This morning I was writing about shuffling as a middle-aged
person in the middle of the night. Because I was doing my stream of
consciousness journaling, this came out:
Shuffling – not a dance but a way to keep as much body
contact with the ground as possible while walking: points of contact…which leads me to those
caves I climbed in at the prairie national park that hot driving summer of
1996.
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| From NPS site: Taken by Art Palmer |
I had no idea that I’d come out after
god-knows-what-I-did-in-the-darkness-of-the-earth-hole (feats I never would’ve
attempted had I seen the actual
terrain in the light) to see myself covered in soft red dirt. Hair, clothes,
hands (despite climbing gloves), face, shoes, socks were covered in a fine rust
powder. I rubbed up along the inside walls of the belly of that cave and
emerged from it marked, tattooed, sanctified by it, like the ash in the form of
a cross on the child’s forehead at the onset of Lent. There was beauty in that moment;
I have to hold the image in my mind because I didn’t photograph myself so thusly
blessed by the cave’s blood. I remember, more than anything, how very surprised
I was to see all that silt on my body when I came out of the cave. The headlamp
had been just barely enough to land hand on rock – but not enough to see that I
carried her guts with me, on me, until the blaring light of day spotlighted me.
I do have the most vague sense that I didn’t want to wash off the dirt. It felt
emblematic, symbolic. The sign of achievement: Acrophobe Spelunks! I had merged my inner landscape of fear with
the innards of the dark cave and, largely blind to what I was doing inside
there, came out exhilarated, feeling accomplished. I crawled, squeezing through the narrow cracks in the rocks that gave form to the cavern, slits
through which my then-bigger-body could barely squish. At one point, my head
was nearly stuck between two rocks until I remembered to turn it just
one-quarter-swivel and I popped through the opening. That cave gave me
something – better than a paper certificate or human kudo – it offered me
confidence as I saw just how much dirt I’d gathered onto myself, as I remembered the crazy dangers I felt I'd faced in there.
I hardly remember the cave forms themselves and I wasn’t accustomed to seeing by the scant light of that strangely-colored glint of headlamp along cave walls; I certainly wasn't used to going down those long, narrow, steep, rock passageways. But even as I capture but a few details here, today
(seventeen years later) I am taken back to the precise feeling of standing-tall-on-earth, marveling at the iron earth on
my body and knowing I had just done
something. It wasn’t something I did for the world, but it was for me…and a
step toward being able to do for the
world. And that’s a great gift of empowerment. The memory takes me directly to
the emotions of surprise and glee, even all these years later.
The inner/outer
landscape is a powerful one and does not diminish over time. Then and Now are
fused, just as I was in that moment: one
with the soils of the cave.
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| From NPS site: Taken by Tom Bean |
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
