The Low Wire: Meditations on Loss and Creative Restoration

"The Low Wire: Meditations on Loss and Creative Restoration" is a survival manual for the modern age. Combining memoir, essays and poems, these pieces introduce (and suggest) bringing a new level of insight to counteract overwhelming situations, the essential "footings" to be poured for renewal and creativity. As author John Miller writes in the Foreword: "Low comes when all of your big ideas and master plans and deep dreams just don't happen. Here's your VIP pass good for one free cocktail at the The Low Club, where you have nothing left to offer. This book says humility is a gift and that searing pain teaches way more than glorious victory." Live long enough and you will fail and you will fall, hard. You're going to get cancer, divorce, or lose a child or alienate your adult children. Or have a debilitating stroke, like the author experienced in the fall of 2015.Some days you can't even get up out of bed. Some days you're so beaten down and low-affect, you're barely there. You wander as a ghost. Other days, you flood every conversation with too much intensity, and alienate your friends.So, how do you get back on your feet and find new ways to balance? Being resilient isn't always the best answer. Sometimes you need to shatter completely.When is it okay to be divorced, bankrupt, bereaved and broke?When is "nothing" a great hand?When is third place billing on the concert poster just fine?When are those times when you should lay low and not rush too quickly back to your high-wire act? The author used to write the Ringling Brothers annual circus program, and in 2002 he met Bello Nock, a seventh generation circus performer in the Ringling Brothers Red Unit, a daredevil clown and a high-wire trapeze artist. He practices and perfects every maneuver of his high-wire act on a "low wire" cable that is rigged only 18 inches off the ground. An apt metaphor for starting over safely. This book is about learing to live on that Low Wire.