Introduction: A person inside my head.

Somewhere inside of me, there's a little black girl of about 8 or 9 years of age. Her hair is caught up in ties, little balls of fluff on all sides of her head. She knows that she's not meant for anything fine the way she knows how to breathe. And she draws with a stick in the dirt whenever she gets the chance, draws her family such as it is, draws the sycamores around her, and sometimes, with her mind, she draws shapes in the clouds. She is barely aware that she does this. She does this because creation is as much her birthright as the wind is.

I don't know how many more years this girl lives, what children she bears or whether her life ends as it began – in slavery. I just know these bare facts, know her unconscious acceptance of the circumstances of her short life, the art she makes in the simplest of forms, the wind on her black skin, the hard work she endures and the losses she suffers as a matter of course.

We have these birthrights, these few things: The capacity and impulse to create, skin that feels the wind, the opportunity to love, if only to love ourselves. We have inner workings that accept the gifts of the world – the calories and the oxygen. The workings by themselves tell this truth: We belong. We utterly belong no matter what; we were longed into existence by a force greater and truer than ourselves and then, regardless of appearance or contribution, we are loved every single day of our short silly lives.

Jumping into the cold, deep water on command

Greetings from the land of the great, cold lakes. I'm not talking about Minnesota. I'm talking about the land of writing on command. When you're not into it. Not feeling it. When all you're feeling is the hot, fetid breath of the deadline on your neck and the sweet lure of what you'd prefer to be doing calling to you.

I was on the last leg of my roadtrip driving towards Flagstaff, when sweet anchor client lady called and said can I do one little thing today, can I, can I? I tell her I'm going through Albuquerque and of course I can stop off at a little coffee shop and whip it out.

Which is where I am right now, creating an essay on unity, the spirit of oneness and the elephant in the living room (a concept I grabbed on a high hurry from here of all places).

Writing on demand works. But it hurts. The question I sometimes ask is why do I do it? Why can't I just climb out of the deep end and live a normal life like nearly everyone else?

Colorado, trail magic and the tyrolian

Here's what I was up to last week:

I departed Denver on Saturday and headed north and then west towards Nederland, CO. I was warming to the habit of stopping anytime something looked interesting, so a parking lot with two cars and a pile of boulders seemed worth exploring.
Boy was it.
Beyond the innocuous granite was 1000 feet of relief leading to a cataract and ...oddly... A railroad track. I made my way to the edge, but even from a stable position, I felt dizzy and lightheaded. On my way back from the edge a man on another boulder pile shouted "You think it's going to clear up?"
I had a rain jacket tied around my waist, but he seemed to want clear skies, so I answered affirmatively.
Six hours later, I was hanging upside down from a wire in the near dark staring at the river sloshing 30 feet below me.
It was awesome.
How I got to experience a tyrolian is a matter of trail luck. I walked over to where the man and his posse were waiting out the drizzle and after some conversation they asked if I had a harness.
Oh yes, I replied. A harness AND shoes. I come prepared.
We climbed two pitches near the cars. Ron and Randy, the two best climbers, tackled the one that looked for all the world like plate glass. The rest of us did the one with the three separate overhangs. I made it up to the first one, having hit some moves that for me, after a year of no climbing, I felt pretty damned proud of. And then I came down, all four points quaking like the Populous tremuloides growing around us.
This wasn't THE climbing area, though - that was 40 minutes away by foot, down a hill, over and along railroad tracks, across the cataract by cable and back up a hill. There were six of us, including Latifa and her boyfriend Jeremy, both new to climbing but already strong and leading and Ron's sister Deb, fresh off a plane from New Jersey.
Ron was astonishing. He had the kind of face that on a man can be a little too pretty if he didn't take care. And he didn't. He wore his hair in the manner favored by members of A-Ha circa 1987. With highlights. By design, a lock of hair dropped into his right eye at all times. And for all of that (and all of that included a tall, tan bundle of muscles that most celebrities can't come close to achieving), he was a terribly laid-back dude. Just a nice guy. Whodathunk?
So. To get to the climbing area, we hiked down to the the tracks and along them for 1/3 mile. Then down a trail so sketchy that my best efforts couldn't spare me a bashed knee.

The trail started at the mouth of a railroad tunnel. Before descending, Randy, the late 40-something environmental attorney and I walked into the tunnel (along tracks I'd seen at least 6 trains travel already) until neither entrances were visible.
Terr. If. Ying.

I scampered as lowly as I could out of the tunnel and down to make my appointment with the rock that bashed my knee.
Our destination was a wire where each of us would perform a mysterious maneuver called a tyrolian. To get there, we hiked over slick, down-tilted rock above an exceptionally ugly looking set of rapids. I'd lost faith in my aging Chacos by now - they'd failed me and my knee only moments before.
And getting three or four solid points was nearly impossible. My consolation: five people had just successfully made it over. They were waiting. I could to it too.
The setup: A thick cable. A pulley. Someone's rack of quick draws for pulley ballast. And a fluorescent pink string. Ron slid over and Randy reeled the pulley and its stabilizing ballast back over with the string, each of them in turn clipped their harnesses into the pulley until it was just Randy and me. They made it look so easy.
And it really, really wasn't.
"Ok," Randy said, "Just clip in, flip upside down and go across."
I sputtered with incompetence. He took pity and hooked me in. I went across, taking what felt like frequent smoke breaks and nearly gave up 8 feet from the end. My stomach muscles were scorched. I made an out loud promise to myself to start doing sit-ups.
The trip across the river yielded a beautiful walk along the river. Wildflowers profused. One stretch could have doubled as the set for A River Runs Through It. I could hear my erstwhile sweety, Art, yelling "Trout!" He would have loved being right there, and he'd trained me well to spot a good stretch of trout river. The climbing area, alas, was not along the river. It was 1000 feet back up the canyon wall. I led the way up, thanking the sweet lord that I'd hit my inhaler before leaving the parking lot. Call it instinct.
We set up two ropes. These were ostensibly easy climbs but everyone seemed to find them challenging. Not a good sign for little ol' me.
We ate snacks; I watched them climb and when it was my turn, I hit the harder route. I tried the true line for a while without success and then went right to accomplish some actual ascension. I made it up to a crack and jammed my right foot in it facing east. And headed west. My foot was completely stuck and the line of the rope led away from it. I was feeling rather screwed for a moment and then I got it unstuck and scrambled over to a ledge. I looked down.
Down went on and on.
My nerve fled and after some arguing with Randy, who was belaying me, about whether it was a good time to quit ("It gets really fun right there," he said. Right there was an overhang), I came back down to the sweet, solid earth.
It was getting dark. Latifa was still cleaning a route that her boyfriend had worked very hard to lead. I watched her with admiration until Randy gathered me and Debbie up to make the first flight across the river.
I was to go first, which meant I'd have no one to receive me at the other end. Fear was fast becoming the day's regular theme. But it had to be done. Halfway across, I realized that pushing off with both arms yielded less painful results. It was a good thing, too, because the string broke and I had to come back.
With the string reattached, I started back across, but it was knotted and I could go no further. I rested in my harness. Thank God. Sitting in the harness, I surveyed the river upstream and down. This doesn't suck, I decided. It was deep twilight and there was nowhere, nothing, better than this.
Debbie and Randy untangled the string and I made it across and was freeing myself just as the second flight arrived. Randy came over, then Deb. He sent us up the uber-scary, knee-basher of a trail with Latifa following close behind. At the top, my two new friends and I peed together. Very bondy.
Walking back along the tracks in the dark, I think we all felt some strain of adventure accomplishment, cut by varying degrees of exhaustion.
The trail led off the tracks and uphill to the left. Ron and I were in front (for my part because I wanted to avoid the use a a headlamp - hate hiking with lights even in the moonless dark). Ron tripped and fell - a fairly spectacular occurrence, given his size. At the top, I dressed his thumb which was bleeding freely. He fretted about the 5 hours of massage he had booked for Sunday. Don't know if he was able or not.
In the distance I heard one of them say, "I thought she was a writer." Ha!
_______
We parted with the ritual exchange of cards and I drove to Nederland in search of a friendly spot to camp.
Both Randy and Latifa had offered to put me up, but I was adamant that i wanted to sleep outside. Driving up a road labeled the way to Caribou, I started wondering if I'd turned away the proverbial two boats. My concern only heightened as I turned on a narrow double track with an apparently endless drop off on the right side.
Fear again. I thought about backing up - I'm good at that - but with the spare tire/bike combo, I wasn't feeling the love. I could back up in the morning if it came to that. Forward. Trees pushing into the road on the uphill side, black abyss on the downhill. Two boats.
Bits of terror. Finally, a spot on the left allowed me and my car to leave the road. A bit of flat beyond that served as my bed. All was well and the critters that night never approached.
In the morning I awake in a field of flowers with wild asparagus growing near my head. A good day.

WTF is the problem?

I wrote a query back in June and just sent it today. It was a good query - simple, direct, to-the-point. And I'd already completed it. For some reason that I can't begin to explain (other than bone-jarring terror at putting myself out there), I had kept it back until just today.

So please...please leave a comment if you have any ideas about why I'm so frickin' silly.