There's an inner one too?

Today was the last day of work at the Nordic Center. I want to go to the desert. I am leaving tomorrow. Today was a wonderful almost last day in the snow. I love being here too. A few days ago I was skiing down along  Maroon Creek following some ducks. I saw something in the creek. It was a big red ball caught on the far edge. There was no time to ski down and get it because I was already skiing out fast to make it to a film opening where a friend's film was debuting. Today after work I skied up to find the ball. It had floated free for a bit and was caught up in some overhanging willow branches. I took off my skis and climbed onto the willow and pulled it out. Gnomi and Sticky swam in the snow melt water. It was one of those PhysioBalls the big sit on kind that are all over the Gaia offices. This one belonged to the  Aspen Valley Ski Club Nordic division. We had used it as a game ball for the children. I think some of the Alpine kids had taken it to the top of the mountan and let it go down the out of bound chutes that feed into the creek. I rolled it along the trail. The wind was strong at our backs and the ball rolled fast ahead of me on its own. It didn't fit in my car so someone else took it. That ball had some adventure. Everyone should take their sit on balls out and let them have such fun!
When the winter people leave Aspen they often leave all their winter things at the thrift shop they just buy new stuff the next year. I brought in all our lost and found from the Nordic Center to donate and found two pairs of furry boots one pair long splotchy brown and white fur and the other pair looking like they were made by an Inuit woman tan and black with coyote ruffed top. I couldn't decide tonight which ones to wear so I have on one of each. I will give these boots adventures they never dreamed of.
Tomorrow I'm driving to Utah with a stack of books and the dogs. Two friends from the East coast  will meet me there. I knew them before they were born. They are camping in Moab for a week. I will be relearning my landscape. I want to keep going where my body takes me.

I love that truth depends on our deciding.  The one thing in me that I don't let decide what is true is fear. I let other pieces of me take turns.

Dawn and I were  walking along the Rio Grande Trail a paved one that runs along the river from town to town down the valley. Dawn was telling me about her lunch hour. She wanted to do her sound meditation an eyes shut thing with head phones. She also wanted to walk and take pictures. Dawn decided to combine them all so there she was head phones on, eyes shut, camera in hand, walking along the Rio Grande. (Reason #289 why I love Dawn!) She found that 19 steps were her thresh hold before her eyes needed to open. Dawn suggested I try it. I had camera in hand, no head phones. She didn't know that I love my eyes and use them fully but I don't need them. I call it facultative sight, not obligate sight. I've spent long moonless nights in the woods feeling my way with some strange sense and my feet becoming my eyes. I stuck my hands out like moth antennae and shuffled forward ninety nine, one hundred steps.. let's play another game and both of us laughing so hard.
Off to Utah I picked up two hitchhikers in Fruita. I often stop there it's the last town in Colorado before the emptiness that is Utah. I stop into the strange little thrift shop where I always find candles and buy them all for 25 cents each they become my heat and light source the nights still drop to freezing. I don't mean to, I try to be nice but I think I scare hitchhikers. They had been waiting on the highway there a long time. I drive the road fast I know every curve and rise. They sat in the front with me the only room with Sticky and Gnomi too. Most of the way is desolate two lane no shoulders like a dull ribbon laid down across the bareness. We saw an antelope. The man of the couple had never seen one. I think my driving is connected to the blind walking. Sticky likes to stand in my lap one front paw braced on each of my thighs. When I look straight ahead I see dog head. I tilt my head  lean it against the window to see. That way I can rest too. Sometimes he switches one paw to the wheel. Sometimes he honks the horn. We might be on some high pass in Northern India or the Andes. I might have driven extra fast because I am gleeful to be home. Lynette gave me a stack of old New Yorkers for starters. After the sun goes down it's dogs me candles all funny mixed up ones, books and hot tea. A whole week!
There are a few dirty patches of snow in sun hidden places. The La Sal mountains are deep white old winter staring down at me from the North East while Summer drops away warm and red into the South West. I'm close enough to the mountains to be held by their snowclad arms. I  can feel the last icy breathing of winter, quiet, as if it's energy is spent like the snow. The snow is dying. It lies crusted and brittle like a larval shell. I spent the first morning waiting for some warmth wanting to settle and finding the settling too cold. In the afternoon I took the dogs a few miles down the road to explore the shape of the land. It is how I define myself from the  wandering and examinings of the earth body the swells and crevices the slopes and growths the barren places. At night I press my face into Gnomi's back. Her smell is the memory of the day. I try and sleep with two small candles lit against the cold. Their flicker light keeps me up. I want it dark I want nothing to distract me from the silence.
Every day I walk new contours near the cabins. No aimless wanders but  slow deliberate findings of spines that allow me to climb onto saddles and ridges or route finding though canyon washes. I found a secret hidden deep pocket of water scooped from the rock at the lip of a cliff wall. I need to return on a warmer day with a rope. The pool sides are too steep for a body to climb out. A stone bucket. I returned to a raptor nest ledged on a cliff and climbed above to peer down into the empty egg place.  Gnomi and Sticky follow scents. My eyes absorb minutiae. The land is my book to read, no that doesn't explain it. The land is my secret giant lover's open palm and me the reader of our coupled life line. This is my home.

A light flurry of snow was falling in the morning turning the ground to lace the slick rock to silver. There must be little here to eat yet for the birds. I have only seen crows carrying nest sticks across the sky and a small sooty black headed bird alone at the feeder. The weather mirrors the extreme landscape. There is subtleness only in the detail. The climate systems fury and crash, sear and blow no calm comfort. The snow became a blizzard falling fast as rain and thick enough to fill the sky as well as cover the ground.. In Greenlandic language the word for weather and consciousness is the same word. The weather doesn't only dictate what  I might do with a day. It tells me I am alive. It is my favorite teller.

My need for this. It has not been a choice. It is stronger inside me than anything else.

All of life moving forward and backward swirling into a focus of beacon. Except that word beacon is one I wouldn't use. I like the word beak and beaker and especially the word goblet but beacon doesn't come out of the mouth right. This is baby Siona!

The snow clouds dropped themselves down on me. Everything beyond a few close trees disappeared. The snow came as a fine more mist than snow. I love to think that from down in the valley, from that perspective I am here in the sky. I am part of the dark storm my cabin a small glowing cocoon hidden inside. From that perspective I am with my father.
The cloud turned itself inside out and left another half foot of snow. The morning sun steamed some of it back into the sky and sent the rest roaring down the creek that runs through the canyon. All day I heard water and birds. Juniper Titmouse, Spotted Towhee, Dark Eyed Junco. What names! The coyotes yipped and howled just across the canyon at dusk. In the morning I watched a pair of them circling a herd of Elk far off  at the edge of the mesa. I thought first they were Gnomi and Sticky. In this wilder land of Utah the coyotes must be telling the dogs something different than they do in the ranchland of Colorado. Here they never give chase.  They let the coyotes be.

That is the only way I know. Every morning when I get up I let my heart out and tag along behind it all day and sometimes through the night.  I am my heart's dog.

Most of the time I like to be so caught up in experiences there is no brain space for imaginings and most of the time my experiences become things beyond imagining. I leap first. The imagining comes later when I'm lying in the dark and my body is too tired to resist my mind.. Since I was little I sometimes go over the day and imagine all the disasters that might as easily have happened and then imagine how I would have responded. Last week when I was up by the cliff edged pool, that night I went through a what would happen if I fell the hundred feet and landed with broken legs ( it would be a shorter story and boring if I died) I pictured dragging myself in fine detail back to the truck  and it's locked and I can't reach the key hole so I need to pile some rocks to prop myself up on... or years ago when I'd skate for hours on the thinnest lake ice and at night would imagine the breaking through and looking up through the water to find the hole... or when the children were little and we lived along a river that raged when the ice broke up and I'd imagine them falling in.  These thoughts are vivid and calming and resolve themselves.  I leave them only in my head (my own demented version of the blood/brain barrier) they don't make me hesitate when the sun comes up again. We'd canoe down the river instead of fencing it out.
Good things wonderful things I would have my whole body take part, not just my mind.  When there are days that turn out bad my imagination knows what to do. It knows it is all in my head.  I cope. And leap.

I might not understand it but there is a stage in child development very early on that is called parallel play. It comes before cooperation and game playing and role playing (and doctor playing) I think maybe we devolve in some way after this. I think a way of showing love can be being with someone without engagement, just being there.

I am already me. I don't want to not be me yet. The seeking to become I think will happen when I die. I hope that is still a ways off. I think bodies know who they are and meddling with this can make the returning back to oneself last a lifetime. When this body I have is worn past it's time or broken past repair there will be a seeking to become. Then I want to become a bird. I haven't figured out which one yet. There are so many possibilities.

Aspen trees are connected to each-other in their root system. They spread out like a lovely tapestry thrown across the slopes of the mountains. As they grow up tall the trees shed their branches. You can see the lower ones turn gray wither and fall. In this way the trees all have a chance to feel the sun on their leaves, to eat the light.  The trees along the edges of a grove sprout branches freely where no aspen trees grow yet, and an occasional single tree is hard to recognize in shape it  spreads out wide. Beavers gnaw and drag away whole hillsides of aspens for their dams.  Gnomi and Sticky snarl and bite at each-other in some unresolved confliction every day. I stand back and watch and love the fierceness like a  quick storm. Conflict is part of all life.
Then there is a sad kind that I don't know how to respond to here. The kind that is inside one person. I do not want to be around yelling or bickering or sarcasm or angry silence. I don't like to breathe those exhales into my blood stream. Like the birds that fly when I raise the camera to my eye.
The aspen trees are all dying.  Yesterday we skied through faded groves. The trunks have turned a strange yellow color and the bark is cracking. 

Can someone be full indifferent and absolutely passionate about everything at the same time? That is how I have grown to feel.

I think there is another way not of standing up to them but moving around and beyond them. If your are a giant you can step over them if you are a fast runner you can be around them and far off before they even blink if you are small you can scoot between their legs if you are clever you can trickster them with words or magic the point is to move beyond in some way that doesn't engage where they want engagement. A few times I have stood up to bullies in their game and found they were frightened more than anything else and I was saddened to have hurt them.

The trailer looks like a mallard drake out of water suddenly the wheels exposed and the belly too. It has lost the snug support of snow and sways again on windy nights. It's lighter.  I cleaned out the winter's accumulation shook the rugs and removed the winter window covers.  How wonderful to have seasons and times for shedding, nestbuilding, hibernating and migrating. I'm driving to Boulder now with a friend. We're meeting Siona and Timon, Dawn and Jordan for dinner tonight.

I loved taking microbiology. It opened up the world of permeability and mutability, of motion and flux. My eyes and porous skin and lungs and veins are fluxing in and out with my environment. I am thin skinned and uninsulated. I like how it is to strain all that is out there through my body and see how everything moves out and away like breathing. When I stay too long in certain dying places  I can feel things shriveling up inside I can feel a turning into concrete or plastic dolly. I separate myself from others when I need to be still I use distance and open space as compensation for insulation or thicker skin. I would love to have fur or feathers. It wouldn't change the flowing through but it would make me so happy.

"Although he may not be the man some girls think of as handsome..."  I do not like to be watched or watched over. I never have.  I do not like to imagine that there is anything/body/being watching, taking care of, supervising, having some control over. I like to imagine that everything just is. I also like the idea of a god. Maybe a blind one. I also like Gershwin's song especially sung by Ella F.

I love the earth. I use every kind of love happy that there is using and never using up. I love the earth in the knee weak way of first love. What a thing! A lover's body so immense one can spend a life time caressing new swells and vales, a life time of pressing nose and flesh against new damp places. What a thing. A lover who never pulls away. I love the earth as a child loves a parent. That comes easy now with my father's body enveloped under so much dirt. I love the earth as a best kind of friend calling me out every day for a fresh adventure playing tricks and teasing me shape shifting beyond any wild dreaming. I love the earth as a wise mentor who challenges and inspires and shows me how to love harder things.

Sticky is showing here how to love the tree. A whole life can be made of the love showings. It is about grace and an ease of being in the world. Then the love loosens up and flows and is there for the taking.

I stopped in an Internet cafe in Fruita to send out a few notes before driving up and up into my windy home. I sat by the door of the cafe. It opened and a gust of wind blew the floor full of pink petals.
There is still snow red dust stained along the sides of the road. The ground is covered with a delicate green, the shortest color of the year a week or two of life between months of desert flesh and months of white drift.  I hurt my left wrist. Writing is one thing it doesn't want to do so  I switch to my right hand. The handwriting is more precise with an interesting runic curvature. I have always written with my left hand which flows faster but sloppy. Yesterday Dawn reminded me about the journal I wrote through Iceland. I never read it after the writing. I knew just where it was among my thousand books. I'll read the journal and count the books (are there a thousand it seems so) in the morning while the sun starts it's warming up. The weak spring sun takes most of the day to finally fend off the bite from the wind.
I take the dogs on a walk every evening when the sun is low when it seems to move faster as if hurrying to another sunrise in an easier land. Gnomi and Sticky race ecstatic. There are fresh bear tracks in the mud along the shrinking canyon stream.
I counted the books. There are 986. Some still vibrant pressed poppies fell out of the Iceland journal.  I read a collection of essays by Wendell Berry a book that was my father's. The passages he underlined give me something powerful a piece of my father's intention. From a field guide I read where a certain swift can hold 600 insects in a sticky ball in it's throat all sky-caught to feed it's babies.
Imagine so many books like this caught in mismatched rows to feed the mind

The desert landscape tells a big story about wearing away about dying. Underneath there is so much life. The flowers seem to bloom in defiance more than anything else (the hummingbirds and butterflies see it differently) The brightest ones, the desert paintbrush are hemiparasitic. They use photosynthesis but also can pull nutrients from the sage brush through their roots.
Yesterday I wandered a labyrinth of canyon washes, sandstone domes and spires picking my way with each random and determined step. Sometimes a queer looking land-form leads me a certain way sometimes a glimpse of sky is there beckoning. Yesterday I was drawn up a gully widening to slabs of steep sandstone. Gnomi lost her footing once and tumbled down. When I reached the sky's edge when the land flattened I found the other side dropped overhung hundreds of feet to the easy place where I came from where I needed to be. I walked the edge cliff and more cliff. Then there were elk tracks to follow knowing they would lead me off in a gentler way and they did.
Today I wandered a less abrupt land of widened washes and rolling sandstone swells. It was easier hospitable land full with rabbits ground squirrels and deer bounding away from our intrusion. Clark's nutcrackers sat high swaying on the tops of tall pines.  A single red-tail circled. There are no trails but there is no getting lost. The way-into-summer snow-packed mountains claim the East. South appears suddenly if I walk too far, a thousand foot precipice sweeping away toward the Colorado River. The memory of water as carved out dry pools and sandy washes flow West, the beginnings of cottonwood canyons snaking green down into the desert valley. North will bring me home. I peel I cactus to eat and chew wild onion and bitter juniper berries.
One pulling from that unknown place inside lead me into a shallow overhung wall.  On the wall faint worn was this same story I have been writing. There were bear paws and a herd of deer tooled into the rock a thousand years ago.

I think I can use the same response I used for a question posed last week. With passion and indifference.  Passion about possibilities passion about fortitude and greatness and  at the same time a personal indifference to any outcome. I love the book "Punished By Rewards" by Alfie Kohn.  And if you tell them troll stories, people can do things they never imagined possible.