all I kept seeing was the image of the fool in tarot leaping off the cliff, beginning a whole new journey.

I remember saying to her, this is what the leap looks like. You must be willing to be midair, to have no anchor for a moment, to have both feet leave the ground—for there is no other way for all of us to arrive on the other side.

But what I didn’t know then that I know now, was that sometimes we’re walking towards that cliff for years.

Sometimes we forget that there is anywhere else for us to be except on the edge—the edge of our limits, the edge of our world, the edge of despair.

Sometimes there is so much weight we need to put down before we can leap that it feels like this is our whole life. The world asking us to shed layer after layer after layer.

But then, eventually, one day, we leap.

We always leap—even when we start to believe it’s impossible for us—because the leap is inevitable. It is the nature of how our soul moves, at our essence we cannot help but continue to evolve.

And so we leap. And when we do, we must remind ourselves as our feet leave the ground:

Do not be afraid—this is what the leap looks like.

Lately, I look around me at my family, my community, this aching world, and think to myself—wow, what a leap we are taking.

What a time to be here on this planet, in this mid-jump uncertainty. It’s an honor, really, like it’s an honor to feel the sting of rain carried by wind or to bend so low you can smell the rain-opened soil. Or how, if you stick around long enough, you’ll eventually see a rainbow.

And it's an honor, to keep walking up to that edge ourselves, because our own individual leaps are, ultimately, what makes it possible for the world to have the collective energy it needs to leap into the healing that awaits.

So if you, too, are feeling an endless expanse of mid-air in this eclipse season. If you read this post and see yourself in the simple sensation of not knowing. If you sense a new era coming but cannot yet see it for yourself—

You are not falling, my dear, you are leaping.

And this is exactly how you get to the other side.

In flight,
Asia

P.S. I recorded myself reading this post for the first time! If you’re someone who likes to listen instead of read, just press play at the top. And if you enjoyed having an audio version let me know for future posts. 🤍