My Life As a Mountain Climber

Not an expert mountain climber but a really, really lousy one. You know the type; You hear about them on the evening news.

"Climber falls trying to scale the vertical face of the Mountain of Life... more at 11:00pm."

Then you either think while shaking your head or you say out loud, what an idiot the person was. Admit it.

That's who I am. I haven't managed to plummet to my death yet but I have fallen hundreds of feet, over and over again, scraping up my face and all the other body parts that I didn't think to cover up when I started climbing.

It was nice day. So what if I had shorts and sandals on. So what if I used my carabiner key chain thinking it was good enough. How hard could it be? Nobody told me that the higher you get the hand holds become labeled with all of the events of your life. You hang there wondering which one is safe enough to grasp and trust that it is solid enough to hold your weight. Heart stopping when you feel it crumble beneath your fingers. Over your shoulder you see it fall in pieces and land among the ruble below. The skin you leave behind on the rock as you slide down back to where you were before you reached out in faith of its solidity.

I dreamed this very dream last night. A mountain face full of labeled hand holds. Motherhood, God, friendship, lover, student, artist... every decision or action I have ever made that has affected anyone else, written in stone, waiting for me. I stood, bloodied, trying to find a safe way up to the top. I never did. I drifted up out of slumber watching myself getting smaller and smaller standing at the bottom of the vertical climb.

Novel or Short Stories?

When you look back at your life (so far) do you think of it as a novel or more like little short stories? Thats not a rhetorical question btw, I really want to know. If you read this post and care to answer please do.

I was thinking (nothing else to do when you're not sleeping) about all that has transpired in my life (so far). I noticed that when I look at pictures or read old entries on my blogs, I mentally remember and label the time with,

"Thats when I was a " _____".

It is then overlaid with a sense of sadness/melancholia or sometimes relief, depending on how it "ended" and what it was I thought I was that I am no longer.

I think of my life in short stories, with beginnings and endings. There are a few connecting threads but not many. Not sure what that means. Maybe it doesn't have to mean anything.