Cliff Jumping

I have had a picture in mind these past weeks--a picture of a young woman in mid-fling from the top of a cliff. Her arms and fingers are outspread, her legs still bent behind her from the hammering steps of her spring into open space. I'm not sure about her eyes--are their lids flung wide open, the air rushing past as she stares for what is coming? Or are they screwed nearly shut against the fears she has chosen to disregard? But her face, I know, is creased with the vibrations of mingled terror and sharp joy. She will never make it across the chasm. That is not her job.

I love pictures and picture making. In some of my earliest memories, I entered my own place through creativity--a state of immense satisfaction where I moved freely about crafting wonderful things--first swirled crayon bird nests of color, later a paper tree with a hole in the trunk. I fashioned a squirrel on a tab which could be slipped behind this hole so the squirrel could peek outside. Literary endeavors began around this time, as well. My keepsake box at home houses the dictated construction paper manuscript of an odd story about rabbits and foxes, funny in retrospect, but quite serious at the time.

As my creative efforts grew with me, I became increasingly aware of the gaps entangled with this delightful activity: the gap between what I saw on the paper and what others saw, the gap between my efforts and the achievements of real artists and writers, and the dispiriting gap between the story or picture in my head and story or picture on the paper in front of me. How was it that things so alive and meaningful in concept could fall so flat in the physical world?

The last two gaps have bothered me most in my recent life "on my own." Cut free from the nurturing connections of childhood, I find myself weighted down by a need to justify my own existence. I think if only I get a book published, if only my writing begins to touch others' lives, if only I leave an indelible mark for good on the world, then I would have been worthwhile. Funny thing is, though, when justification for existence depends on accomplishing something, that particular thing becomes too terrifying to attempt! Better to be forever getting around to it, than to be confronted, finally, with sharp rocks at the bottom of a long drop.

I've been painting a bit, again. Not the tiny, light, careful details of my earlier attempts--but quicker, freer renderings in water color. The activity now, I hope, is closer to an act of faith than to an act of achievement. I begin to suspect that life is not so much a toiling up one great mountain, as a hiking over a chasm-pocked land. We are confronted, over and over, with gaps and spaces hopelessly beyond our negotiation. But Someone calls us, and we fling out, the wind tearing at our ears, our brain and stomach rebelling at the senseless drop below. We fling out, trusting the One who has made His business bridging the impossible distance.