I fell off a cliff. I was twenty-six and traveling
through northern Minnesota with a then- girlfriend
to see the aurora borealis. We had booked a cabin
for the weekend, and about halfway there we
stopped at a scenic overlook called Gooseberry
Falls. It’s this beautiful vista where you can see for a
huge expanse and look down onto a canyon where
a river cuts through to form a series of waterfalls.
My girlfriend was a photographer and wanted
to take some photos, so we decided to walk
down the trail for a bit. We had probably walked
for ten minutes when the sky opened up and it
started to pour down rain. We ran at full speed
to get back to the car. I was wearing a miniskirt
and brand-new cowboy boots, and I slipped on a
slimy rock and slid right off the edge of the trail.
The fall was thirty feet, straight down. There
wasn’t even a slope.
People always ask me, “Did you have visions
of your whole life flashing before your eyes?” I
didn’t. I had been reading the novel The Unbear-
able Lightness of Being. What went through my
head as I was falling was, “Become unbearably
light.” I had an image of how a feather falls, waft-
ing from side to side. I thought, “Be unbearably
light, and land like a feather.”
I landed on a rock slab. If it had not been
there, I would have fallen another forty feet into
the river and all of the waterfalls. All that hap-
pened was I got a sprained ankle and tore a lig-
ament and cartilage in my knee.
You might think, “That must have sucked.” But
that fall woke me up in a big way. The moment I
landed, I felt more like, “I’m so lucky to be alive.”
I didn’t start doing yoga until much later, but I
understood right then that I needed to figure out
how to be more present and really appreciate my
life. That’s the moment the yogi in me was born.MONKEY POSE