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Posts Tagged ‘skate skiing’

Revelation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 27, 2022| 10 Comments »




After skate skiing on groomed track for months,
following only the preset path, today
I wake early enough to ski on the hardened crust
of spring morning snow. Suddenly,
the whole valley is a playground. And
it’s freedom. Freedom to move in any
direction. Freedom to loop or climb or follow
the river. Freedom that seeps into breath, into smile,
into my understanding of what it means to be alive.
And the whole time I skate and pole
and propel myself over snow
I hear an inner refrain from Romans:
And death shall have no dominion.
Not a still small voice, but a resonant boom.
And I, so alive in this sweet slip of time,
know that though my son has died
and my father has died, here I am,
carrying their love, and alive. Alive!
Alive through the winter.
Alive though I grieve. Alive. Alive as I skate
through willows and aspen and wide open white.
Lungs burning, legs striding, heart beating
hard in my chest. I know myself as breath
and return to the wholeness that never left.
Skating across the frozen world, the sparkling crust,
I live into this life that so wants to be lived,
this life that asks everything, everything of us.

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Skate Skiing at Priest Lake

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 9, 2022| 9 Comments »




For two hours, I am
more lung than thought,
more legs than loss,
more heart beat
than heart ache,
and so holy alive
as I become rhythm
of push and glide,
push and glide,
pole and swing,
I transform into
a flying thing—
each shift from ski
to sliding ski
a calling on balance
that comes from
the core.
By the time
I ski back to the car,
it’s not that I have forgotten
my loss, it’s just
that every cell in me
now remembers
the dance between
falling and recovery,
falling and recovery—
how it happens
again and again—
how this is the way
we recalibrate—
we fall, we recover,
we move forward.

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Skiing in Town Park after a Big Winter Storm

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 1, 2014| 1 Comment »


a gift to you my heart would bring, the sweet release of everything, the breath I take before I sing …
—from “The Spaces In Between Us,” Jan Garrett and JD Martin

Some birds don’t sing.
It’s an evolution thing.

*

God, it’s soft, so
soft, the snow,
how whitely it gives beneath
the weight of my skis.
When the world’s this soft
I do not mind it,
gravity.

*

If I were alive
in the 18th century,
then I would wear
a dress with at least
one pair of pockets,
but they would be worn
underneath my petticoats
so no one would know
they were there.

*

It’s the syrinx that does it,
that holds the membranes
that vibrate when air
from the bird’s lungs
pass over them. And
it’s located down, down
in the chest where
the bronchial tubes branch off
each lung, which gives the syrinx
two sources of sound,
one from each bronchus.
Oh poor humans who
can only sing the most
simple songs.

*

It’s almost like flying
when I ski along the track,
elbows akimbo,
glide and kick, the snow-heavy
branches bend toward my lean,
my breath comes in and goes out
on great invisible wings.

*

An amber bead. A nickel.
A crumpled napkin
with a part of a poem
scribbled on it in red.
Lint, of course, a scrap
of hard bread and
the memory of your hand.

*

They just don’t need to sing,
turns out. The mallard
can easily spot his mate
as she waddles along the shore.
No elaborate tune necessary
to woo her. Just a simple quack
and a flash of his bright blue wing,
that’s all it takes to initiate
some fowlish dabbling. And the vulture,
who has no need to converse
with his kettle about where to find
the latest kill, he has no syringeal
muscles at all. It’s the birds that spend
their time in the trees that need
their voices to carry.

*

I sing as I move through the evergreens.
I can’t help it. The song has me
by the throat and will not
take silence for an answer,
no matter if I am out of breath,
no matter if I don’t remember
all the words.

*

You may wonder how
I would reach into those pockets
beneath my hoop petticoats.
There are openings in the seams
where my hands might slip through
and reach inside, not to locate
my mobile phone nor car keys
nor credit cards, but to rustle
around for a love letter written
with a quill dipped in ink from you.

*

Reasons to sing:
danger signal
dinner bell
love song.

*

In dreams, I have flown—
god, it’s marvelous to move
through the air. I have
no fear of flying, it’s
the landing that scares me.

*

Here, my love, I will sew you
a pocket of blue to wear in your
innermost thoughts where no one
can ever steal it. And in it,
I will slip a breath, and then
this song, the one I’ve been singing all day long
beneath the spruce trees,
the one that makes me think of you.
A bird would have no reason
to sing it. It’s a song about
gratitude.

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