Archive for the ‘ Base Jumping ’ Category
Once again Everest haunts my dreams and taunts my waking mind.
I see the cloud cover on the peak, survey the blanket of fog and snow stretching for leagues in every direction. I can feel the freezing wind on my face and I always wake just as I leap from the summit and the currents carry me aloft.
Someday.
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“Today I will do what you won’t, so that tomorrow I can do what you can’t.”
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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)
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I had a way then losing it all on my own
I had a heart then but the queen has been overthrown
And I’m not sleeping now, the dark is too hard to beat
And I’m not keeping now, the strength I need to push me
You show the lights that stop me turn to stone
You shine it when I’m alone
And so I tell myself that I’ll be strong
And dreaming when they’re gone
‘Cause they’re calling, calling, calling me home
Calling, calling, calling home
You show the lights that stop me turn to stone
You shine it when I’m alone
Home
– Ellie Goulding
Good song, I like the bassnectar remix muchly.
I have had a couple of days to breathe, which is nice but still somehow feels somewhat counter-productive.
Kicking the energy level up several notches in the morning. Life doesn’t wait, it passes by while you make plans that never achieve fruition, while you dream dreams that never become real.
I don’t want that. I don’t want to look back upon wishes wished, now filmy and indistinct. I don’t want to regret not jumping when I could, never leaping without looking just because I was afraid of where I’d land.
I’m never scared of where I’ll land, I let fate handle that end of the business;
my job is to make sure I stick it.
My writing moves. It moves forward, now sprinting, now crawling-but always forward. Writing two books at the same time is interesting…I don’t recommend it.
This upcoming week is going to be intensely busy.
Bring it.
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Parov Stelar’s Booty Swing from The Paris Swing Box never fails to make me grin.
In other news I’ve been google earth’n the world, looking for sweet stuff to jump off of.
I need adrenaline. I believe I’ve mentioned that before. It’s one of the things that I really just have to do now and then to feel human.
I don’t know that I’ve really got anything deep or super-interesting to talk about today. I did learn some more about proper stress management this week though, that’s for sure.
I find that I’m somewhat less engaged in casual conversations of late; as if my mind is shrugging off those machined pleasantries and searching for purpose and meaning instead of just letting the banality of most interactions pass by unmolested by actual thought.
I am an oddity. Purposeful enigmatic-ness/ism is too much work, I’m just genuinely strange.
I rather enjoy that.
I also enjoy making up my own words or adding prefix/suffix items that were never really intended by the rules of the English language to describe things.
And anthropomorphizing concepts/objects.
I could go on but I think that about covers it.
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So I dug out my base-jumping helmet. I think it’s well past time to put a fresh coat of paint on it.
And at some point I’m going to put my company’s logo on it.
Feels kinda weird to say that. But it’s pretty cool too. I think seeing all of the amazing things that Steve Jobs did for apple made me kick it into high gear.
It strikes me as somewhat sad that his death motivated me to just go for it.
Go big or go home.
I always go big. Probably because I always run full out, headlong into everything I do.
Sometimes you run into a wall at full speed.
I’ve found that I generally just roll right through them.
Especially when I see them coming.
Just leap.
If you sketch the landing, so what? Life is messy, but it’s also awesome.
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I am finally free.
I want to jump off of something very high, with a chute of course.
Sometimes your feet are moving of their own accord, and there’s a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
I am right when and where I am supposed to be in my life. As everything starts to fall into place, I can feel the muscles in my face form a smile; unbidden, slightly ironic and decidedly mischievous.
Loose ends tied. Baggage checked at the door.
Metamorphosis complete. There are thousands of words in my personal lexicon, many more available through my dictionary app, not a one can describe how I feel right now.
I rather like that.
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I want to base jump right now, so much.
(I think its partly missing the adrenaline, but also partly a question, one that says that maybe I’ve lost my edge. A big “do I still have it in me?”)
“And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Today I really miss that hair-raising, heart-racing, goosebumps, icy-knot-of-fear sinking feeling while you look down into the abyss right before you will yourself to leap.
And then all that fear turns to joy. It’s an intense feeling, and there are a few moments right in the middle of it when you’re not thinking about the leap or the landing: you’re just in perfect harmony with the universe.
There are few things like that in life. I happen to have been blessed enough to have found two. Jumping off of really high things with only some stainless steel and ballistic nylon holding me to the here and now and creating something from nothing.
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curro ergo sum 