Sometimes charged experiences surface unexpectedly while climbing, like dolphins from the ocean. This winter I am surprised all over again by the degree to which brushing snow off branches as I rise up among them feels intimate, or sacred, even after several winters of climbing. It feels like a ritual, or an unclothing; or a ritual of unclothing. Each sweep of glove along a branch, the showering of snow down towards the ground, the now-bare branch. The silence of the snowy woods. It’s breathtaking. It feels like one is permitted to be there, that being there (in fact just existing) is a gift given, and that a kind of sacred gratitude is the only possible response.
Weeks ago, before winter lowered its snowy hand across the hills, I was climbing late one night after coming back from bagua, making my way up in the dark on clean, dry branches. The climbing was good, effortless, and I felt as I rose a kind of hunger of the body, a consuming energy that propelled me as I twisted and turned upwards. It was a hunger provoked by climbing, and a hunger for climbing; so that climbing both sated and increased it. It was about movement, and rising, and the joy of the body, and the feel of hands on branches. And like many hungers, it escaped its source and looked out upon the world; or perhaps stood in for others. It was a state of being that is not easy to describe, but was, in a word, delicious.
I suppose both these experiences—different as they are—would fall broadly under the heading of the erotics of tree climbing. Perhaps a subject in its own right for another day.
In the meantime, I climb.
