Friday, March 1, 2013

cold and deep.

I was taking a run on the Jane Craig today, only second time skiing all year. Conditions were amazing and I was beginning to realize that skiing is much harder work than teaching dance - I was huffing and puffing working those bumps... and all that SNOW!  I had gotten out from behind that group of kids and was completely by myself, feeling the burn and also learning how uncoordinated I had become after two years of not doing this at all. 

Around another corner and still blissfully alone, I let my skis take me to the edge of the trail so I could catch my breath, watching the tips cut into the fresh powder beyond where any skis had touched, and then I looked up into the trees lining the trail. They were elegant, straight-trunked spruce trees, barren of branches until about eight feet up, then brandishing only broken sticks for another five feet or so and above that was a canopy of straggly branches all covered in heavy snow, the needles tipped with hoar-frost. 

I looked from one to another. All those straight trunks, receding into the distance in the deep snow and the quiet. So many of them, just living there. And there I was, trussed up in my ridiculous layers of winter gear, heart pounding and breathing hard, just amazed by their stalwart complacency. 

Just out there in the snow. On the side of a mountain. All winter.

And I asked them, how do you do it? 
              and as one, they said to me, We Just Do. 

The lesson was, it's not a struggle. It just is.