How to Climb a Rock : Connection & Disconnection
Disconnection is often a story of sadness, of heartache, of absence; it can also be a messenger of truth, of deeper understanding; it can be a portal to greater connection.
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More than a year back my relationship with my sibling began to fall apart. (Estrangement is the word I’d use if it still didn’t sound so scary.) At first it happened slowly: the usually invisible, impenetrable cord of connection that tethered us, she and I, became visible. The magical thread of mutual respect and admiration that I had blindly expected to be there always and forever showed signs of weakening. For the first time in my life I could see that the threads, the binds, the DNA strands, that held us together weren’t as strong and impenetrable as I’d assumed they were.
Let me remind you here that this is a story of disconnection: the wilting, the dying, the disappearing of a relationship. It is painful. It is ugly. It is confusing and opaque and riddled with blind corners and holes.
Our phone calls gradually but noticeably became less frequent, and when we did speak the sound of our voices clunked against one another, creating a strange off beat rhythm like one of John Cage’s odd abstract performances but without his artistic flare. Words miss matched, tones tensed, the weight of our miscommunication laden with all the things left unsaid and the topics deemed off limits.
Eventually the unspooling picked up speed and things began to unravel all at once. Scores of fissures and deep gouges formed along the now visible, weakened, strained cord of connection. Our relationship changed by the minute, like a rubber band left to bake and fester in the hot sun until all its elasticity and utility is gone. Our already infrequent phone conversations sparked, ignited, burned, smoked out, then extinguished all together. The edges of our common ground receded into silence and big wall like structures - boundaries, I am told- erected themselves before my very eyes until it was no longer the impenetrable cord of connection that was invisible but the person who had once held fast to the other end. It’s not the dead but the living that become ghosts in your daily life. The connection I’d once depended on completely vanished without a trace, and left in its place was a gaping maw of disconnection that I strained to see my way through. Sharp, vast, empty.
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For a long time, too long maybe, I thought disconnection was the opposite of connection; that disconnection was a dead-end, a droop in compatibility, a force that interfered with connection, a problem that needed to be solved, an evil spirit that needed to be vanquished, a splintered surface that needed to be sanded to the appropriate grain. I thought that the goal of lasting and deep connection was to eradicate disconnection from all areas of my life and subdue it within myself. Once connected, never disconnected, right?
I was wrong. Disconnection is not antithetical to connection, it is a mirror image of it.
When I feel disconnected, in that moment, I am disconnected to the same degree that I am, in fact, connected. Put in another way, disconnection and connection are not things in and of themselves; rather, they are the energy we pick up on and imbue our lives with, and focus our attention on. Disconnection is not something that happens to connection, something that jeopardizes it; disconnection and connection are both colors, textures, levels, of connection itself.
Imagine a beautiful serene alpine lake, the surface water laying motionless in the silent air of dawn. When you gaze at the lake, the surface perfectly reflects an image of the sky above it. You can see everything that’s happening above right there on the surface of the lake. The sky is both on the lake and it is not. Likewise, imagine you are walking along a city street on a sunny afternoon. As you walk down a long block of buildings constructed of shiny glassy material, you catch sight of your reflection in the glass, there you are walking in-step with yourself. It is both you and it is not you.
Connection is the sky, disconnection is the opposing reflection stretching across the lake’s surface. Connection is the embodiment of your physical form, disconnection is the opposing reflection of how your body appears from the outside across the shiny glass. And while you can see the sky in the lake, your view, understanding, capacity, are limited by the size, shape, angle, of the body of water. Just as your own sense of self and embodiment are limited when you solely focus on your outward appearance. If the sky is what you’re after, then learning to look up is paramount; if embodiment is what you’re after, then getting to the inner layer of yourself is crucial. And if connection is what you are looking for- in life, love, relationships, Yoga, selfhood- then learning to focus, and refocus, and refocus, on connection, even in the face of feeling disconnection at times, is the core practice.
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Last month I went rock-climbing on an outcrop of odd-shaped, weather beaten granite at the base of the Eastern Sierra. There I was, clinging to a 100 foot fin-shaped rock, grinding my way up its featureless, vertical face. The knife edge of Mt. Whitney pierced the clear blue sky-line. The curve of a crescent moon hung in the wings of space like the spirit of a distant relative, it settled over my shoulder like a ghost. The heat of the sun beat down on the rock and my back, and crisped the bony ridges of my bare shoulders.
I crimped my fingers onto a razor sharp sliver of rock, forced them to stay, and inched my feet up. Right, left; feet, hands, feet, hands; pinch, hold, pull, move. Breathe, Erin, breath. I looked down through the window of space between my legs and the wall, my eyes followed the flaccid rope snaking down from my harness to Zack’s on the ground, connecting us to each other. He was a small, distant figure far below. I marveled at the way he stood there so effortlessly. The rattle of carabiners clanked like coins in my grandfather’s pocket as I bore down on three points of contact -two feet, one hand. I clenched the rope with my right hand, wrapped my fingers tightly around its girth, then pulled it up to the nearest quick-draw, a kind of fixed anchor that helps to catch a fall.
Clipping!, I shouted before pulling the rope up to the gate of the quick-draw.
Swoosh - Click. I slid the rope into position and the mental gate snapped shut around it. The sound of satisfaction and safety.
Clipped!, I called out.
I continued upward when a wicked gust of wind flew up the rock face. My pant legs billowed, the paint-brush ends of my braids whipped, the whorls of my ears hummed. A sand size grain of uncertainty whirled in my stomach, boring a hole into its pit.
Feet, hands, pinch, pull, left, left, right; I continued up despite my growing self-doubt.
Late morning sun baked the rock, and the heat of the rock softened the rubber on my shoes. My toe-nails tenderized, my heels throbbed, my bones burned. I looked upward, squinting into the sun, towards the next quick-draw. It looked very far away. Insecurity dripped down the back of my throat like a broken faucet. I swallowed hard. Feet, hands, hold, grip, pull, drag. Another wind monster sprinted up the rock face. I held fast to my hands and feet, my body refusing to be cleaved. I stole another glance at the quick - draw above, then I looked down at my previous quick-draw clip, which I’d now climbed well above. It too seemed very far away. The ground, the other end of the rope, Zack’s effortless form, appeared fuzzy and distant. Drip-drip-drip. The leaky faucet of my insecurity got louder. I reached my left hand up, and let it search for the next hold. A picture formed in my retina: slick rock, a glassy surface beneath my sweating hand. I looked up with incredulity, sending my eyes to my hand to search more thoroughly for something to grasp, for a way forward, upward, but my mind, my good sense, my optimism, had already vanished. Drip- drip- drip.
My heart quickened as my left hand performed its reconnaissance more frantically, desperate now for a positive piece of rock to hold on to. Nothing. My feet burned, my fingers quivered, the wind turned deafening. Drip-drip-drip. Insecurity leaked from all my pores. Like Peter Pan and his arrant shadow, my mind ran off and left my body behind.
You got this E!Zack shouted up to me as I clung, unmoving, 50 feet above him.
I tried to breathe, tried to think straight, tried to believe that I could do it. I could, objectively, I knew I could. And yet, at the same time, I wasn’t, wouldn’t, and therefore couldn’t. I was not so much stuck between a rock and a hard place as much as I was stuck wishing that I were, wishing that I was confined in some way instead so horribly exposed.
I tried to take a deep breath. Nope. I tried a mantra : I can I can I can I can. Nope. I tried to bend my mind in on itself, and thread it back into my body. Nope. The shadow of my mind would not be stitched to the soles of my feet, not this time. Focus, clarity, ability, confidence, connection, all of the things I needed and wanted were gone, lost, momentarily estranged. My body was a vacant building with no address, all the windows and doors left wide open.
Sweat beaded at my temples as I blankly considered my options: Remain here in this lurid liminal space of disconnection between quick-draws, and try to fix the problem of my mental fragmentation and body panic until my fingers bled; or, accept I’m off course, that my mind got derailed, that I am clinging to disconnection, that I don’t need to fight this battle, that I can simply let go and begin anew.
The options sound cliche and rote as I recall them now, and yet they were my options nonetheless.
One. Two. Three. The timbre of my voice was breathy and resolute. On three I shouted, FALLING!, then held my breath and uncrimped my fingers. I let go. That moment right before a free-fall terrifies me, but the falling itself always seems like magic. Magic in the way that it begins and ends in the same moment. In the flash of a single magic moment I went from about to fall to having fallen, the process of actually falling left somewhere on the editing room floor. I smacked back into the side of the crag about 10 feet below that last quick-draw I’d clipped.
So much of my understanding of connection since the loss of my relationship with my sister stems from what I do in the moments I feel the pain of disconnection; whether I can do what needs to be done within myself to refocus and recenter and return to connection or not; whether I can remember that feeling disconnected is not the absence of connection, but an opposing reflection of it. No matter what I’m doing, no matter where I am, my own felt disconnection stands as a reminder for me to let go and refocus on connection.
After I’d fallen and Zack lowered me to the ground. I slipped off my harness and took five minutes to myself to see if I could reset my mind. I had narrowed in on my feelings of disconnection, exacerbated them, and now I was full of self-doubt and negativity. Could I open myself back up so that connection between my mind, body, and the rock could flow freely? I didn’t know.
Recently while tidying up my home office, I sifted through a bunch of stray sheets of paper covered in my sloppy scrawl, sitting in a disheveled pile on the far corner of my desk. White sheet after white sheet filled with random but meaningful words I’d written: thoughts, ideas, things I want to remember. As I flipped through them, deciding which would remain and which would carry out its fate in the recycle bin, I came across a page with a solitary sentence trailing across the top margin:
You are still trying to fix it, you need to remove yourself from that role.
I remembered writing it down. I remembered the pressing urgency of the message and my sweaty palmed desperation to remember it. I’d written it down because I’d known it was one of those simple things that I would so easily forget.
One of the benefits of things falling apart is that you eventually become willing to see yourself more clearly, it is the only way through, and the people nearest to you get to see you more clearly too. For a long time, even still sometimes, I had not been able to see how badly I wanted to solve and fix every problem; I couldn’t see how much the role of ‘solver’ was eating me up, holding me back, and keeping me fixated on disconnection and negative thinking. Removing myself from the glorified role of ‘problem solver’ was a horse-pill of a lesson, one that requires an ocean worth of water to wash down. Truth be told, I'll likely be choking that one down until the end of my days.
Disconnection can seem like a huge problem when it occurs, a problem that ought to be fixed, changed, solved, controlled, eradicated. But does solving every problem and eradicating every ache of disconnection lead to harmony, peace, connection, and all the other good things we’re after in life? Is being able to find a solution more valuable than knowing how to accept the conditions of a problem?
During those 5 minutes of alone time after I’d fallen, I worked to take myself out of the role of trying to fix my panic, disconnection, insecurity, and expectation. I told myself to let it all go, to let it all fall away. And when all that low-tide sludge of emotion and judgment and distraction drained from me, I looked up to the sky. The sun was still high and bright, and the open space around it was a wonderful, pure cerulean, that special kind of blue that only seems possible in the Sierras. I looked towards the tooth of Mt. Whitney, and thought how amazing it was that I’d been at its peak all those years ago, how amazing it is that I get to be here now. I’m here because I love being touched by nature. I climb because I love connecting with nature.
Inhale. Exhale.
I returned to Zack, slipped back into my harness, and made my way back up the route, climbing clean past the place I’d once felt crippled with disconnection.
Back in my office, place the paper with that treasured reminder back on my desk, on the top of the stack this time, just in case I forget tomorrow what I think I know so well today.
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How I do anything is how I do everything, of this I am certain. The beauty of living is that there are no real boundaries. Who I am in my relationships is exactly who I am on our yoga mat, is exactly who I am on the side of a mountain. And that person is forever falling apart, changing, adjusting, growing, letting go, re-centering, and beginning anew. The wisdom I garner, the hard lessons I learn, the treasured memories I accrue, they’re never lost, never gone, never estranged. How I climb a rock is exactly how I live and love and connect: right, left, hold, pinch, pull, move, search, find, fall, begin again.
Our greatest losses, somehow, someway, become the things that make us strong, the things that feed our conviction and push us towards connection. The open secret to connection is that all it takes is willingness and attention. You don’t have to solve the problem of all the ways disconnection shows up, you simply have to remember to reset, refocus, and return to connection, again and again. The sky is in the sky, just look up.
Originally written for and published on the Members Area in 2023.