Zen and the Art of Cross Country Skiing

I got to cross country ski in November.  Two days in a row now.  It's my favorite exercise.  Ever.  I love sitting on my steps, putting on my boots and gators, walking out the door, clicking on the skis and just going.  Around and around and around.  Ten acres, three laps - the same scenery, sounds and smells - day after day. Sort of. The track is the width of our John Deere mower deck and it has unremarkable hills, trees, a pond, critter tracks, critters, a field, edges; they don't change all that much. I could certainly say I've been there, done that, many times, in every season.  If I can't ski it, I walk it. But I've had strings of ski weeks that go all the way to spring.  I get all the goodie out of every bit of snow, and luckily, we get a fair amount around here.  And every single lap is a new discovery if you do it in the right frame of mind.

I don't find it beautiful compared to some of the stunning things I've seen traveling the US and other parts of the world.  But I am regularly blown away by it.   I do that 30 acre track very mindfully.  I feel my feet in my boots, my boots on my skis, my skis on the snow, my muscles contracting, the breeze and sun on my face, the sweat dripping down the small of my back, see the dazzling sparkle of snow, the play of shadows, hear the sound of my breathing, smell the snow in the air.  It's different every time. I like skiing best because I do have to work a little harder not to fall on my bum, so my purposeful, linear thinking is much more easily suspended.

That's when I come closest to feeling the world the way that bluejay does when it flaps out in front of me and suspends for a second before it zips away.  I'm just there, with the deer that I scare into the field across the pond or the wood ducks or that crawdad that stands on it's tail in the spring snapping its teeny claws at me like it's gonna scare me off.  I've met generations of brave little crawdads in approximately the same low spot at the bottom of the hill, past the pond.  And once, a little fawn that couldn't have been more than a few hours old.  But it's not the dew glittered spider webs or the array of changing blooms; it's not the textures or the tracks or the critter scat or sightings.  It's the being and belonging as I slide over the different kinds of snow, sticking or zipping along.  I'm not much for sitting meditation, though I'll try.  I'm more a zen and the art of cross country skiing kind of girl.