This picture is taken at such a place. Snowbowl, Missoula's local hill, is where I go as often as I can. Even if this photo is five years old, it still captures how I feel about it today: a respite from the heaviness and hanging grey. This photo was taken during my first winter in Missoula, a ski I remember fondly with the rising moon and the diminishing light just out of bounds at Snowbowl, where I thought I would be for just a season to ski. Yes, I was 33 and wanted to live the dream of a ski bum. Call me a late bloomer. Call me simple. With two degrees and too much teaching experience and a carload of belongings strapped together with an abundance of naivety, I landed in this city where I had only visited for a total of four days and knew one friend. It was late October, 2007.
And somehow my semester at ski manifested into a home. A lot has happened in these last five years. So much has happened and changed, but these hills budding into mountains dusting with snow are where I return with the same intention I carried with me five years ago: to seek exercise, to speed under downy white conifers, but mostly to seek the light in my heart. Sure, this certainly sounds poetic and perhaps even downright indulgent, the ability to ski all day or at least a few days a week and still hold down a full-time enjoyable job with benefits?
I must be living the dream, right? I am. Simply because it is my dream. And yet, I am only now, five years later seeing this choice and dream as also a responsibility. The responsibility we must all face with the choices we make, even if it is as simple as putting skis on a Thursday morning before going to work for some fresh air and exercise. And while I ski and seek the quiet, I let my mind go. I would love to be so Zen that I just breathe and not think, but lately I have been thinking about what our dreams cost us as much as our failures. And what I can say I have found with hours in the cold and wind? Really, they cost the same. It's only when we judge ourselves for either does it change the shade.
The choice in how I see my life these days as a new year dawns can get downright grey if I were only to see negatives. And sometimes I do only see the negatives and forget there is a sun behind inversion and grey. And when I forget, I put on my shoes, boots rather, and continue to ski to feel a sense of blooming. Sure, some days even while skiing I stumble on negative views, worry I will hit a tree and fail to see all the endless powder in front of me. Somedays I stand at the top of the hill, so afraid of taking a risky route while the daylight quickly passes, I hamlet myself under down and fear. I get stuck. Limboed in my own mind, blurred by my far-sighted vision, avalanched by worry, I get cold. But at this point, I remember my feet. How under all the plastic and wool, they are there, bare. No matter where we go or what we wear, there we are, bare even to a numb sun. Somewhere in us no matter how buried is our spirit, our sun.
Maybe people who live above the 45th parallel become obsessed with light and can get downright depressed longing for it. We mole ourselves in the grey dulled days. We long to see the light, dream of languid greens and cherry blossoms from some orcharded youth. During these times of longing, I look to other languages to say what I cannot seem to define. Leave it to the French to have a phrase to talk about this blurred vision, this waning of light. As a way to explain this desire to differentiate between the familiar and unknown, l'heure entre chien et loup, the hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two cannot be distinguished from each other. The hour in which--and it's a space rather than a time-- every being becomes its own shadow, and thus other than himself, maybe more wild and more dynamic. I'd like to call it the hour of metamorphoses, when people, half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf, something mythical and graceful transforms. This hour comes down to us, when we must change. When we must use our grace as much as our fear to find our spirit, our self.
I won't claim to know how to transform. But I do know to get closer to the unknowns, you start with what you do know. Me, I like to ski. I also know that five years ago, I could get down a hill, well sort of, but certainly not with grace. And no one did it for me. That's the beauty of transformation, you have do it yourself using your own fears, failures, triumphs, dreams, feet and of course, spirit. And really to transform the self on two fat sticks being graced down an immovable mass, is the closest I have felt to being whole with agility and grace. Smiling even as the light fades.
Here's one of my favorite sonnets on light, grace and transformation.
Enjoy.
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, not turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
--From the Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
No comments:
Post a Comment