Singled Out: The Adversary's Falling Is Flight

Andre Mistier of The Adversary tells us the story behind the song "Falling is Flight" from their brand new album "Chapter 3: Falling Is Flight". Here is the story:

This song is taken from a story in Neil Gaiman's graphic novel "The Sandman." In one of the side vignette stories, a person is having a chase dream. he is running through a desolate wasteland and mysterious creatures just out of sight are trying to get him. He sees a mountain and starts to climb. He can feel them getting closer and closer. He looks back and sees claws starting to reach over the rocks behind him. He climbs faster. As he reaches the peak he can hear them scrambling. He climbs higher, reaching the narrow spine, higher and higher as the claws scrape his feet. He looks up, sees there is nowhere to go. And then he slips and falls.

He screams in terror as he tumbles to his imminent death, falling past the creatures from an impossible height. He screams and he screams until he realizes that he wasn't falling, he was flying. Once he has this realization his perspective completely shifts and he begins to control and enjoy the flight instead of falling with no control.

I feel like a lot of people have had some element of this dream. Certainly ever dream of flight I've had has started with falling. "(Something, something, something), then I was falling, then I realized I could fly, then everything was amazing!"

For whatever reason though, this particular telling of the story made me focus on the perspective change part of it instead of just the flight part. Sometimes falling actually is flight, if we can only let ourselves see it in that light. In fact, maybe that terror, that fear and the feeling of loss and falling, are entirely necessary to reach that place of flight.

If you do not let yourself reach a place of true risk and vulnerability, how can you really reach the most soaring of heights? And if you always could have flown, and if you always could have been flying, then maybe letting goal and risking the fall is the hardest thing to do.

Also, since I haven't re-read "The Sandman" since I wrote this song, I'm not 100% sure I'm quoting this story right or not. Regardless of what the story says, this is what I got from it.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself here and learn more about the album right here!

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