snow going

Dear Gerry Lopez,

My name is Athena. I saw you - at least moving images of you - at a screening of Warren Miller's "Children of Winter". You sealed my fate; I knew after that that I had to learn how to snowboard. This is the story.

I went surfing for the first time this past summer, on my honeymoon. My husband Chris and I went to Kauai and Maui, and signed up for a lesson in Lahaina. As we walked from the shop to the beach, our instructor described his transition from snowboarding competitively out west to teaching surfing in Hawaii. There are only so many mornings you can wake up and not move from the pain of the last trick you learned, and do it all over again he said. Water's softer than land. We paddled out our jumbo soft tops (I got rashes on my arms from it; I'm 5'2" and 95 lbs soaking wet and I could barely get my arms around the board), and I got up on my second wave ever, and that was it. Hooked. Like everything in my life before had led up to that moment. I didn't know how, but I knew I'd just have to make more of those moments happen, come hell or high water...

Which is a bit hard to come by where we live. Cambridge, MA isn't far from the ocean, but you have to drive at least 45 minutes on a good day (to our humble North Shore) or an hour + to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, the Cape. I went every chance I could in the fall, and even determined to buy a winter wet suit for the colder months. But after checking the umpteenth surf report and resigning myself to the flat - ankle high pronouncements, I sort of gave up. Very disappointed in myself, but I hoped I could pour all my energy into a couple trips to warmer places. And then I saw that movie, and it was all clear. I live in New England: if I can't surf, I can do the thing that comes closest on some frozen waves.

Needless to say the first day I tried snowboarding (in Sutton, Canada), I couldn't find the surfing analogy to save my life. No "getting up" the second time, no heroin-like realization that I needed more, no dangling of legs in the water, killing time 'til the next wave. Falling, falling, falling, falling. Or rather: crashing, clashing, slamming, jarring, jolting. Tailbone to brain. My dear husband, a big skiier who'd snowboarded once, kept telling me I just needed to rock from my heels to my toes. We marveled at how easy it looked when others whizzed by. I wondered where all my tai chi and meditation and yoga and working out prep had gone. At least by the end of that day, I did know how to fall a little bit better, and I could get down the bunny slope with some dignity. Okay, dignity's overreaching here; I could get down.

Insert immediate dunking in hot tub, hours of stretching, taking arnica, drinking wine. Then the second day, I had a teacher. A supremely nonchalant, good-humored teacher. There's nothing natural about locking your feet into a board and winding your way down a mountain, he said. You have to train yourself to resist your inclination to always lean back on your heels. Try turning and facing the mountain on your toes. That was the day I discovered how much faith it takes to make the subtlest of movements in a counterintuitive space. To be going at a speed, looking up the slope, not seeing what's behind you at all. But the light bulb burst when I did it... a tiny pop, and some sputtering through the rest of the day, and I realized even though you start pretty low in snowboarding, your progress comes quick.

The third day, a different, sweet teacher - who really broke down each little movement and its purpose. And I started to feel the surfing analogy reprise. I started to put all the pieces together: look where you want to go, lead with your shoulders, flex and extend around the turns. Some of my turns were even smoother than my falls. And by the fourth day I could make tiny jumps (not over anything in particular) and do 360s (not in the air, and not without coming to a standstill at the end). My muscles burned on the flats and the steeps, and I'm certain nothing will ever replace surfing. But I am hooked. I know I'm just knocking at the door of my snowboarding fun. Someday soon it's going to be FUN, and it makes me feel super happy that I can take advantage of my beautiful New England home, its abundant winters and small but earnest mountains. And ever important is the repeated confirmation that there are so many things out there that teach us we can only experience control when we fully let go.

So... thank you. Feels like so little to say for the gift of inspiration, but I mean it with all my heart. I aspire to your grace and relaxation in whatever groove you're riding. And I wish for you that all the beauty and elegance of the universe continues to be reflected on your path.

Yours,
Athena

get on up

In quasi-lunar cycles I remind myself that exercise is like food. Going on Spring Break three days ago facilitated the resumption of this daily need; I went to the gym. Thought nothing of being there… mounted the elliptical with the best view of the MIT pools below, fussed with the sad plastic boxes that connect you to one of six different tvs or uninspiring satellite stations, spaced out for a good 10 minutes before I noticed that 20 people dressed in full fatigues and sneakers were jumping into the pool holding machine guns. A luckier handful were standing on the five meter platform with black knit caps pulled over their faces, their instructors describing to them exactly where the edge of the concrete was. No one else was watching on my side of the glass, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the gap between these routines: our earnest but luxurious exercise, their terrifying and inconsonant training. All of us pushing ourselves beyond what desks and cars require, all of us compelled by internal or external drill sergeants. Harder to say if any one of us enjoyed what we were doing.

Those of us who seek that simplest kind of locomotion do so for reasons ranging from the most practical to the hedonistic. A vestige of chasing our food, perhaps, the stirring that acknowledges the necessity of action – and evidence of evolution, our need to swoosh and wriggle and jump and careen. We’re so committed that we hurt ourselves to keep going. I thought about that briefly while watching Jiri Kylian’s improbably wonderful ballet ‘Black and White’ . The audience remains captivated in the ease and flow of what these dancers convey; we hardly contemplate the strains and bruises that carried them to the stage.

One could argue that regardless of the venue, we’re driven to measure our motility’s worth. Heart rates raised, dunks slammed, moguls conquered, opponents thrown: the push and pull between play and ambition.
You could blame it on our capitalist values, or our type-A programming - or an innocent misunderstanding.
Fell in love with surfing in Hawaii last August, and proceeded to employ my typical m.o. to getting that “done”. That works until the ocean reminds you that little comes from struggling with weather and waves, and if every day is going to be a good day, you might as well plan at the last minute, give up all expectations and have fun every possible second you're out there.

I promise to yield to the mountains I’m about to meet: Gerry Lopez inspired me to take full advantage of my New England home and go snowboarding while our Atlantic waters warm (piss poor googling booty on video of Lopez snowboarding, but if you find some let me know…). No matter the terrain, I wonder if we love it all for the chance to let our brains be guided by our bodies. They teach our thoughts how the balance between making happen and letting go really works. They're efficient, free (arguably), and wiser than we know. And they might even be happier when we let them loose on the world.

tu te souviens :

memory : prisoner and guard of muscle and grind, warp and sway : you spirit through the shutters of ice that grip the light and twist it : helix and trial, victory and crush : you grant insight like a batch of meat, sow dry bones by nightfall : : :
to harness you was eminence when youth was standing still : intractable the pull of your release : leading me through oceans of whim and gold : your daughter met me at the shore and shook my lungs : : : : : she glowed a million bulbs of current, daybreak for the denizen : but your shadow alighted, and we were bound in weeds : swarming my plains ‘til your threads grew my wheat : we lurch through seasons still : : : : awake my marrow pulses, knows : whose edict lies matters less than truce : we both at once were queens

more or less

Newton had an elegant proposition: every action is met by an equal and opposite reaction. Generation X has seen that principle through the prism of unprecedented economic expansion, followed by a fair share of contraction. That sense of stricture is understandably uncomfortable – not least for those who started with little. But in characteristic (commendable? condemnable?) style, we want to do more with this less. Arguably, very necessary. Still a riddle that leaks through the seams of our withering security blankets.

In politics, the rhetoric sounds hyperpractical and uberefficient. Technology pats itself on the back for inhabiting just that role on its best days; sustainability yearns to convince every last human that this process is just, and true. At work, it means one does the work of three, without compensation, and in leisure, it nudges us to turn off the tv and pick up a book.

Poor people have been riding such transformations for eons. Although class structure is relative and imperfect, doing more with less seems the very definition of a family of four living on an income of $45,000. The New York Times found bankers and brokers who might relate, because they’re “not yet rich”; they “work hard and get paid a lot for working hard”, and warn that anyone suggesting their bonuses be taxed is a socialist. (My husband suggests that socialism might also be defined as a government giving money to a business so that it can give bonuses to its employees.) If $625,000 is less, can’t we still call it more?


We could just walk around our own cities and towns to gain insight into the alchemy we seek. Traveling affords us that learning in a centrifugal spin. My friend Kim inspired me to pay attention with a beginner’s mind through her vision of Guatemala. (You'll have to guess on i.d.-ing the pictures, I'm too ludditic to arrange them correctly...) Cartagena, too, is full of examples of comical practicality, endearments of sharing, and beauty that persists through tenacity or default.


Necessity and creativity have long been siblings; they bicker in boom times and scheme in the rough. I hope they remind us to be bold with our play, be it new ways of seeing or choices we’re unaccustomed to making. We might trick ourselves into getting what we truly want with some artful magic.