“I waited for the next gust, holding the camera but covering it with my hat, to keep snow from penetrating its mechanisms. After all, I’d wrecked the controls last year by leaving it on a tripod in the rain. But it was a great shot. The year that followed haunted me, “darkest before the dawn” might hint at it, or “just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse”. But that was then. And now, I know I can get through just about anything. I can still fill my pantry with food, and order high-class chow for my cats. I don’t waste emotional energy on the games that other people play. The prayers, like flags I’ve set at sunrise on some distant peak, have attracted attention. Strapping on the skis I bought as discarded rentals, I realize they’ve molded to my motion over the years and are performing better than ever. It’s a blessing to be able to disappear into the woods for three hours, and go off-line completely. Feel the rush of your inadequacies, begging to be allowed to flush out and reconfigure. You’re not dead yet. You can still help trees, branches locked down in chains of old snow, your kicks, your whacking ski poles, gloves yanking the bended limbs free, enacting a blessed mercy. No one cares. Which is how we should act, in our truth. You sell your house, you welcome the loss, you celebrate those who have overtaken you. On a good day, you hear the stories of the lives of those who’ve come to supplant your own. So that you can move on. And redefine everything you knew about yourself already. Amidst the high elevation maples no one taps that only you visit, you choose a route. It’s either up to the left, into a spacious expanse of mature, senior trees, or down into saplings, stumbling the old path, that’s grown over. You thought the new owners would give a shit. That they’d ask you to help maintain the twists and turns of a secret society of adventurers. No, it doesn’t carry forward. Not now. Not in today’s terrible world. Old knowledge is reduced to memes and catch-phrases. They don’t realize what’s slipping away. Because they feel more in control by virtue of the media, telling them they are.”
