Hello again

So you must think I have disappeared into the clouds.  No. 

Just spending time contemplating the snow, the music (Mozart for Morning Meditation), the fall of light on the wood floor, the order of my life.   Woke up this morning in Salida (been here since Feb. 3, 2011).  The city's first real snowfall of the year.  Surprise.  The ground here has been brown and dry...no snow cover to keep the moisture in.  So this was a good sign. 

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But I had gotten up at 5:00 am (actually woke up before then but I make myself stay in bed until 5:00 am so that I don't develop a habit to wake up earlier and earlier.   So I waited for sunrise at 7:09 and then till 8:00 to decide if I would go up and shalom at Monarch Mountain or stay here and cross country ski on the other side of the river.  I'd seen people walk their dogs there.   

So after putting together a newsletter for Fort Collins Religious Society of Friends (Feb-Mar ch edition), I donned my ski clothes (finally figuring out how to affix the hood to my ski coat....I could take all this time using the mirror to help me find the right snap and its correctly corresponding holder.   Got my skis from the car.  Cleaned snow off the car (it fell like powder).  Put on the skis and went down the street, crossed through the small park to the bridge, and went down the other side of the river. 

Past this shipwreck of an old industrial building, designed to process limestone from the mine up Route 50...it remains an operating mine, though the processing now takes place in another place and, well, construction here is way, way, way down. 

The buildings have an industrial aesthetic of another time.  A masculine integrity.  Rough, tough.  No way around it.  Move that ore through the grinders and separators.  Don't need nothing fancy.  Just do it.

And that aesthetic is so lost these days when so many people want to believe it is just all about skiing and mountain biking and kayaking and a pristine mountain retreat.  But it is also history.  And the struggle to make a buck from a harsh and unforgiving landscape.

But then I head back to the townhouse...enjoy the play of light off the buildings across the river...enjoy the warm hues of the house, its furnishings, its openness to the hills.

 




So then I do a yoga routine (my own variation of a theme on what muscles and tendons need stretching after a couple of days of skiing.  They all do.  So I vary it depending upon the amount of, well not pain, but the amount of feedback from the particular ones involved. 

A shower.  A bit to eat.  And now spending time with friends.  More stories to follow.