how will you leap on Leap Day?

So, here’s the story, in short form:

A book that had great impact on me as a college student: Sam Keen‘s To a Dancing God.

My father had just died, and Keen’s story of the Peachseed Monkey in that book touched me deeply:

Once upon a time when there were still Indians, Gypsies, bears, and bad men in the woods of Tennessee where I played and, more important still, there was no death, a promise was made to me. One endless summer afternoon my father sat in the eternal shade of a peach tree, carving on a seed he had picked up. With increasing excitement and covetousness I watched while, using a skill common to all omnipotent creators, he fashioned a small monkey out of the seed.

All of my vagrant wishes and desires disciplined themselves and came to focus on that peach-seed monkey. If only I could have it, I would possess a treasure which could not be matched in the whole cosmopolitan town of Maryville! What status, what identity, I would achieve by owning such a curio!

Finally I marshaled my nerve and asked if I might have the monkey when it was finished (on the sixth day of creation). My father replied,

“This one is for your mother, but I will carve you one someday.”

Days passed, and then weeks, and finally, years, and the someday on which I was to receive the monkey did not arrive.

In truth, I forgot all about the peach-seed monkey. Life in the ambience of my father was exciting, secure, and colorful. He did all of those things for his children a father can do, not the least of which was merely delighting in their existence. One of the lasting tokens I retained of the measure of his dignity and courage was the manner in which, with emphysema sapping his energy and eroding his future, he continued to wonder, to struggle, and to grow.

In the pure air and dry heat of an Arizona afternoon on the summer before the death of God, my father and I sat under a juniper tree. I listened as he wrestled with the task of taking the measure of his success and failure in life. There came a moment of silence that cried out for testimony. Suddenly I remembered the peach-seed monkey, and I heard the right words coming from myself to fill the silence:

“In all that is important you have never failed me. With one exception, you kept the promises you made to me—you never carved me that peach-seed monkey.”

Not long after this conversation I received a small package in the mail. In it was a peach-seed monkey and a note which said: “Here is the monkey I promised you. You will notice that I broke one leg and had to repair it with glue. I am sorry I didn’t have time to carve a perfect one.”

Two weeks later my father died. He died only at the end of his life.

I have carried that book by Sam Keen around with me for over 30 years. The cover is worn, the pages marked.

Artist Mary Campbell remembered me talking about Sam Keen and emailed that he was coming to her office in Atlanta for a presentation. She asked if I wanted to send a letter to him and she would make sure he got it. I did. I also sent him a copy of Life is a Verb and included my old copy of To a Dancing God and asked if he might sign it, which he did.

I’ve written a lot about trapeze–about letting go of the monkey bar.

Sam Keen has written a lot about trapeze–and he teaches trapeze on his property in Sonoma.

February 29th is all about leaping.

I’ll be in California giving a speech on February 28th. And I could go to Sonoma to Sam Keen’s to leap on February 29th. There is something beautifully poetic about doing that in the very year I will turn the age my father was when he died.

I called–and it may or may not work to leap with Sam Keen. If not with him, I will leap somewhere else on February 29th. I hope you’ll join me in making it a true Leap Day.

I am afraid of heights.

What leap can you envision for yourself on February 29th?