FINDING MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE

Boy...this week has been a cold shoulder from ole Mother Nature and the sap run has slowed to a crawl. We've been sittin on a boil for the past 3 days...well, Stevo has been on the boil and I've been ice-packing my knee. On Thursday morning I got up early and took the pup out to do her business. There was a slight coat of snow over everything and I was feeling like I might get on my skis a few more times before the season finishes. But timing wasn't favorable and as Sadie took off after a blowing Oak leaf, I stepped on the garage pad and found it was covered with black ice and wham...I was down and my injury is taking me out for another round. I feel like a child. My racing is done, and snowshoeing with the pup is done. My plans to sit for hours with Stephen simmering our plans for the upcoming spring and summer have yielded to sitting alone on a recliner with my knee packed with ice feeling sorry for myself. This time, when I fell, the pain in my knee took the lid off all my bottled up grief and I cried like a baby while Sadie tried to figure what the heck was going on. I'll tell you whats going on. The whole damn universe is telling me to slow down...just the way I harp on Stevo for driving with a lead foot. Karmic kickback. So for days now, between Priscilla's passing and my wounded knee, my brain has been telling me how dissappointed I am in myself. I seem to ride on a merry-go-round of self destructive thoughts. But something is different.

I've always been my own worst critic. If my friend was telling me what weighs heavy on her heart, I would tell her not to believe any of those repetitive old tapes. I would remind her of some of her best moments and downplay the injury. I'd tell her not to listen to that crap. Yet here I am in my own company, not only listening to the whiny negative crap...but actually believing it. Wow. And doing it while Stephen is busy boiling down the maple sweet sap of the first run of the year. The boiling of the sap is such a great spring ritual. You have to stop and sit in the sun and watch that the boil doesn't burn or overflow and you have to keep adding sap until you've rendered all the collected gallons into gold sweet syrup. While sitting there, we like to talk about our yet unfullfilled dreams and wished for plans. It kind of goes with the rendering essence process. After zipping around on skis all winter, it slows us down so we are better ready to notice the simple signs of spring that put wings on my heart...the return of the birds. Something old has loosened and seems to be falling away. I am aware of the hum of my negative tapes and their comforting familiarity. I see that I have chosen to listen and believe them and that in doing so, I have been cold and unfriendly to my self. The bite of the cold stops the flow of the sweetness...stops it dead.

Today, I don't want to listen to all the ways I've dissappointed myself. I don't have time for it and quite frankly, I don't believe it deep down inside. I didn't knock myself out on purpose. And I didn't beat myself to a pulp either. There is really nothing to stop me from sitting with Stephen by the boil and being a part of rendering sweetness. The only thing getting in my way is me. There is a two-fold lesson to be learned here. One is to seize the moment and choose again. When confronted with your old shit...throw it in the compost and let it fertilize the next cycle of growth. You don't have to eat it. The other part of the lesson is to loosen the ground and prepare it for recieving what is new and worthy of love and attention. This means that you have to be able to listen to the beautiful songs of self praise before you can learn to believe them. You can't keep pushing away what is loving and beautiful and true...and if you do, you just starve yourself. I feel like a bear. Ive been hiding in my cave all winter and now I'm awake...and damn...I'm hungry. Am I going to run out and eat shit? No. No sirree. I'm gonna have some of that newly made syrup...the sweet golden wisdom of the Sugar Maple and I'm going to start listening to a new rhythm and refrain. I've slowed down. I can choose more wisely. This year, I can unbury my heart ...thanks to my wounded knee...and my teacher...the tree.

FIREDANCE

Today a special fire burns in our hearts for Stephen's mother, Priscilla Caswell. It's not a candle. Nor is it the hearth fire in the woodstove or the fire that will distill the sweet maple sap into that liquid gold maple syrup...no. It's not the flame of everyday or the leaping high-reaching flames of a backyard bonfire. No. This is the once in a lifetime cleansing fire of cremation that leads our earthbased physical form from the human body state to the state of ashes...Ashes to ashes and dust to dust...all that remains is her love within us.

So here I am kindling an inner light...meditating on who she was, this mother of the love of my life. Priscilla was adept at all kinds of mending. She could sew and from the time Stephen and I set out to make a family, she began her shower of love with home made Christmas tree ornaments that were soft and squishy and something safe for a small child to grab and pull...or a dog. The lower branches of the Christmas tree have been decorated with those old fashioned stuffed toys for 28 years. She made quilts for the boys and mended clothing like a pro. Her mending and fixing of things went branching out in lots of directions. She loved old treasures...antique dolls to dress, old chairs to cane and paint...she had the knack of giving life to old used up items and making them new again. She boldly and bravely took on the family homestead at 1 Middle Street in Marblehead after James died. I like to think of that house as one of her life's Opus creations. She discovered some old wallpapers in the attic and managed to redo the first floor living rooms with a brittle but beautiful old paper that would have driven me crazy to work with. Not her. She patiently painted and hung the paper...prepped walls and spackled holes, glazed windows...there was no aspect of restoring that house that she couldn't handle with a little help from Stephen. She adored working with him on do-it-yourself projects right up until her cognitive abilities began to nosedive. She was accomplished and in those years after Jim died while she worked on Middle St., she really seemed to come home to herself. Even the landscaping bent to her will. I sort of felt like a third wheel in the home decorating field and though I grit my teeth and plod through the painting and cleaning that always needs to be done, I can't say it's my favorite activity.

Priscilla loved her friends and participating in all kinds of recreational activities. She enjoyed her excersise programs, walks, meeting for muffins and coffee and going out to eat. She adored music and dancing and in her later years, she enjoyed several trips to Ireland, the islands and a few cruises as well. She had a restless spirit that moved her...her passion was looking at real estate, buying and then fixing it up. When she ran out of projects, she would dream up another place and move on. Each place she left better than it was when she found it. That was the power of her love...to make a place sing and to fill it with people she loved and good food. For Stephen and I and our two boys, Priscilla was an angel.

She was a tireless Grandma and always happy to watch the boys if Stephen and I had to go someplace. She loved shopping thrift stores and finding bargains that she could pass along to us. Her home with Jim in Sandwich NH was our families favorite place to hang out in the summer...providing endless opportunities for fishing, hiking, swimming and sailing on Bear Camp Pond. She kept us in touch with the wildlife that frequented the area while we dreamed of and prepared a way for ourselves to move to a more rural northcountry. Priscilla supported our dreams and family visions and helped us purchase our first home at a time when owning a home was near impossible and interest rates were up to 18%. She attended most of the passages our boys made through school and sports and she clearly loved us with a large heart.

When she was unable to care for herself independently, she came to Maine to live with us. While she was with us, Stephen built a beautiful new pine apartment in the walkout basement of our home and she helped him by holding up the boards as he nailed them. She was always ready to lend her hands to help with all kinds of projects. We had visions of her living out her life with us assisting her in daily activities. This dream wasn't meant to be and after 6 months, it was clear that her needs were more than we could provide for and her dementia was not going to improve. Sadly we came to the moment of putting her in a home...something she repeatedly begged us not to do. She had witnessed the slow death of her own mother by dementia and made us promise we wouldn't do the home thing to her. She was always in the market for a little place of her own but I'm afraid living at Ledgeview was not her idea of a nice little place. The move broke all of our hearts.

As we sat with her in her last moments, I found myself saying I'm sorry...hoping for her forgiveness. Stephen and I both struggled with the guilt of being responsible for her ending up in the very place she begged us to avoid. There was our desire to be angels for her and then there was the reality and magnitude of her care. I know in her dementia, she was unable to forgive us. But Sunday night into Monday Morning, perhaps her oversoul hovered above because when it came to the moment of saying Goodbye, I felt forgiven and realized she would have hated it if we had given up the flow of our own lives to make her disease the centerpiece of all of our lives. I also found myself saying Thank You...because her other life's work was the sustaining nurturance of my beloved for in her relationship to him, he was able to know and love me.

So today, as the fire burns...I allow myself to go deeply into my gratitude for Priscilla's life and to see the parchment skinned hands that touched our lives with grace and beauty and love. She has taught me about the thread that connects heart to heart...the tiniest filament that sends instant communication to those that are part of us. Her timing was impeccable and all 4 of us were able to sit beside her during her last moments before she let go. I only hope we were her angels at long last.

STREAM OF THOUGHT

It's snowing today but the streams are starting to move in the woods and the great melt is on. This is the season not to trust the surface of things. Movement requires awareness or accidents happen...like my fall two weeks ago. Just a momentary lapse in attention and your plans can change on a dime. Ice can have a dusting of snow on top and though it looks like all the rest of the driveway, it 's dirty little secret could be a dreadful setback. I find myself shifting my focus. Winters at a ski resort are all about the surfaces of things. Our livelihood depends on snowy surfaces and groomed surfaces and surface smiles and smoothe surfaces and calm, collected customer service surfaces. As the sun warms and the snows begin to melt and recede I like to think of Winter as a dirty old man losing his grip on the young sweetness of Spring. She peaks out from under his tyranny for a day here and there and then a few in a row. Soon her gifts of warmth and growth draw a line in the sand and Winter eventually gives up and goes away.

As I've been called to stillness for healing my knee, I've spent unusual amounts of time just sitting and putting ice on my wound. Where before my accident, I was a flowing conciousness, I now find myself more rooted...like the trees. The sugar maples are tapped and now begins the daily collection of sap. Stephen compares himself to a vampire...that that is what he feels like when he sets a tap to bleed the sap. I am tuning in to the movement of the sap within the trunks of all those maples. Mother Nature seems so well organized. Did she plan on the movment of the sap concurring with the melting streams in the woods and the melting of what's been frozen inside our hearts? In so many ways, there is a beautiful order to the turning of seasons that we humans can become alienated from by our technological gadgets and work lives that require us to spend huge chunks of our lives inside. This incredible gratitude for the graceful order of things seems to be awakening in my heart at the same time Japan is suffering the devastation of the mega-earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis. Where Japan is sadly aware of the backlash of an angry earth, I am suddenly becoming concious of how mostly, the laws of nature are deeply dependable if one is willing to delve beneath the surface. When I was younger, I was mystified by the mysterious contradictions of nature. How could you trust nature's order one day and the next, be holding back the dyke of a once in a lifetime flooding? Is Mother Nature a schizophrenic?

It has taken a woman's lifetime to bring me to my present awareness...including the journey of menopause. There is something deeply connected about the paradox of Mother Nature and her seeming indifference to the human animal and the aging human female. There is what we know and what we show...and then there is the part of ourselves that is becoming...the molten lava under the surface crust that shakes us to our core and demands we change or die. I no longer puzzle over the duality of her appearances...or my own. I've stopped asking ..Why? I have reached a time of my life where it is enough that I finally begin to accept that every living thing including Mother Nature and myself, has a shadow. There is a dark side to every light side. And this recent accident...though a cause of great moans and frowns from me...has forced me to begin writing on a regular basis. Smile. There is a light beneath each darkness. Tommorrow is my cousin Sharon's 53rd birthday. On Saturday the moon will be full and the family will gather to celebrate and honor her too short life. The circle will gather...in body and spirit and in the darkness of our sad hearts, a great Light will shine. My conciousness can find peace in the dark and light of all things...and rest in knowing it is all good.

INCREASING LIGHT

I'm really starting to feel the slight increase in my energy since the clocks were sprung forward. Like a tree, I can feel my cells gobbling up light and charging my battery. It makes me think about my garden and wonder about how growing your own food nourishes differently than grocery store food. There has to be a difference. Think about it. First you choose the day you put the seed in the dirt...and then you hover around hoping for a solid germination but you continue to be in-union energy-wise. You care for the seeds...maybe you even pray for the seeds and the weather. You run for covers when the temperature threatens to drop below freezing. The care is a form of love that you give the seeds you put in the soil until harvest. The plants either grow and thrive or they challenge you with their demands. One might attract cucumber beetles or cabbage worm or show signs of a fungus or a tender green loving animal might graze them right away. You open yourself to fear even as you plant the seeds of love. The seeds go into the dirt with hope and trust in the power of life that you're germinating when you plant the seed. Last year I realized fairly far into the season, that I was worrying about my garden and that maybe the constant fear vibe had something to do with the fungus that began taking my tomato plants from the bottom up. I had yet again, planted my tomatoes too close together. In fact I tend to plant everything too close together because I'm a doubtfilled soul. I lack the vision to see that without my worry, the plants will grow large and need steaking. They will in fact, fill the spaces and I will pay attention to giving them more space for air circulation and light. So all summer long, you give the plants your attention. Sometimes I will cancel plans if there is a weather event due to arrive or if a crop needs to be harvested. Mind you, that's my food getting all this love and attention for month after month. But that is just the beginning.

There's picking and curing and chopping and braising and drying and blanching and storing and freezing. That keeps me occupied right into November...all the while I'm eating fresh greens, salads and vegetables while I put up pumpkin and berries and beans and cukes. This is where I like to linger in my thoughts. As I eat all the freshness, and enjoy the nourishment, I am preparing frozen homegrown vegetables and pesto and pickles and sundried tomatoes. I am scurrying around storing food for the winter and I have a deep respect for the squirrels and chipmunks enjoying the now but with an eye toward preparing for the future. Something happens to me and I get consumed by the yield from my garden. These vegetables almost seem to own me...my thoughts, my love, my time. So how is this food that I've grown and worried about and protected and paid attention to any different from the green beans I grab by the bunch at the grocery store? It might be just a slight increase in the energy like the shift in light that started me off on this tangent.

But it seems only right that the energy I've put out into growing this food will come back to me with dividends as my body digests it. Like the waxing light of March, the energy of increased light is absorbed by cells and I venture to guess, it feeds a lighter spirit. As I dig out the frozen carrots and mixed greens and green beans from the freezer, I hear myself say...its frozen food and not fresh. But an answer comes back from another part of my brain...sure...but this bag of frozen collards has an extra vitamin made from the energy I put in to weeding the patch and picking the bugs. It is not just Birds Eye frozen...it is planted, tended, picked and stored by one heart...my heart. So these homegrown vegetables have a lifetime of my love and its all coming back to me in the soup kettle.

Stephen set out the taps for maple syrup yesterday. I just love the ritual of boiling down the sap into syrup. I love the collecting of the sweetness and then sitting by the fire and watching the boil turn the watery sap to thick golden maple syrup. The sun is often warm enough to give a sunburn. I love to think about the trees sucking up moisture and pumping the sap up with warm days and cold nights. There is probably a sunlight effect at work as well. So today, I feel like I've been thinking like a tree. And somehow, that has lead me to consider the difference between digesting the food I've grown vs food I've purchased. I don't know exactly how the difference will manifest, but I sure do feel a change in my energy. Have I finally blundered into a healthy way to love myself? Something I can really digest?Mmmmm...almost time to start some seeds.

GETTING PLOWED

There comes a time when you redefine what you are willing to riskto have a good time. (Hey...thats a poem) Since I already used CRASH COURSE as a title for a recent blog, my love of wordplay has thrown up a different metaphor altogether...and I'm spinning off on an unanticipated tangent. If I was in my high school English class, the teacher/headmaster would make me raise two hands indicating I have comments that will lead the discourse in an unrelated direction...unrelated to him and his planned verbal itinerary. So...here's a two handed offering.

I have long outgrown the belief that having fun requires having alcohol. I think parenting was my initiation into sobriety and realizing there is lots of fun to be had in life without the help of adult beverages. There's an edge you sit on when you have small children. Anything can happen at any time and parents need to be able to respond to quick changes in plan, unforseen emergencies and venturing into untravelled terrain. Ultimately, this is true of any moment in your life but the responsibility for young lives really brings it home. Don't misunderstand me...I enjoy my adult beverages but I am definitely over "getting plowed". This process of redefinition seems to be a requirement that spirals around at many different points in life. I think I'm actually sitting on the threshhold of one right now.

My boys are young men and fully fledged adults as well. Stephen and I enjoy our whole home and the way things stay where you put them. We have discovered the blessings of the empty nest and how perfectly it can accomodate two birds of a feather, as well as how wonderful it can be to have our sons visit with their respective girls. I never thought I'd be able to say "it feels good when they go home". There is an echo in the house when they leave...a reverberation of the walls. I felt it yesterday when Sadie spent the day at the vet's getting spayed. The walls of the house hold the energies of our loved ones and when they are absent, the house seems to feel it. Time has flown and I have become quite comfortable with the silence and myself for company. Going here, there and everywhere has lost it's sheen. Busyness has ebbed to a new fullness that comes out of time spent alone. Guess its a tidal thing that changes as the passages of our lives change. An ebb and flow of who one is and what one enjoys. You'd think the change would come slowly but no...it can smack you unaware or you can suddenly be face to face with a reflection you don't recognize who has needs you don't know how to fill. Then I guess you must spend some quality time with yourself so you can refigure what's required to maintain balance and keep you focused on your bliss. But what happens when you're so focused on your bliss that you forget to pay attention to what's happening? Why is it that when things are going really well, thats when you end up in a faceplant under the lift or sprawled on the street wondering if anyone witnessed your supreme grace and elegance?

I've got to imagine that that is what happened yesterday to our 88 year old neighbor Charlie. It was a beautiful sunny day. And Charlie is always in some kind of a vehicle...his truck, a tractor, a ride on mower. He finds his bliss in working with powerful tools. He is stone deaf and retired, so he can spend whole days moving leaves around or plowing snow. So yesterday, while Sadie was getting spayed, Charlie was plowing at our Paradise house...and whoops...instead of stepping on the brake when he intended to, he stepped on the gas and plowed right in to the front of our garage. Kind of a wake up call...the last two times Charlie plowed something that wasn't snow, he took out the electric wires twice and CMP finally came and moved the wires so he wouldn't plow into them. His back truck bumper is bent from those two efforts. I believe it may be time for Charlie to redefine his bliss and make some necessary adjustments to the limits brought about by age. Charlie...it might be time to hang up your plow. But I can't tell him how to redefine his bliss. So from where I stand, it just might be time to say no to getting plowed.

BENEATH THE SURFACE

The sun is bright and warm today and there is a waterfall coming down from the roof as some serious melting gets underway. I am nursing my bum knee and after yesterdays slush storm turned to ice, I am experiencing the nameless dread in relation to the surfaces that I would have to master were I to venture out. I braved the storm yesterday to see the doctor and twinged my knee no less than a dozen times just walking through parking lots and taking the pup out to pee. First there was snow...then pouring rain for a whole day and then more snow and of course a return to sleet and freezing rain. The surface appeared to be snow and ice but when I stepped on it...my foot sank and slid sideways so every other step was a potential knee-tweaking. I went home and stayed put. But the conditions got me thinking about surfaces and whether or not they can be trusted. Our eyes see very little of what is beyond the surface and reflecting the light. And our minds want us to believe all their fears and practicalities and logical reasonings. If I believed just what my eyes see or what my mind tells me, I wouldn't be here now. I certainly wouldn't still be married and I certainly wouldn't have a 5 month old puppy. So there is something under the surface of things that speaks in a language that only my heart can hear. March is a month of wild weather whimsy and vascillating temperatures. It is the early morning of the year when the increases in light are measurable. The trees are done popping and living things are beginning to move in the woods and my house is full of those damn ladybugs.(I never thought I'd develop an attitude towards ladybugs but these ones bite and they swarm the sunlit windows). Looking out the window, it appears to be full on winter but walking in the woods shows me buds on the trees. Any day now, Stephen will tap the maples...and our early spring ritual of distilling the sweetness will bring our hearthfire outdoors for the first time since November. Under the bark of slumbering trees a movement begins and we need to be ready for it. Last year, the sap run began in mid-February. We were in such denial that the time was upon us, that we missed the first three weeks of the run. We believed our minds telling us that March is the month... like every other year, when in fact all signs pointed to a rare February run. Oh well...we learned.

These days, I am chewing on the bone of ...What's beneath the surface? Winter is visible but I am listening to the fattening of my asparagus and garlic in my dreams. The trees appear to slumber but their rich sweetness is already starting to perk...and what of my love? This year passed has been so focused on supporting Stephen through his healing process; growing and putting up homegrown foods and caring for our mothers...and its all been done with an edge of urgency and fear. My outer surface has been wearing an outfit that represents a corporate institution that lies to the public and pretends to care and in wearing that outfit, I have chosen to give that reality my support when beneath the surface, I am not a supporter. As the seasons begin their change, I want to focus on the deeper root of my own truth. While I hold to my truth, let the glisten and shimmer of winter's crusty cover begin to melt and lend its fluids to what lies beneath. I will not sit here writing with ice on my knee while my pot of savory soup burns. Oh no. Not again.

CRASH COURSE

I do love Wednesdays. I participate in the Bud Light Locals Challenge races that are held on 10 Wednesdays throughout the ski season. I have learned an awful lot about myself that I never realized so deeply into my bones. For instance...I have finally realized that my primary learning style is kinesthetic. I need to process new information by physically experiencing it. Much as I love to read and write, it was a conditioning provided by school and not always in a positive fashion. By college I became quite successful at "doing school" but there was a cost. Kinesthetic learners by nature are the hardest for teachers to cope with in a classroom because they are forever restless, doodling, craving motion and talking. They seem not to be paying attention but really, in order to attentively listen, they need to be doing something else at the same time. I don't know exactly when it happened but somewhere along the line, I began critisizing myself and running tapes in my brain that sounded familiar...like the voice of a frustrated teacher who would say things like "why aren't you listening...pay attention...follow directions...be quiet...sit still." Or later, "you'll hurt yourself...people will see how clumsy you are...you don't know what you're doing...what will THEY think?" There was very little opportunity to develope confidence in a unique and individual style that was constantly pitted against "how I SHOULD do it". So...last year was my first year racing. On ten Wednesdays, I planted myself in a starting gate much to the dismay of my more cautious fearful self. The thoughts would swirl...the fears of getting hurt, looking stupid or doing something really dumb in front of the people watching. But because I had sat on the sidelines most of my life, I was fed up with the the inner dialogue and when I would hear the starter say Racers Ready, I'd say shut up to the whining and go ahead and do it anyway. It's about goddamn time and Lord knows why it's taken so long but the truth of the matter is, I believed all those shitty critisisms for years. Standing in the start gate and saying So What to the fearful ruminations gave my body a chance to practice saying no...I'm going to do it anyway. And I've learned that my body can do alot more than my mind would allow it to do. And I have finally learned the moment of choice where I get what the old tapes are trying to say but I can choose not to listen to them. How else can a person grow? You have to leave the comfort zone and try new territory if you want to believe in something better about yourself. So...ski racing has become a zen master for me and on one particular day I had no thoughts of insecurity and on my first run, I thought I'd done something wrong because it all felt so easy. Come to find out, thinking I screwed up was my inner prelude to breaking my own record and doing my best run in two years.

Last Wedsnesday, I did my two runs more cautiously that usual. I was later to the course and both runs were rutted and shiny. My confidence level is not so strong that I could choose to let the ruts take me and to make use of them for increased speed. Speed isn't my priority at this point and I found myself feeling for the snow...turning higher or lower than the precarved ruts and it cost me time. I wasn't very impressed with my performance but I finished whole and thats the main idea. It turned into a bluebird day and Stephen and I were skiing some fun runs. The snow was hero snow and I was having fun and going fast...no pressure...no fear. Everything was RIGHT! Ripping down Risky Business, I caught an inside edge and did a complete yard sale right under the lift...on stage if ever there was one. It all happened so fast that I still try to replay what happened physically when I wake up in the middle of the night. I couldn't get up and so a ride down the mountain on the toboggan was my last run of the day and perhaps for the season as I have done something serious to my MCL and I'll be keeping my leg up for awhile. And there is the interesting irony of it all...when I feel like I've screwed up, I'm probably my best ever and when I'm confidently doing my best and having a blast doing it...well..I don't want to create a new tape that tells me to avoid having too much fun or I'll hurt myself. I haven't quite figured out what my body learned last Wednesday doing a somersault under the lift but I didn't give a hoot what anyone thought. It was nice though, to feel how much people can really care. Wish it didn't take me hurting myself to really learn that. Now...I think I'd like to take a course on using brain and body equally...engaging my fully human animal intelligence, but I'll have to use this time to read. Getting a leg up may mean dancing between brain and body.

WINTER'S BELLY

It's March 1st and it's coming in like a lamb. I look out the window and through the shimmer sheen of growing icicles and feel just now, like I am in the belly of winter. Winter draws me inward and begs me to keep close to the woodstove where I look at seed catalogues and read great books and they become my circle of friends for the winter season. We've been here in Maine for 11 years now and as I warm myself by the fire, I review my winters here and like the frosted window panes echo the mountain lanscape, I can see patterns etched from the memories of previous winters. I've learned not to sign myself up for night classes in winter. It just seems to go against my nature- which begs me to relax at home on winter evenings and seek warmth in hearthside connection...be it Stephen or the puppy or a good story. Over the 11 years, I've grown content with my own company and the warm breath of my house is a presence that no longer puts me on edge. I find the silence relaxing and the push, push, push of do that and do this and go here and then there and get involved in that cause and go to that meeting and all that busy-ness just seems to have flowed right by me like water under the bridge. Have I changed or has the vast open landscape entered and changed me? I seem to have lost the urgency to do and in the process, I've discovered how to be. I like it.

Today I went skiing by myself and though it looked like the wind would keep lots of lifts shut down, the sky was cloudless and bluebird and I craved the sun entering my squinty slits for eyes. I felt peaceful. Riding the chairlift and looking down at the snow covered treetops, I felt so lucky. Lucky to be dangling in the sunny cold air on a monday morning over Monday Morning(the trail).The stiff gusty wind would blow and puffs of powder would billow up and catch the sunlight, floating in the air like little rainbows dancing their way to somewhere. It was cold and my toes reached a point of discomfort after a few hours. The cold got into my bones and crusted the inside of my nose. I realized that I used to feel self concious when I skied alone and very aware of how happy all the people appeared because they were sharing the activity. Somewhere along my path, I learned to think of being alone as being lonely and I think I missed alot of living because I felt so awkward as a solo person. Today, I skied my own pace and rode the lift sometimes with strangers and sometimes with silence and alone. I believe the growth I was experiencing in my comfort level skiing alone, gave me a satisfaction that startled me. When I had enough, I left...my rush today was hustling home to let Sadie out of her crate and to take her snowshoeing up behind the house. I do all the talking when we snowshoe. I'm practicing the art of comingling with the trees..breathing out for them and breathing in what they give out. The only noise was the shush of the shoes crunching the crusty snow. Sadie was silent...chasing pinecones and following blowing beech leaves as they skittered across the snow.She buries her head and grabs at twigs to peel the bark and snap them off the plant. Her gnawing on the cold twigs was a companionable sound as she left me to think my own thoughts.

Before I knew it, I had skied for 3 hours and snowshoed uphill in heavy snow for more than an hour. When the 3 wild turkeys took off from the hill just 100 yds. above us we were awestruck by their size and by their heavy bodies taking flight. I was breathless but sweating from the exertion.

Yep...it sure seems like the thick belly of winter as I look through the icicle teeth hanging before my eyes. As the sun begins to descend slowly, the soft colors shine through the ice and I can see rings of thicker ice marking the growth of the icicles as they melted. There is a deep blanket of snow and ice left by the hard work of February and spring seems very far away. When I feel discouraged about winter and mud season, I remember my asparagus shoots way down deep in the dirt waiting to push their tips up through the ground whenever Mother nature's alarm goes off. I think about the fattening of the garlic bulbs and the sleeping bears and chipmunks and I settle myself by the fire in my den and I don't feel alone. I have grown another ring and in a short time, the sap will begin to move up the trunks of the sugar maples and Stevo and I will begin to gather the sweetness to simmer over an outdoor cookstove while we chat and eat peanuts in the sun.