Approaching the Headstand: Commentary on “Three Ways of Looking at a Headstand”

“The purity of thought that happens when you are really exerting yourself... gives you a space to both escape who you are, and to burrow deeper into who you are.”

—Caleb Daniloff, Running Ransom Road

The first draft never happens like I imagine. In fits and starts, in sections that have nothing to do with one another, I write blind, focusing on the details while waiting for the revelation. How hard breathing became when hooked into the side of Half Dome; how the sweat dripped off my nose when straining towards a headstand. The smell of the yoga studio. The scurrying of the marmot. The adrenaline churning in the back of my throat while I braced against the side of the rock. The adrenaline that came churning back when I sat on the arm of the couch opposite my husband, arms crossed over my chest, squaring up for a long disagreement.

Creative nonfiction relies on connections between and among these kinds of details. This time, I thought the connections came because of the timing—the climb up Half Dome, the yoga class full of inversions, and the three-hour argument with my husband all happened within the same three weeks of June 2011. Later, I thought the connection might be in the way the events made me feel like I was about to step off a mountain. That feeling stayed as I wrote. After two pages, I set the manuscript aside and caught my breath.

But a few months later, I had to bring something for my writing group, and this was all I had. I returned to the draft, not stopping until everything was on paper. When I printed out the essay, my stomach told me this is a terrible essay, and a terrible idea. When I read it to my group, my throat tightened until on page five when I started crying. A group member finished reading for me. But the churning adrenaline was gone. If I was falling off the mountain, at least the worst had already happened.

Rock climbing, headstands, and arguing had taught me how to do things that were scary. Scarier, however, and more illuminating, was writing the story of what had happened, drafting and redrafting it, and sending my confession out into the world.

Writing has always led me, in the swirls of my half-cursive print, to the place where I have to look at myself from the inside, and then speak to the unknown. Whether we call the way we talk to the unknown religion, philosophy, or prayer, my writing always comes back here, linking to the spiritual life I keep even when I wonder who is listening. My writing also always returns to the physical life. I found my spiritual life when I was four or five years old, around the time I started writing, around the time I noticed if I ran up and down the driveway I wouldn’t cry that day, around the same time I figured out I could do 50 pushups and, thus, was invincible.

The threads of faith, writing, and physical exertion have directed my life, but I did not spend much time thinking about their connections until I took a creative nonfiction class during my third year of college. In every essay, I was running, swimming, or climbing a mountain, usually in search of an answer from God. In one assignment, my professor asked the class to respond to Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Thoughts on Faith (where she also spends much time swimming and running and asking questions of God) to discuss how the book influenced our writing and our faith. My response escapes me, but my classmate’s has stayed. She said she did not see a separation between the categories of faith and writing. No boundary line marked where the writing ended and the faith started, because to write and to keep writing made her faith real in a way that merely thinking about faith and talking about faith did not. Her answer begins to explain why, despite my spiritual failings, I...