Proving Ground: Lessons from the Roof of Africa

Summer - Week 31 - On Mountains and the Making of Ourselves

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

Just past midnight on the roof of Africa, an hour into what would become the longest climb of my life, I turned around to catch my breath in the thin air and saw something that stopped me completely. Below, a constellation of headlamps wound through the valley like fallen stars, each light marking another soul making their slow pilgrimage toward Uhuru Peak. Above us, Venus and the moon held court in a sky so clear it seemed close enough to touch. I wasn't alone in this impossible place. None of us were. We were all just taking it one step at a time, breathing hard in air that held half the oxygen our bodies craved, following the lights ahead and becoming the lights for those behind.

That image, those beautiful lanterns snaking up through the darkness became my compass for everything that followed. Not just on the mountain, but in understanding what it means to rebuild a life, a body, a sense of what's possible after everything falls apart.

Almost three years ago, when my back snapped, my world collapsed with it. The recovery stretched longer than a year, a season of illness and slow healing that taught me the particular helplessness of a body that won't obey. But bodies, as I learned on Kilimanjaro, are wiser teachers than we give them credit for. This same body that had failed me so completely would rise to meet the mountain's siren with a grace that humbled me.

To hear what my body had to teach me, I needed to strip away everything else. I left my phone behind for seven days on Kilimanjaro's Lemosho route. My watch too. And without the tethers that normally bind us to the world's urgency, I fell quickly into mountain time. The ancient rhythm of breath and step, sunrise and starfall. I knew the mountain would demand mental fortitude alongside the physical, knew I'd need to push through exhaustion and the edges of my limits. What I hadn't anticipated was how much it would ask me to dismantle the careful caution I'd wrapped around myself during recovery. The whispered warnings that had kept me calculating risk and guarding against further breaking - bones and heart alike. The mountain would once again remind me that healing requires not just physical courage, but the vulnerability to let others catch you when you stumble, and the openness to receive their encouragement when your own faith wavers.

The Architecture of Endurance

In the days leading up to that midnight ascent, something was being built inside me. Above the treeline, where the world turned strange and spare, I felt adaptation's ancient work begin. My heart learned new rhythms. My lungs discovered deeper capacities. Each step forward became a negotiation between who I thought I was and who I was becoming.

Even in this barren wilderness, we were not climbing alone. The white-collared ravens followed us through terrain that looked like another planet, their intelligence sharp in their black eyes. The alpine chats appeared impossibly delicate against the harsh landscape, yet fearlessly present. These creatures reminded me that survival often looks different than we expect. Not always dramatic and forceful, but sometimes quiet, persistent, adapted to conditions that seem impossible from the outside.

My body was building something I couldn't name yet, something that felt less like repair and more like reinvention. An architecture of endurance that had nothing to do with the careful management of limitation I'd practiced since the accident. This was different. This was trust made flesh, faith built one breath at a time in air too thin to satisfy.

Mile after mile, day after day, the mountain was drawing me back into my own skin. I'd lived so disconnected these last years, observing my body from a careful distance, managing it like something separate from myself. But here, with each step demanding my full presence, each breath requiring my complete attention, I found myself inhabiting this form again. Not as a fragile thing to be protected, but as a wise companion I'd forgotten how to trust.

Each day, the mountain stripped away another layer of assumption about what I could do, what I was capable of becoming. The moorland's rolling heath taught me about incremental change. The alpine desert's stark beauty showed me that strength doesn't always look like what we expect. And always, my body kept surprising me. Not just enduring, but adapting, finding new ways of being strong that I'd never imagined possible.

The Heart of the Mountain

That final push began in darkness so complete it swallowed everything but the circle of light at my feet and the constellation of companions making their way up through the thin air. Seven hours of climbing in cold and wind so blistering it made my bones ache, each step a prayer I didn't know I was praying.

This was where everything converged into pure revelation. My body, this same body I'd thought was broken beyond repair, operated on something deeper than conscious will. The breaking had gone deeper than bone, into the depression that made everything feel impossible, the numbness that had become my constant companion, the way my mind had learned to expect nothing but disappointment. But here, my body was teaching my fractured mind something new. It knew things the darkness had made me forget. It remembered capacities that I thought were lost forever. With each labored breath, with each deliberate step toward the roof of Africa, I felt myself shedding not just old limitations, but old stories about what limitation even meant.

The exhaustion was total, complete, but so was the understanding flooding through me: I was capable of far more than I knew. The mountain had become a proving ground not just for physical endurance, but for a kind of faith I'd lost when everything fell apart. Faith in my own wisdom. Faith in my capacity to adapt, to endure, to become something I'd never been before.

The summit wasn't just a geographic achievement. It was proof that the body I'd grieved as broken had actually been rebuilding itself into something stronger, more resilient, more capable than it had ever been. Standing there at 19,341 feet, breathing air that barely existed, I wasn't the same person who had started this climb. The mountain had remade me into someone I'd never been. Stronger not because I'd recovered what was lost, but because I'd been forged into something entirely new.

The Return

Coming down through the mountain's green cathedral, I discovered what I can only call the nirvana of walking through pure oxygen. After days in thin air, the rainforest felt like abundance itself - air so thick with moisture and life that my lungs expanded with an ease that made me dizzy with relief. The black and white colobus monkeys watched from their perches, ancient faces grave with knowing, while my body remembered how to breathe deeply again.

Here, beneath a canopy so dense it filtered sunlight into green-gold coins, I felt something profound loosening in my chest. Some tightness I'd carried not just from altitude, but from years of careful, guarded living. The mountain had asked me to trust again, and my body had answered with capabilities that humbled me.

Already, I find myself mourning the return to civilization, to the busy-ness that keeps us in continual movement. On the mountain, I'd hardly sat for a week, yet I'd never felt more still, more present in my own skin. The question that haunts me now isn't whether I climbed Kilimanjaro - it's whether I can hold on to its lessons back in the world.

There's something vital about choosing to do hard things, especially when the world offers us endless paths of least resistance. We live in an age of optimization, of making everything easier, more efficient, more comfortable. But Kilimanjaro reminded me that some lessons can only be learned in the crucible of difficulty. The mountain doesn't offer shortcuts or compromises - it demands everything, and in return, it reveals who we truly are beneath our assumptions about our limitations.

I am lighter now, more connected to myself, to the earth, to other people. My body now knows that adaptation is possible, that strength can be rebuilt, that faith in our own capacity and others, can literally move us to new heights. But more than that, I learned that sometimes we need to go through something equally challenging as our breaking to prove we've truly returned.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane