Your spark can become a flame and change everything.
-E.D. Nixon
The quote of the day pulled out of a stack of cards. A prompt: Your spark. My spark. Friction and gasoline and the fire in the eyes.
Sometimes I feel like the furnace with a hundred rooms to heat, my spark is not enough. Other nights, breathing in the dark in bed, I am a wildfire in the crowded room, filling the air with smoke, watching bodies drop one by one.
It’s a stretch in the metaphor — but there is a fine line between setting the world on fire and burning yourself and everything you love down with it. This is where we get the calculating professional that we criticize . . . we want the martyrs, but they are buried alive.
I listened to Glennon Doyle’s podcast this week about Women at Work and feel the pang of being in an HR role . . . this is impossible, I think, and then again: there needs to be another option.
We are the flames and the extinguishers — the fire starters and the boots the squash the sparks. It’s exhausting.
I am too tipsy for metaphors. Sometimes the fire just needs to burn itself out and start again.
With love,
Natalie