Dec 06 2006
Insurmountable Chasms
In Rule #4 I mention David Whyte. Today, I would like to provide lengthy quote taken from The Heart Aroused. He is on a trek alone in the Himalayas.
On the afternoon of the second day, exhilarated by the clear, thin air and the ever-nearing white peaks rising around me, I turned sharply from an eroded cliff path high above an immense black gorge and found myself on a grassy shelf where the path turned from the roack wall. . . [T]o my utter dismay, the bridge itself was broken. The taut metal cables on one side of the narrow footbridge had snapped and the old rotted planks that made up its floor had concertined into a crazy jumble in the middle. Looking down through the gaps, I could see the dizzying three- or four-hundred-foot drop into the dark lichened gorge below. . .I stopped right by the every entrance step to the bridge, calculated the movements I would have to make . . . made as if to go, hesitated, then immediately retreated to a safely anchored sun-lit rock to sit it out. . . After an hour had passed, I had finally faced up to defeat . . . As I reached for my pack, I noticed the silhouette of a small but strangely shaped figure shuffing into view along the same cliff path that had brought me to the bridge. I saw her but she did nto see me. An old bent woman, carrying an enormously wide-mouthed dung basket on her back, she saw nothing but the ground she was so intent on searching. . . She shuffled, head bent, toward me, and seeing at the last the two immense booted feet of a westerner, looked up in surprise. Her face wrinkled with humor as she registered her surprise, and in the greeting customary throughout Nepal, she bowed her head toward me with raised hands, saying, “Namaste” . . . [S]he went straight across that shivering chaos of wood and broken steel in one movement. I saw her turn for a moment, smile almost mischievously, and then to my astonishment, she disappeared from the sunlight into the dripping darkness of the opposing cliff. Incredulous, but without for one moment letting myself stop and think, I picked up my pack and went straight after her, crossing the broken bridge in seven or eight quick but frightening strides. . . It seems to me that every man or woman comes to such a bridge at one time or another in their life.
How many times in life have we approached a chasm that apeared insurmountable and the bridge we had hoped to cross was down, and what did we do about it?
