 Leap of Faith
July 1996
I’m standing on a red rock cliff, my toes glued to the lichen, my heels leaning on thin air. My fingers are gripping desperately to the rope that will rappel me 200 feet over the edge. And I’m asking the clean blue sky, what do I do now?
I’ve been waiting a lifetime for this instant, this moment of gut-twisting fear. I’ve read the books, prepped my body, coached my brain. I’ve leapt into this out-of-bounds adventure to test what I think I know about myself, and to see how cleanly I can navigate my way through even the world’s most treacherous boundaries. And now, in my moment of deepest amazement, my own best advice eludes me. Something about fear, about not being afraid. Something about looking doubt in the face and walking right through it. Something about learning to love the fate, the not knowing, the adventure of your life.
I’m all roped in, smiling uneasily to a few companions at cliff’s edge. Our guide checks the knots in my harness – crafted by my own uncertain hands from a long and dingy strand of flat gray webbing. I take a last long look over the edge and gaze in disbelief at the 20 feet of rock I’ll slither down. I gasp at the blank and empty space below. From there I’ll have no choice but to dangle like a spider from her homegrown silky thread.
The sun shines. My eyes settle on that vast world of rocky mountains around me, within me. Up here at 9,000 feet, the clouds are eye level. Enormous, earth-solid peaks lay far in the distance. I spot our three blue tarps far below, with the thin strand of river snaking past them. Straight across the ridge I see the steep green thicket we bushwhacked unbelievably down yesterday. There’s nowhere else to go. At last there’s no way out.
I dive in. Or really, I dive out. I’m supposed to step off the cliff backwards -- butt out, feet in -- and walk down this harder-than-life mountain as if walking through a Sunday afternoon. Except here there’s no turning back. And here there’s no one else.
Friends disappear, above me and below me. I’m more alone than I have ever been. The harness, the ropes, the cliff, the body dissolve into the step-by-step journey of where these feet go next, of how this rope feels as it slides through my grasping fingers, of how far I’ve dropped and how far I’ve yet to fall. One quick glance out the window of the world, and then even I disappear. I’m wiped off the face of past and future, plunging head-first into that deep round chasm of now.
What can be understood, seen, told, known from the outside are those few minutes before and after the big leap. The fear, the nerves, the coaching and resolve while mounting -- a diver approaching the high board. And the incredible burst of recognition when those feet hit the ground – at last returning from the moon. I did it, I did it in good form. I got down on my own power and muscle and skill and will. I lived. I am alive.
Yet the moment before and the moment after -- the moments before the big dissolve -- are ultimately illusions. The real experience lies in those few moments when I, me, this separate creature, the world, all disappear completely. For these few minutes of swimming in the sky, this becomes my life, my mountain, my creation. And my skin, my body, my world. I’m too busy being alive to belong anywhere else. Just floating spider-like down my own delicate and unsure strand.
I disappear into that secret, sacred space where life burns through. The world’s on fire. The space inside my brain grows quiet. Remembering ceases; planning becomes an impossibility. Gone are family and friends, jobs and journeys, joys, frustrations, fears. The stage goes black. Life is reduced to this: the animal of Claudia climbing down this red rock-solid cliff. Pure, clean, flowing. Innocent, absorbed. It lasts a second and it lasts a lifetime.
I wish I had more to say about these few moments of infinity in the air. I wish words could track them more clearly. But I’m so entranced, absorbed, so clearly burned through to the core, no trace is left when I hit solid ground. It’s only then the world returns and the complexity of knowing replaces the stillness of the flow. I unlast myself from ropes and rings, my body still trembling with alive. Look at my hands, now blackened from clinging so tightly to the ropes -- the story of my life. My right hands is blood-stained, a callus ripped from the pad of my palm, a deep round crater in the flesh that was supposed to stay so loose on the ropes.
Where was I just now? Honestly, I’m not sure. But I do know it was one of those pure and blazing lands where life shines through. One of the places poet Annie Dillard envisioned when she urged us to "stalk the gaps." The crevices, the canyons, the cliffs. The big life. The secret life. The whole shebang. Why drag slowly, stomach to the ground, when you can fly or at least climb over and through and up and down those mountains of "what if?" How little time we spend in those secret gaps of now -- not before not after, but here. Seconds in a lifetime, perhaps.
Having found a gap I know I am restored, electrified, made whole again. No boundaries within me, and no barriers between me and you and the sweet hot sky or the silky water running through the gorge. I keenly feel how cleanly this gap has lightened my load, and yet it feels impossible to recreate on solid ground. Still, I know this is the life of fire, life lived from the guts of the world that I want to feel again and again and again for a lifetime
Perhaps it’s enough to know I’ve been there. To remember those few seconds when I became the world, as I dissolved into nothing but thin air. Me and the mountains, and then not me, and not the mountains either. A glimmer, a rapture, really. Dangling off a mountain, life reduced to ropes and bloodied hands. Walk down the mountain safely and in danger.
The secret of rappelling -- I almost hate to admit it -- is that it’s easy. It’s embarrassing once its over -- what then seemed so foreboding, so impossible, so overwhelming, now I know was no big deal. Gravity, a leap, the ropes, a few simple instructions, and you’re back on solid ground. Realizing this, I wonder how much of life I’ve made harder than it is. How often have underground fears have halted me before I’ve felt the first step, before the adventure’s even been conceived? How much haven’t I done because it was impossible?
Maybe it’s just fear that holds us back, that shuts us down and sends us shouting one glorious NO in the face of life and change and challenge. But what are we afraid of? Death, pain, life. The new, the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar. Letting our hearts be touched by sharp rocks, by those aches and sorrows that cut grooves into our deepest places, just as wind and water sculpt canyons out of mountains.
Yet when I’m staring at a mountain, and the mountain doesn’t move, the choices are infinitely limited. With everything to lose and nowhere to hide, I’ve finally thrown myself into one of those unmistakably hard place places, where the now is too dangerous, too much, too demanding to let a single step be anywhere but here. One slip of anything and I’m Sisyphus’s rock unbound back down the mountain.
There’s no choice but to walk right through the fear. And then emerge the other side and wonder, what was all that fuss about? I’ve heard Buddhist monks talk about life burning so brightly, so cleanly, inside, that no trace remains after the moment. And now I see that soul-sweet possibility that lightens any load. Let’s do it again. And again, forever.
That night my companions and I skip down the slope triumphantly, each burned clean by our own unredeemable moments in the sky. We return to our thin and well-worn tarps, a bonfire in the night. To a playful dinner of rice and veggies and lost talk about who we are in this enormous and unbounded world of life and adventure and undeserved possibility. We’ve grown so much sweeter since our faithful leaps this afternoon. Closer, kinder, happier. Each of us, perhaps, returned to child-born innocence. To that place of possibility within us, where despite unending dangers we’re no longer afraid to jump.
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