falls

This waterfall is about 6 miles from my house. It was owned by the local power company, when I was a kid, and the company had no interest in patrolling the area. There weren't any trails into the cleft, so we used to clamber down through the brush while pushing innertubes along in front of us. We'd soak our sneakers swimming out toward the falls, where the water was coldest and deepest.

I'm not sure if you can see it in this picture, but there's a rock ledge just towards the bottom of the middle stream of water. The second best thing about going to the falls was climbing up on that rock ledge and looking down the river from behind the curtaining water. We could put our hands out into the water to make peepholes, if we wanted, or just watch the blurry dazzle of the water as it splashed on stone.

The best part of going to the falls was jumping off the ledge and into the pool beneath. There was a hair-raising suddenness, moving from the shaded ledge into the sun, being able to see the river clearly for a moment before tumbling back underwater.

New York State owns the falls, now, and the Department of Environment Conservation patrols the area to give tickets to people who would be so stupid as to climb up into slippery waterfalls. Otherwise, I'd invite you all to come home with me and fling yourselves through the water.

I started remembering the falls, though, after yet another long attempt with a friend to determine what a clearness committee is and will be for me. A good many of my experiences of discernment have reminded me of jumping through those falls, the burst of clarity followed by the waters closing over my head. Clearness committee is a new ritual to learn, and learning new rituals is always exhausting (and sometimes terrifying) to me. I can fall into rituals that I know and trust them to carry me, while new rituals feel more like tiptoing, constantly checking to see if the experience will hold me.

One of the weird things about jumping off the falls was the depth and stillness of the pool beneath the falls, and yet how quickly the current would carry me toward the rockpile on the right, or on downstream with a bit of steering. I don't remember ever needing to swim toward the surface in order to breathe. The current itself would surface me, by its own motion and my natural bouyancy.

I've never been through a clearness committee, but I've been through various discernment experiences before, and there will probably be more familiarity here than I'm expecting. I feel as though I'm being rather melodramatic about the entire thing, but thinking about the waterfall this morning reminded me that I do float. Fearing that the waters will close over loses its sting if I can trust the current that guides those waters.

Sorry to bore you with a long stream of introspection, but you did get a pretty picture of a waterfall.