Tao and the Art of Jumping Off Cliffs
Anne Hecker
You stand on the edge of a cliff, toes hanging just over the side and a stray pebble slides off. The ground below you is so far away that towering trees look flat, and if the pebble hits the ground you never hear it. A cloud brushes the cliff face some distance below you, near a jagged tower of stone that juts out at the base of the up heaved land. You take a deep breath, feel the air swirl around your lungs and dance with the butterflies in your stomach, then let it out slowly and relax your tensed shoulders. Birds sing, enticing you to fly with them. They swoop and soar and dive, playing with the winds, at one with the miasma of zephyrs and sky. You take a step back, then another. You tighten the straps of your parachute rigged to your back, over your shoulders, and check all the connections and positions of it. You take another deep breath, then before you can think any longer you take a running leap and you’re free.
You track away from the cliff face, arms stretched behind you and your hands cupped slightly, your legs bent marginally at the knee and shoulder width behind you. Wind whips past your ears with a roar, thin clouds kiss your cheeks, and the ground begins to rush up toward you before you simultaneously reach up with one hand, like a loose salute, and reach behind your back with the other to grasp a piece of fabric stuffed into a pouch on the parachute rig. You yank it out and throw it, and a second later you are jerked backwards. The straps around your legs and chest dig into your skin. You grab a hold of the loops on your shoulder straps and steer your parachute to the landing site. You’re a BASE jumper, and you’ve made a successful jump.
BASE jumping is a sport in which a person flings himself from a cliff, building, bridge, antenna, or any number of tall objects, freefalls for a length of time—sometimes only a fraction of a second—then deploys a parachute. BASE is an acronym that can stand for, but is not limited to, Building, Antenna, Span (bridge) and Earth (cliff, mountain, waterfall, etc.). The sport evolved from other forms of parachuting such as skydiving, and is practiced by thousands of people all over the world.
It’s an odd experience to watch a person stand on a plank jutting out over a gorge, wearing a helmet and a small backpack shaped BASE rig strapped to their back, and know that that little pack contains a rectangle of fabric that is the only thing that will stop them from bursting on the ground below like a bug on a windshield.
The first time I was able to watch my brother BASE jump was last year, early October, at an event at the Royal Gorge outside Canõn City, Colorado. Jumpers gathered from all over the world to for the chance to legally jump from the world’s highest suspension bridge. I was there with some friends and my brother. He is a jumper in every aspect of his life. It’s not just a sport or a hobby for him—it’s a lifestyle. He does everything: pilots aircraft, rope jumps, BASE jumps, sky dives, paraglides; in all aspects of his life he is in flight, even when his feet are on the ground.
He stood at the edge of the plank, his blue boots hanging over the edge, and he leans over and peers far below to the landing sight alongside the river and the railroad. He took a step back, checks his equipment once more, adjusts his helmet on his head. He stood completely still, letting the calm excitement wash through him like a swelling tide. He looked terrified. He looked exhilarated; he looked apologetic, blissful, and brave beyond imagining, at ease and completely petrified at the exact same time. It was beautiful.
“In ten!” he called, and then began a silent countdown matched in the heads of all the spectators. He started again at, “ three…two…one…”
He took a step forward and launched away from the ledge. He twisted backwards and tucked into a ball, back flipped twice while falling away from the bridge, getting smaller and smaller, before stretching out and stopping the flip. He reached behind him, now nothing more than a speck to those of us on the bridge, a bright colored dot that reached back and threw something—his pilot ‘chute, then soon after something larger and brighter unfolds, like the wings of a butterfly from a cocoon, and with a loud, echoing thunder they fully unfurl and catch on the air. He glided through the canyon, smoothly, circled around then landed.
He’d be back for another jump in less than an hour.
Many people look upon the sport with a mixture of awe and disdain. Awe for the sheer boldness, the audacity of the people who BASE jump; they see only that these people seem to be suicidally reckless or that they have a death wish, and they begrudge the jumpers because ordinary people would never dream of doing something so rash, so wild and out of control. How irresponsible, some of them think, that these people will jump and die and leave others to clean up their messes. Most people are wrong. Most people are too caught up in their conventional ideals: get a job, make lots of money, get ahead in life and have a beautiful husband or wife and children, buy big houses and expensive cars, but beyond all: be a productive citizen of society. In regards to most BASE jumpers I have met, this is an utterly false misjudgment.
BASE jumping is not a sport in which the unduly rash, reckless and out of control people last very long. The risks are calculated, acknowledged, and BASE jumpers attempt to avoid them. After all, a dead person can’t make another jump. Jumpers are a rare breed of humanity. They see the everyday life, the cars, the money, the hubbub, the scramble for getting ahead in the dreary race of capitalism, at society’s rejection of dreaming, at the concept of growing up and growing old, at the masses turning their eyes to the ground and forgetting the world beyond a rectangle of paper that can buy them a nicer lawn than their neighbor’s, and they turn away. They reject a conventional lifestyle; a conventional way of thinking, knowing that to follow along with the crowd would be to waste a life on useless worrying and greed. They would rather live while they’re alive, and live in the way which brings them satisfaction and contentment. They know life isn’t about the money; it’s about living as much as possible while they can.
Obviously not all BASE jumpers are like this, just as not all Taoists follow a single stereotype. And to live a life with only life in mind is not singular to BASE jumpers. However, for me, at least, just dreaming of unhindered flight brings me closer to a state of no-memory than anything else I have ever experienced. My brother once said that freefall is hopelessness. It is watching the ground fall away above you and rush up at you at the same time, and there is nothing attaching you to either—to be a creature of the ground but not be on it, to be a human being and not at the same time. It is being farther away from humanity than at any other time, yet being closer to what makes you human.
There are those who would say that BASE jumpers, along with all other extreme sports enthusiasts, have a death wish. I have never heard anything more incorrect. It isn’t a death wish they have—they try to avoid death. If BASE jumpers had a death wish they wouldn’t use a parachute. Rather, they understand that the closer one is to death the closer one is to life. The closer one is to life the closer one is to death. As a comment on The Way of Lao Tzu states on page 112, “he who loses his life will find it.” With this same thought in mind that BASE jumpers are willing to risk dying young and dying violently if it will bring them closer to that feeling of emptiness, of having no memories and no past or future, just that moment of weightlessness and the absolute present. It is a recognition that death is a natural part of life, not and end of everything. If they thought that death was an end to everything they wouldn’t take chances, never risk anything. “Living is more important that being alive,” said my brother.
Another trait of many BASE jumpers is a resilient ability to overcome any hardships that block their way. This past February my brother was paragliding, another parachuting type of sport, when he crashed and was hospitalized with extensive leg and head injuries for four months. The beautiful wings of fabric that had given him access to the sky had collapsed. However, only approximately two months after being released from medical care he was jumping again and accepting all the lingering pain from his injuries as an acceptable trade for his return to the sky. He did not defy the wind of hardship like a stiff tree whose limbs are felled in a strong gale; he bent with the wind, let it pass around him and sway him, and it did not uproot him. Bodily injury is a common occurrence in a BASE jumper’s lifestyle, but they do not let fear deter them from doing the thing that makes them content with their lives.
They expect nothing from the world around them but for freedom and receive everything in return. They do not change nature to suit them; they change with it. It is in being released from the ground that they become attached to it. BASE jumping, unlike a good majority of other sports, does not necessitate the sculpting of the world in which they live. They don’t need goal posts, or painted lines in a field, or concrete jungles or skate parks built specially for them. Instead, they use what has already been built for different purposes, such as with buildings and bridges, or they simply utilize the grand heights of cliffs and canyons and mountains that nature crafts.
To the BASE jumper, the earth is something to look at and experience through eyes filled with wonder and awe at the simplest things: the sunset, a breeze that gives lift to a tiny butterfly and helps it flutter high above the trees, the colors that the sky paints on clouds at dawn, all are noticed and absorbed. They do not ignore the state of the world around them. They recognize that “Heaven and Earth are not humane. They regard all beings as straw dogs (The Way of Lao Tzu pg 5).” BASE jumpers don’t feel entitled to the world, the way many people feel they are. They know, through experience, that the world is unyielding and, and it is they who must acquiesce to it. They fly with the wind, using it and not fighting it.
The greatest thing I have learned from people like my brother, from the BASE jumpers and the people who fly, is that when I look up at the sky I shouldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet and think, “people were meant to stay on the ground. Gravity exists for a reason.” Such thinking leads only to a sad lifestyle, the logical realist life that does not conduce the imagination to think in new ways, or to think beyond a salary. I can look up at the sky, and I can float into it, hoist myself onto a cloud and chase the horizon.
The BASE jumper is always questing for the state of enlightenment that only leaping from a cliff can give them. They follow their own “way,” their own “path” that deviates from the norm of human thought. In a way their lifestyle and way of thinking is akin to certain aspects of the Tao. They are “like the wind blowing about, seemingly without destination (The Way of Lao Tzu pg 134).” They carry within them a deep love for the sky, for nature and the world in which they reside. They do not fear death, but they do seek that moment in time when they are nothing, weightless and with past and future. It is that moment when they free themselves from the world, a “hopefully, hopelessly lost” moment when there is no time and no being before they have to return to being and deploy their parachute.
By~
Annibal
Anne Hecker
