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.

Rising man

There's a rising man forever frozen in the naked branches of the giant oak tree outside my bedroom window.  The oak grows up way past the third floor windows and towers over the roof, but the rising man is whole there, outside my room.  His modesty is preserved by the main trunk where he originates. Clear as day, each fall after the leaves drop, you see the back of his leg, bent at the knee, his midrift and shoulders lifting up, one arm out as if to catch himself and one arm reaching up.  The pose radiates strength, growth, unfolding.

He has no choice about being humble and patient, being made of oak and bark and all.  Squirrels race up and down his back and neck, chasing, jumping and tumbling over one another. He has made peace with the gray ones, the little red guys and the black ones.  He's pestered by some lovely woodpeckers - three toed, ladder-backed, red bellied, red headed, downy. He never flinches. And nuthatches, titmice, sparrows, bluebirds, jays and cardinals shelter and hop around, sharpening beaks, waiting their turns at the feeders.

I am always so glad to see him each year.  He helps me not to mourn the green and golden.  To love the still, textured potential of this dormant phase.  It's magnificent.  We should pause, rest, shelter and romp during this time.  It's the before and the after and right now.  You can see nothing more in him than what was lost, what is long in coming, what he cannot do.  Or  you can see his unmoving latency, stillness as beautiful and alive, full of magic and potential.

Edges

I love edges.  This time of dropped leaves and lingering green grass with the occasional blast of red or orange still vibrating.  My path to now is my daily walk around the mowed edge of our ten acres. Three laps.  Thoughts race but they come back to the apple I pluck from the last few still good ones on the last fruit bearing apple tree. Thoughts race but they come back to the large deep deer hoof prints in the mud in front of me.  My thoughts race but they come back for summer's last gift of the final six slightly frozen yellow pearl tomatoes that I eat with relish, and the eight Indiana figs that are almost ripe.  I don't eat all of those.

My thoughts drift as I end with my few standing yoga poses.  Then I salute the sun, close my eyes and see the lingering white shadow drift behind my lids.  I open them in the next pose and see the red heads of the lingering pineapple sage.  My thoughts drift then I count my breaths in the next pose and watch the clouds float, a hawk perched high in the tree.  My thoughts drift then the beautiful bones of one of the fully exposed giant oaks shimmers with frost.  My thoughts drift then I see my upside down dog shadow between my legs and smile.

Endings and beginnings are what edges are all about.  I love them.  They remind me that everything is temporary except that it all changes.  And that is magnificent.

Why can't we see ordinary?

This is such a rich, lush time of year it almost feels excessive.  Everything we welcomed in Spring so eagerly is here in such abundance we almost stop seeing it.  Why do we do that?  Drive right past something stunning because we're preoccupied or bored or moody, so our attitude makes it invisible?  Or even annoying? We miss so many opportunities to restore by not looking at anything but our screens - or just simply rushing through our lives.  But even from the window of our cars, on the way to the something really pressing and important, we can notice the color of the light this morning.  Like everything else, it's tending toward the golden now.  Instead of complaining it's too hot or it's raining, what about those thousand shades of green that are starting to randomly take on bits of gold? The birds and the insect whirs and chirps are so loud.  How do we tune that out?

The soy bean field I drove past this morning was all rich, dark green, and this afternoon it's one third gold. Tomorrow it will be all golden while the next field will be untouched.  Some of the corn fields are crisping and drying to tan/gold now; some are still waves of green bending in whooshes as my car sweeps past.  I love to look in the rear view mirror to watch the tops undulate like ripples on a lake.  Even if we don't look, that's all happening.  Sheesh, there's so much action just driving past those stubborn, chopped down ditches between the road and the fields.  They can't help but produce too. As the car approaches, blue and yellow butterflies whirl up out of the blue chicory and the butter colored daisies and dancing green grasses with long tips of golden seed.  When it rains, the colors shine and the dimmer light makes them deeper.  And then we get the cloud action at sunset with the golden light making them luminescent in spots before they start to shade to orange and pink and blue. We have such stunning clouds on the prairie.  Always changing shape and color, taking up half the view.  We don't need mountain ranges, not that mountains aren't beautiful too.

We don't need to wish ourselves to some exotic spot out away from the boring fly over states either.  Nor do we have to strain to appreciate the excess.  We just have to decide to savor the ordinary extravagance of the zillions of birds and bugs and vegetation, the endless parade of abundance and color on the ground and in the air.  I love edges, and this is the edge right now that shifts us from summer to fall.  It will pass whether we see it happen or not. Why don't we see it while we're perched here on this edge?

So, I think you have to have a world view that is simple but true in order to navigate being.  I have no idea how I'd describe mine, but it feels necessary that I keep trying.  Many, maybe most, say their religion belongs in that spot.  I've studied so many, looking for the most right one for me.  Instead, I've made peace with the fact that none so far, for me, have adequately illuminated and celebrated the mystery, or even come close.  Neither has science alone, as magnificent and mysterious as it is.

I would never choose to reinvent the wheel.  It takes so much unnecessary time more happily spent using that wheel.  But mostly so far, I guess, my world view is that I can't fully believe tidy world views. Yet I also refuse to have a world view of refusal alone.  Refusing to believe this, denying that, denigrating the other versions.  Being more right and righteous than my poor, deluded, sinful, ugly neighbor is not the way I want to be.  Time will run out and I would have to look back someday and say in horror, 'That is how I used my precious time?'  Nope. Instead, I'm letting the mystery be.  I'm OK that all of us grasp a bit of it, and I'm loving the mystery, trusting that any and all attempts so far to describe it are woefully, humanly inadequate, but that still there is an organizing intelligence to admire and episodically glimpse.  An organizing intelligence that includes suffering and joy, light and dark, still and frantic, terrifying and peaceful.

And creating.  Your self and your way of being is creating something.  While you are being human, knowingly or not, you get to do that.  It's amazing.  My overall intention is to create a life that is loving and joyful, accepting and peaceful in the midst of pain and horror and busy and beauty and indifference.  I hold that in place and then ride through the day, immersed in whatever is that I perceive through the flawed lense that I own now and that will change as I pass through.  Boredom, sadness, beauty, storm.  Suffering.  Joy.  I know whatever it is will be temporary.  Like me.  And everything and everybody.  I'm OK with that.  In fact, I love that.  So much.

Way to be

 I am intensely interested in how we manage to be while we are so temporarily human, where suffering lives right beside joy.  So many people focus on either one or the other.  I suffer, therefore I am who I am.  Or I am happy, therefore I am who I am. That's pretty normal, because intense experiences grab our attention for lots of good reasons.  But the intense periods always pass.  And anyway, the thing about being human (or any other being with consciousness - I wonder a lot about all intelligent beings like elephants and dolphins and dogs) is that we can expand our awareness beyond the single experiences of intense suffering or joy while we are enveloped in them.  And when we're not immersed in the intense experience, we ponder why the world is like it is - full of such breathtaking beauty right alongside random, stunning cruelty and undeserved pain.  The facts are the facts, and we can shift focus, deny, distract, rationalize in order to live with them.  But it is a thing to wrap your head around the why of this set up.

Far greater minds who have poetically performed the magic of sharing a gorgeous, complex, working world view. And yet, we still each have to figure out for ourselves how we will be in this moment.  I have the mechanics of it, I think.  I do choose joy whenever and however I can, right along with all of the ugly stuff.  Not to demean or disrespect pain, not to pretend it isn't there.  When pain is present, I try to open fully to it rather than escape it, because one thing about this deal is every bit of it is temporary. But so far, I've managed to acknowledge suffering fully and choose joy still.  Also.  So, that's what I'm doing and lots of others do too.  But really, how?

Nemisis

I’m a bleeding heart, live and let live sort. A little old grandmother for cripe’s sake. But the worst any of us human critters has done, it’s in us all. Hatred resides in the darkest part of my soul for those imitation lady bugs. I hate potato bugs. Experiments in natural pest control. Not my experiments, mind you. But somebody brought them out here. They eat aphids. So what? Aphids or potato bugs? No contest. Typical human arrogance, thinking we can outsmart mother nature. They are attracted to white - like the white cliffs of their native lands. When it gets cold, they inch inside the crags and cracks to ride out the winter. My house is tall. And white. The siding is where they go in the fall when they get cold usually after a frost or two. Just when you start to think it won’t happen. Every year. Every damned year. The little suckers bite and if you swat them for it, they stink you. Very UN-ladybug like. I think every year that they aren’t coming. This time, I won. They are finally done. But nope. They come. Just one day, they’re everywhere - creeping in every crack, riding in the door on your shirt, crawling all over the ceiling in the kitchen. If you toss them out, they just march relentlessly back in. They make me furious. I can’t bring myself to poison them because we have a well and frogs in our pond. As a citizen of this planet, I won’t spray weeds or bugs. I learned the hard way you can toss them on the floor and stomp them and they still come up crawling again. It hardly slows them down. You have no idea how long it took me to find out they’re pretty much unstompable. I call out the beastly, merciless side of my spirit after years of tolerance, catch and release, and it’s all for naught. So now I trap them in a jar. They’re easy to catch. If they’re crawling across the kitchen ceiling, they’ll eventually fall down. They drop - onto the table, the counters, your neck. So, when they get within reach, I scoop them into my bug jar and slam the lid. They can live in there for days - only getting air when I open up for the next guy. But I do not care. Let them suffer. I even find their captive stink gratifying when I open the lid to get another. “Your stink defends against nothing! “ I think, and slam the lid shut. I’m so ashamed. It amazes my bleeding heart every year. They come yet again and my ardent, stunningly gratifying round up into the bug torture jar ensues. The invasion eventually stops. Kind of the way they start. Just done. I might see a stray or two as the winter goes - maybe one a month and even though the jar is put away, I still have no mercy. I snatch them and toss them in the toilet. Flush. Even the winter ones don’t get thrown outside on the off chance that they find a way to survive. But by February or March, all trace of them is gone. Guess that’s why I think I won this time. So, if you ever think you’re above the base cruelty of your fellow humans, think again. It’s in there. Someday you too will meet your potato bug.