Jumping Off

Jump. - Joseph Campbell in the Zen Calendar (Posted on my refrigerator circa 2004).

Day 280. I just completed the most marvelous dinner: 10% vegetable soup; 90% chocolate frosted graham crackers. Exactly like my mom used to make in the 1960's (although she wouldn't dream of them comprising a crumb over 55% of our family dinner). I never knew there were actual recipes for chocolate frosting. My mom just dumped in some butter, some powdered sugar, some Hershey's cocoa, and the teeniest spill of milk to make it all stick together. She would then stir, taste, and add more powdered sugar. Stir, taste, and smear in between two perfect squares of graham cracker. Hope like heck a couple survived for the brown bag lunches she prepared for all of us in the morning. They rarely did. Then, like now, dessert formed the base of our family's food pyramid.

My body feels like it did about one week after I was hit by a car on my bike: I am down to three Alleve a day; I can open and shut my own car door; I did not detect any new continent-sized bruises this morning. Life goes on. I bet I even pedal something tomorrow after work, though it will probably occur in my living room. Baby steps. I have a color-coded system for recovery: when black and purple fade to blue - Stretch and lift; when blue fades to green - Pilates; when greenish splotching pales to yellow - Back in the saddle again! So far, it's been a sure fire way to get back on the bike. I abandoned this method as a guide for meditation readiness. Apparently, I can sit on my cushion no matter how colorful the blotches on my body.

Rambling along the Womble jiggled up random memories of my physical exploits as a child. For some reason the extensive portions of bench-cut trail (sections of 14-inch-wide, rocky shelf with a cliff wall brushing my right elbow and a vacuous ravine glowering at my left) reminded me of my bizarre infatuation with jumping off things. I lived to hurl my body through space. My passion for hurling my body from high places was rivaled only by my obsession with climbing up things. The two preoccupations combined well, since reaching the choicest jumping off points usually required nimble ascent of whatever tree, bush, wall, fence, building, fire escape or lattice provided me access to them.

If memory serves, I demonstrated astonishing expertise at jumping off things. Some favorites included the storage shed at the house behind my next-door-neighbor, the tree house platform I built with the same next-door-neighbor in the tree we climbed to get on the shed roof, my own garage roof, Joey Koonze's garage (same style garage since Joey lived right across the street, but the tree we climbed to get to it offered some variety), the tower window at the southern shelter of Will Rogers Park, the attic rafters of the same garage I leaped from in my own back yard, the backstop at my elementary school, the super-sized swing set at the same school (the one reserved for 5th and 6th graders only, though I began hurling myself from the swings at the peak of their arc when I was in the wee lower grades), and - the mother of all jumps - the school building itself. That jump was risky on several counts, and probably deserves its own blog. Suffice it to say, scouting a place secluded enough to clamor up to the roof without getting caught was genius in and of itself. In those days, kids weren't supervised near as closely as they are now. Of course, this particular kid was smart enough to summit the school roof strictly on weekends.

These were rarely singular jumps. I recall the imperative of jumping off, whooping aloud about how cool it was, running around to whatever means took me back up to my launching pad, and jumping again. Primal instinct must have guided my landing technique, because I don't remember a single injury sustained from my enraptured pastime of vaulting off perfectly sound structures. A few friends enticed into joining me incurred fairly substantial boo-boos, most notably Diana Smith's two broken arms when she tried to mimic my dismount from the soaring sixth graders' swing. Diana was extraordinarily brave about the whole thing. Faithful friend that I was, I assisted her with bathroom visits during school hours for the entire ten weeks she was encased in plaster. What are friends for, if not to zip and button your Bobbie Brooks jeans when you can't bend your arms?

This recollection of youthful peculiarity does not culminate in puzzlement over what possessed me to delight in jumping from high places. I never wondered about it with my analyst. I know precisely why I did it. I was intrigued and obsessed with directly experiencing the split second when I was suspended in space. That magic fraction of time when I was not in contact with anything but open air. I didn't have the word for it then, but I deeply desired the sensation of being unattached. I did not have the means with which to engage in the expensive sport of sky diving and free fall. So, like all resilient children, I improvised. I clearly recall my absolute preoccupation with "feeling when I was in the air. . . that space in between . . . before I hit the ground." My odd little girl brain got fixated on living/knowing/sensing/experiencing a heartbeat's worth of flying. Of being suspended in emptiness. Of being unbound by gravity. Trying to transcend the earth's pull. I was an eight-year-old budding Buddhist.

When I perch on my cushion each night, it is like those long ago moments when I sat dangling my legs from the edge of some building just before I pushed off - gathering my concentration in an effort to register the fleeting whiff of suspension before landing solidly back on the ground. Strange that I was so brazenly desirous of escaping the pull of the earth at such a tender age. Forty years later, not much has changed. I still love to jump. I am still taking leaps in the quest for non-attachment. I still yearn for the sensation of being freed from time and space. So far, I still come crashing back to earth. But my moments of suspension are lasting just a little bit longer.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc