Today marks one week that I have been laid up with injury. The days have crept by slowly, and the nights have felt interminable, hours seeping through the air like the languid flow of blood beneath my wounds. At its worst, my own pulse was a scream in the quiet dark. This fragility of body […]

Part of what first drew me to climbing was the opportunity for meditation, the necessity to focus on my movements and to remain absolutely present within myself, denying my mind its usual, incessant chatter. This has been key for me, and is probably my main motivation for going back to the rope again and again […]

My fear of falling is surpassed in my life only by my fear of stagnation. For all of my adult life I have wandered, unable to take root in one place for too long, even when I have tried to do so. Perhaps my failure to synthesize permanence has been the expression of some latent, […]

Climbing, honestly, is not the thing about which I am most passionate, but it is the thing by which I am most consumed. Another winter has crept silently in, freezing all ambition into things statuesque, objets d’art to be gazed at in wonder, the entirety of autumn one far away idea to be thawed in the […]

I breathe deeply as I tie my knot, looping the rope the same way that I always do, dressing it carefully so that its layers lie comfortably amongst themselves, the lengths all perfect, the tension equal. I sit down to put on my shoes, left first, pulling the velcro taught and flexing my toes against […]

I breathe deeply as I tie my knot, looping the rope the same way that I always do, dressing it carefully so that its layers lie comfortably amongst themselves, the lengths all perfect, the tension equal. I sit down to put on my shoes, left first, pulling the velcro taught and flexing my toes against […]

Though the sun shines unseasonably strong and its rays heat the air in days that are unrecognizable as November, nothing stands motionless as it would in the lethargy of summer, and a near-constant wind sweeps the city and kicks up dirt and is not powerful enough to really affect that which it touches, but instead […]

We crossed under the gate in the chain-link fence and onto the tarmac, which was dotted with small planes. The day was clear and filled with a low wind, and that spot on the earth was open and so clearly a point of ejection into everything surrounding it. The sky was blank and ended only […]

I can feel my bones hardening, a stolid ache of the marrow like monoliths being built under the skin. I have spilled more blood in the last five months than life ever taught me was even mine to spill. The flesh of my lip split into ribbons is the prettiest pink, I see, soft and […]

Autumn has finally arrived… or at least it has in theory. This December will mark my first full year in Colorado, and the rolling of the months upon themselves has revealed to me the strange complexities of the mountains’ seasons. I think of October in New York, and of the winds that blow as if […]