Thoughts on Storytelling, Rock Climbing and Fortitude
Kelly Clark
If you've known me for any length of time, you know I love the story. The why. The tangle of experience melded with words and image. The way these things build both the creative process and our visual vocabulary. The way digging into our individual life stories for the work of our hands, be it overarching themes or the events of a simple afternoon, creates a richness all of their own.
Last weekend BC and I dug into the world of rock climbing for the first time. Learning where to dig toes into crevices, how to push, pull, center and scale that rock face. Climbing until my arms felt like a sack of mashed potatoes and I couldn't shake the grin from my lips. Feeling muscles strain and the sweet sweet taste of hiking your body up over that last craggy face. And the whole time, singing through my brain on repeat, was the thought, "how miraculous is the human body." Each time I would stop and rest, shaking my arms out, feeling strong (and as the afternoon wore on, feeling jello), I'd think of the me from two-and-a-half years ago, the one so desperately ill that she couldn't walk up three porch steps without help. And each time, I felt the deepest, truest gratitude a body can feel.
When we returned home that evening, I thought about that intense feeling of gratitude. About the thrill of feeling strong and the joy of perseverance, about the push of determination. The small rock walls we climbed were no great feat in the larger world, but I felt the gift they offered me was a powerful nugget of fortitude; access to my own vein of golden truth. And so. I got to work.
(Fortitude Posts... sterling silver, deeply textured, layered, and adorned with 23k gold)
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