Divinity in Freefall

   

       I’ve been reading Gabrielle Roth’s Maps to Ecstasy and finished the book last week. In the next to last chapter I found a sentence that stopped me in awe. “After you jump and before you land there is God.” Initially I took this as a beautiful description of a leap of faith. As I moved with the sentence this week I realized she’s talking about something bigger, freefall.

    I’m talking about the times when significant portions of your life come unglued and begin to fall apart apparently of their own accord. You didn’t consciously choose to jump off the cliff, but you’re suddenly in mid-air…like the old Warner Brothers cartoons where Bugs Bunny runs off the cliff and his feet scrabble furiously in the air.

    We’ve all experienced falling physically numerous times. But for most of us the distance between the fall and the landing was too short to really get a sense of what freefall feels like. Skydivers know that feeling. Although I haven’t yet been skydiving, I did once jump off the top of Rooftop Quarry outside Bloomington, Indiana.

   I was eighteen and had just moved to Bloomington to attend Indiana University. A few friends took me out to Rooftop to swim. Between swimming and hanging out on the rocks with my friends I watched lone swimmers climb to the top of the cliff and jump off, counting the seconds it took them to plummet into the water. As they emerged from the water their yelps of exhilaration were matched by cheers from groups of swimmers on the rocks.

     I wanted to jump; wanted to know what falling for that long felt like. It took me a few hours to work up the courage to make the climb. Once at the top of the cliff I wasn’t sure I could jump. The sixty-five foot distance between the cliff and water seemed much bigger than it had when I was on the ground. After a few minutes of standing at edge with my heart crashing in my chest, I ran off the edge.

    Thirty years later I still count that freefall as one of the peak experiences in my life. I fell six and a half stories, terrified and euphoric at the sensation of untethered freedom. It was amazing!

     Whether the plunge comes from taking a leap of faith, cliff jumping into a quarry or finding yourself in a dive because your life is falling apart that freefall space is the magical territory of the Divine. Freefall is an exquisite and ferocious confluence of destruction and creation. This is the duende of holding life in one hand, death in the other and dancing across the tension between them. What comes out of this freefall is completely up to us.

    Fear of falling is a natural human fear. Most of us have it. Our immediate response to a physical fall is to do something to stop or break the fall. We usually react the same way to metaphoric falls. When a significant part or parts of our lives begin to unravel we usually scramble like Bugs Bunny. We run around desperately trying to prevent further collapse and get what’s already fallen apart back in place without questioning whether or not that’s really possible.

    Those desperate moments are born of surrendering to the fear of dissolution and possible loss. As soon as we begin to scramble, we take ourselves out of being present with the freefall. Yes freefall is terrifying, but as I learned when I jumped off the top of Rooftop Quarry, it’s also a lot of other things. Freefall is freeing, open, exhilarating, exciting and ripe with possibility. All it takes is a breath to pause and chose to surrender to something other than the fear. Simple, but not easy.

    That doesn’t make freefall any less scary. The deeper choice is really about what we decide to feed with our attention: the fear or the possibilities. This is where divinity enters. Being untethered, internally and externally, from the boundaries we’ve set up for our lives creates an enormous open space. In that space could be anything. It’s ours to fill.

     The divinity comes not so much from some external force appearing with a net for us to fall into but from what we allow to arise in us. When we’re pushed beyond the edges of who we believe we are, we have the opportunity to find out who we really are. Those chances to meet the divine spark within and let it resonate with something larger than ourselves are pure magic.

    Divinity calls to divinity. When we’re able to stop scrambling and go with the falling apart, we invite in synchronicity, grace and creation. Yes there is grief, anger and loss but freefall is big enough to hold both destruction and creation. Flying is just falling up.