The healing power of climbing

In June 2022, I was asked to write a piece that shared what climbing meant to me, I was in my last year of a political science degree and single-handedly running a business and raising my 15 year old daughter. With school, work, and life taking up most of my time, climbing became a distant world that I no longer felt part of. My “new climbing” was studying how power, ideas, and culture work to sustain our broken economic and political system. This was incredibly interesting and inspiring, yet also intense and heavy on the soul. Maintaining power, at least in my own climbing, seemed so irrelevant and superficial when all around me societies and the environment were crashing. Change needed to happen in a good way and fast, and I wanted to help make that happen. At the end of my semester, things were going really well. I graduated with straight A’s, got published in an academic journal, had various photography exhibits, rekindled a relationship with the love of my life, was climbing again, and my daughter and business were crushing it. But then, my phone rang and everything changed.  

Cancer. I shook my head no. Are you sure, I asked? About to face a world unknown to me, I wanted to deny the reality that I was about to embark on a journey that I wanted no part of. Any control I had in my life quickly faded away. I resisted. I had responsibilities, family, dreams… My daughter needed me, I promised myself to this new relationship, and my academic career and fight for justice was just beginning. But just when things couldn’t get any worse, two weeks after my diagnosis, the love of my life walked out. While it took me some time to get over the shock of the cancer diagnosis, heartbreak is another thing. Devastated, I turned to the one thing that made me feel good. Climbing. 

In the beginning, I would go by myself. No people, no pad. Just chalk, a pair of shoes. Seeking out the quiet parts of the forest, I would allow myself to climb the rock without thought, feeling the sharp rock dig into my soft skin. At the top, I would sit, breathing in what remained of the life force around me. As I thought about the bad cells that clung to my insides and the love of my life who no longer stood by my side, tears streamed down my face. I felt weak, mentally and physically. It was too much to bear. Nothing mattered, including politics. Justice, life, freedom, being in “good relations”… my world fell apart. Everything felt so empty and meaningless. And yet, there was climbing…and there was I, sitting on top of a rock absorbing the green forest, my insides burning and melting but still alive. Despite it all, climbing was granting me a little breathing room. An inch of space entered me and I realized that climbing would help me find the strength to get through this. I  promised myself to rekindle this old love of mine.

Nowadays, climbing is different, but at the same time, exactly the same. When I started climbing 23 years ago, there were few crowds and social media was basically non-existent. It was simple, quiet and magical. A send was congratulated with a simple high five instead of a 1000 likes. But in the past years, climbing has changed from something rouge, to mainstream and hip. The growing crowds brought with them dogs, music, and cameras. Tree roots became exposed from over-trampling, and leftover garbage and unbrushed tick marks remained. It became too much. I rarely went out anymore, and if I did, I avoided the crowds. Yet, despite that and the grade chasing, posing down, consumption culture bullshit, climbing had come back into my life in its most basic form. Moving on rock. Pulling me through two crises that I never thought I would experience at the same time. In its pure and simplest form, climbing became essential to my life again.

Over our 23 year relationship, climbing has opened doors I never thought imaginable. It has created so much meaning in my life and shown me what’s important in terms of relationships to land, life, and community. It has taught me about myself, pushing me to embrace possibilities, while facing my own limitations. Despite that climbing has changed a lot in the last twenty years, it still offers perspective and opportunity. In its most basic form, climbing is moving on rock. And moving on rock feels good. It feels good for the body, it feels good for the soul. It gives me strength to conquer the mountains of life, be it heartbreak, health problems, or social injustice. And as I learned in an Indigenous politics class, we can’t heal the world unless we simultaneously work to heal ourselves. And healing requires reclaiming power over ourselves as best we can.