Aotearoa: Maori for "land of the long white cloud" or, as most Americans know it, New Zealand. As glorious of a country as this is through the window of a coach bus, we figure that while free falling from thousands of feet up, it's probably another thing all together.
It is.
-------------------------
An inactive volcano in NZ from our coach bus window. |
"Is everybody ready?!" Our instructor/tandem jumper, Kyle, claps his hands together as we walk outside where we'll wait for our turns to go up in pairs. But there's an odd number of us, so I volunteer to go up "alone" with the tandem jumper.
Are we READY? HA! Is that it? No more preparation? No more safety precautions to be aware of? What kind of place is this? I feel like this isn't how skydiving would be in America.....
No, I am NOT ready...I muse, aloud. What if my parachute doesn't open?? What if I get tangled up in it and strangled?? What if I land wrong and break every bone that matters?? Nobody briefed me on these things. I hear about stuff like this in the news....it happens all the time!
Kyle just laughs. I watch the first of my friends board the plane as I step into my jumpsuit and try not to think about how many people have probably pissed in it before I got here.
Oh.
My.
God.
So this is what astonishment feels like. After all these years, I hadn't fully grasped it until now. I lift my goggles up off my face and blink several times to regain my composure. We're only 9,000 feet up but we can see both coasts simultaneously. We continue to fly in circles to soak up the view of radiant fields dotted with puffy white sheep more numerous than the country's human residents. I am overwhelmed by the brilliance of the green rolling hills that wrap themselves around the land. The vast vividity of this green is surreal...It's not even a real color. What I'm seeing here, this is Photoshop green. This beauty is even audible. Yes, the landscape below me is melodious -- A perfect angelic choir in symphony with God's giggle. Am I dead? Because this is exactly how Heaven appears to me in my dreams. I am suddenly conflicted by an immense desire to jump and a longing to stay up here where I can see this until my heart beats its last.
Me and Kyle |
We fall.
It is everything I imagined it would be and it is everything I did not imagine it would be. Do you ever have a moment in which you tell yourself, "There has got to be more to life than this"? For me, this is a glimpse of the "more." A glimpse of the better things to come. This is not the near death experience I'm fearing it will be, but rather the near life experience I'm hoping for.
After about sixty seconds of what feels more like floating than free falling, Kyle opens our parachute. He eventually hands me the reins and lets me direct our path back down towards Earth. My joy is effortless.
We land. And despite the illusion of Heaven, I'm not dead. In fact, I'm even more alive than before. As André Gide puts it,
"One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
I wholeheartedly believe that the enrichment of a new perspective is always worth the fear of experience. And with each new perspective I am lucky enough to taste, I will have grown. Never to be the same.
On the way home we all gush about our jumps. Some of us complain of sore groins from the harnesses. Some of us report having seen a double rainbow as we fell. Our friend, Eddie, contributes, "That was so scary! Skydiving makes Halloween seem like nothing!"
Oh, what I wouldn't give to relive that jump from Eddie's perspective!