cogito ergo doleo

And once again I surprise myself by not seeing the obvious answer.

I need, very badly, to jump off of something.

Adrenaline withdrawal is an awful thing in my estimation.

I looked back over some posts, thought my way through a few action-items on my agenda and BAM. It suddenly hits me that it’s been five years, seven months and eleven days since I’ve taken that leap into the vast emptiness of our atmosphere.

Just thinking about the process sets my heart to racing, my blood boiling in my veins, threatening to explode.

The rasp of nylon over stainless steel. The eerie howl of the wind that you can only get at height. The absurd thoughts and mind blowing clarity of every sense as you force yourself ever closer to the edge of nothing.

The leap is an indescribable thing, there is a primal fear that surges through you as you look over that precipice, fight-or-flight taking over your limbic system.

I always close my eyes and say my goodbyes and then I let go and fall.

It’s a feeling I’ll never be able to capture with words. The languages I speak are far too limited in their vocabulary.

There’s a moment though, one of those in-between moments I love so very much. A moment when your mind is clear, you know you’re falling toward the earth at terminal velocity but you feel only the cushion of a perfect oxygen/nitrogen blend pushing against you.

As though the hand of god were holding you up, suspended in a frozen moment.

All too soon the moment is gone, fleeting, ephemeral and still somehow so visceral.

Then the mundanities of the situation call attention to the fact that you’ve got to pull your rip, sketch a landing, haul your chute in and run like hell before the cops get there.

I’ve got goosebumps just thinking about it.

Below is are some images of the Asylum Perigree Pro, 2-pin-closure canopy container. It is a thing of beauty. Not just for the design but for the freedom it represents.

***Base Jumping is the sport of using a parachute to jump from fixed objects. “BASE” is an acronym that stands for the four categories of objects from which one can jump:

• (B)uilding
• (A)ntenna (an uninhabited tower such as an aerial mast)
• (S)pan (a bridge, arch or dome)
• (E)arth (a cliff, crater, canyon or other natural formation)

❤