The Spiritual Belay

A first attempt at telling you about that thing I do

In ice skating, the first thing you learn is how to fall safely, because falling is a certainty. Toddlers do it best, if you want my professional opinion, and yes, somewhere in this house is a box containing a name tag with my name on it that says ICE SKATING PRO. Nearly every Saturday morning in college I would drive to the Chapel Hills Ice Arena to teach several cohorts of humans how to slide on ice: with and without falling. There were various skills no on taught me how to teach, and I was invited to work with each little cohort for an 8 week engagement as they learned to fall, to get back up, to glide, to stop, and to move with confidence.

The tots were the best, indeed because they were experts at new forms of circumnavigation. Very recently they had learned to roll, to crawl, to walk, and so gliding was NBD. Plus, anatomically, they are built for successful falling. Gravity is often gentle with them, coaxing them downward in time-bending ease. Have you seen a toddler lose their balance on land or on ice? It’s very nearly a slow motion sit. They’re also often bundled in relatively dense insulation of snow pants and mittens, and their relative mass is teensy. They are ideal students.

Once, I had a sweet tot who moved in a jagged, tripping way you are more likely to see in gangly teenagers. One leg just couldn’t seem to steady, and so he coped by mimicking a skateboarder, gliding only on the other, and struggling with most of the skills like The Snow Plow Stop - pointing both sets of toes inward to intentionally stop, The Figure Eight - drifting the toes together, then apart as a mechanism for driving momentum and learning the edges, and The Squat, which is helpful for things like ice limbo.

In our third lesson, where we attempted a bit of red-light, green-light, a crowd fave, he endured in my general direction, pumping his one leg and staring me down as though his gaze were a lifeline and I was somehow drawing him back. He was defying generally accepted principles of physics. It gives me shivers now as I type about it, because it wasn’t a typical obstinate-toddler-gaze. Instead, my first conscious memory of the spiritual belay. When he made it across, he removed his right glove to give me a high five, and presented me a hand with two fingers and a thumb.

“That’s my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s hand,” he said, in response to the surprised look on my face.

“And this one is my Simpson’s!” As he removed the second, showing three fingers and a thumb on the left.

Assuming his feet were built creatively like his hands, his lack of balance made complete sense. Ice skating requires the use of all toes on each foot or the tractor beam of a spiritual belayer…

As for the rest of them, Kindergarteners are resilient and bouncy, and relatively fearless. They will tell you about their dog, ask you your favorite color, and when you were up late Friday night? They won’t hesitate to tell you about it.

Teenagers generally do not learn to skate as teenagers, or if they do, Saturday morning is not their jam.

Adults are terrifying.

Adults have excuses and old injuries and baggage, but more than that, those taking skating lessons are doing so because they have no idea where their body is in space. They shuffle in a hunched, breath-holding way you might use if you were secretly trying to make your way to the lifeboat after your ship was boarded by pirates. When they go down, it’s not pretty. They refuse to land on their butts and instead either go down rigid, like the statue of an old dictator being pulled to the earth by revolutionaries, or their limbs go berserk, like an electrocuted octopus holding knives. Most of the time coaching them is yelling BEND YOUR FUCKING KNEES, JIM! Or see if you can loosen up anything. At all. Even a little bit. Have fun out there? If you’re going to fall, just let go. Let your arms fly UP. Let your hips FLEX. Your booty is your best option.

Never again in my years of coaching did an adult lock eyes with me the way that little boy did.

That came later.

—-

In rock climbing, the first thing they teach you is how to buckle your seatbelt and tie some knots, because again, falling is part of the process. Except instead of falling five feet, head to earth, you will fall much further and hopefully much slower. When I first learned as an adult, it was in partnership with another human. In climbing, you take turns. One person is a climber, the other is a belayer. You’re connected by a moderately thin cable approximately at the same spot you might find your umbilicus, a fact that is not lost on me. You practice a script.

CLIMBER: “On belay?”
BELAYER: “Belay on!”
CLIMBER: “Climbing?”
BELAYER: “Climb on!”

(I always picture Wayne and Garth).

You each look at the umbilical connections. Confirm that you’re on two ends of the same rope. And then you say, “Ok, I’m going to put myself in a dangerous position for sport!” And your belayer says, “right on, bro, I’ll catch you!”

And then you take turns risking your life for fun.

Rock climbing and hot yoga have a lot in common in this way, and I’d be hard pressed to say I like either. It’s possible I don’t make endorphins, or it’s possible that I don’t like the ones I make, but I don’t get the sort of ‘high’ from defying certain death like other people seem to. I will say, I appreciate the challenges of rock climbing, and came to enjoy it quite a lot as I moved out of the constant din of sheer terror and into a level of surprising confidence.

The day before the vertigo got me was my most favorite climbing day ever, because I was so brave.

But my second fave? The first time I went as an adult, because while the physical practice was new and foreign to me, something else was very familiar.

The tiny chant that you say together. The little call-and-response promise that ends with I GOT YOU.

That prayer, and everything that follows between takeoff and landing?

That’s a place I know well.

Anthropologists call the space between phases of life ‘liminal space,’ and so for awhile that’s what I called it, too. I went to births, and deaths, which are surrounded by liminal space bookended by before and after. Some births were for my thesis, but others were for friends, and most were as a professional. Deaths were often in my role as a card coordinator for someone dying with HIV or Alzheimer’s disease. But very quickly, it got weird.

Not for the experiencing, but for the explaining.

As a doula, I would know things, like when labor would start, or when to get in the car, or what to do once I was there.

At the end of life, I would know it was the end of life, even if clinically things seemed brighter.

It started to bleed out of the liminal space into the serendipity space, which sounds cute and doesn’t capture the gravity.

I would spontaneously call people, often when they were thinking of me, frequently when they were just about to call me, precisely as they were navigating something impossible.

I would run into people in other states, when neither of us intended to be there.

Not any people. Not regular people. People with whom I had been there with.

(It will likely take me an entire book to recount for you the complex weirdness that I’ve been party to. For the sake of this little latte, you’ll just have to trust me.)

The day preceding the night they moved like water, a young, rail-thin doctor pulled me aside and said, “stay close tonight,” with the sort of gaze that elicits complete trust because it seeps into the core of you and mentions wordlessly, “…and bring your harness.” I called the only other person in our COVID bubble, who I knew very little about aside from the fact that he was watching our dog and had experienced some truly near-death moments rock climbing with my person.

“They said to stay close. Will you come?”
“On belay?”

“Of course.”
“Belay on.”

My person texted me for the final time, a harbinger that something very bad was about to happen, and while my blood froze, my body moved like water. I put on my socks and shoes. Then the phone rang - a strange number - and a doctor started speaking…

“Climbing.”

“Climb on.”

From then on, for 33 of the next 35 days, we said the same prayer. He loaded food into bags and dropped me at the front entrance of the hospital, checking my gear for a 12 hour tour a thousand feet off the ground. Then scooped me up afterwards.

There’s no such thing as belaying in series when what you’re facing is rock, but I’m here to tell you that the spiritual belay is a series of connections between humans, and as he belayed me, I belayed my person. The spiritual belay feels like a lowering rather than a climbing. Even as I held my breath in the hospital elevator, I would feel myself descend, lowering into darkness.

And we would be there, together. Touching, and yet too far away to speak. As the world fluttered around us, my focus was exclusively on the climber on my line.

In rock climbing, there’s no mantra to repeat once you’re on the ground again to close the engagement. Maybe you say thank you or bump elbows, but there is no ritual at the end of a climb.

And the same is true of the spiritual belay. Once you’re on, it appears, you never come off.

The next day, when we locked eyes again in an ICU room overstuffed with worker bees making magic, the doc who told me to stay close and I were wearing the exact same shirt. From the outside, we looked like twins, as frequently happens once you’ve been there together. We didn’t speak, as there were no words. But her eyes? They had a message.

You’re on belay, my friend.

Climb on.