Today I went free-clouding.
It’s like free-climbing or bouldering, without ropes and hardware. It’s amazing! It is also very dangerous, but very worth that exquisite intensity of being “on the edge.” So exhilarating! You experience this dichotomy of attachment and connection, and then weightlessness and flotation—almost like the perfect romance with its blend of physical intimacy and spiritual conjunction.
Free-clouding requires special sunglasses that eliminate the XVC distortions and highlight the molecular banks, clusters, and clumps of the clouds, and help you avoid attempting to scale a too-opaque cirrus cloud. With the glasses, the clouds can then be visualized to allow an ascent. (To get a footing on those structures and become airborne, you also need special free-clouding shoes, gloves, and a filament cape.)
You can only free-cloud safely when the clouds hug the ground, or cling to the mountainside, so you can bail before the cloud dissipates or departs for the skies. But that’s what makes it so enticing as you glide above solid ground and scramble about to clear the topography, but not get to far aloft so you can bail before it's too late.
The last time I free-clouded in southern Utah, in Kolob Canyon (Part of Zions Park), I became so distracted by the complexity, challenge, and freedom of clouding a particularly gnarly route on a cumulus, that the cloud bank I had set upon suddenly burst out across the valley, dissipating around me until, with just a fragment of a clump left to adhere within, it fortunately lit upon the opposite mountain range before I could bail.
It was a long walk back to my car, but I’m always in such a meditative state of mind after free-clouding, that the sensation of lightness clings to me, like when you lay down after a long day on the river in rapids, your body and mind clings to those sensations of lift and falling, and you feel it still. This is very much the same. It was a pleasure walking, because I seemed to still be free-clouding and I simply drifted to my car on a gentle breeze. I didn’t even notice the extra miles.
Loren M. Lambert © April 1, 2017
It’s like free-climbing or bouldering, without ropes and hardware. It’s amazing! It is also very dangerous, but very worth that exquisite intensity of being “on the edge.” So exhilarating! You experience this dichotomy of attachment and connection, and then weightlessness and flotation—almost like the perfect romance with its blend of physical intimacy and spiritual conjunction.
Free-clouding requires special sunglasses that eliminate the XVC distortions and highlight the molecular banks, clusters, and clumps of the clouds, and help you avoid attempting to scale a too-opaque cirrus cloud. With the glasses, the clouds can then be visualized to allow an ascent. (To get a footing on those structures and become airborne, you also need special free-clouding shoes, gloves, and a filament cape.)
You can only free-cloud safely when the clouds hug the ground, or cling to the mountainside, so you can bail before the cloud dissipates or departs for the skies. But that’s what makes it so enticing as you glide above solid ground and scramble about to clear the topography, but not get to far aloft so you can bail before it's too late.
The last time I free-clouded in southern Utah, in Kolob Canyon (Part of Zions Park), I became so distracted by the complexity, challenge, and freedom of clouding a particularly gnarly route on a cumulus, that the cloud bank I had set upon suddenly burst out across the valley, dissipating around me until, with just a fragment of a clump left to adhere within, it fortunately lit upon the opposite mountain range before I could bail.
It was a long walk back to my car, but I’m always in such a meditative state of mind after free-clouding, that the sensation of lightness clings to me, like when you lay down after a long day on the river in rapids, your body and mind clings to those sensations of lift and falling, and you feel it still. This is very much the same. It was a pleasure walking, because I seemed to still be free-clouding and I simply drifted to my car on a gentle breeze. I didn’t even notice the extra miles.
Loren M. Lambert © April 1, 2017
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