You Can Just Ski

 

Last day of February.   Trouble has managed to turn me on to Patricia Brenan, a contemporary vibes player who is vibrating around my room just now .  I have a secret fantasy to secure a vibraphone and have someone come by and offer me lessons on how to play it.  What a beautiful combination of percussion and melodic possibility.  I suppose we always had our primary exposure to xylophones as kids.  What a shame we didn’t keep it up. 

Pulled out one of the aspens I planted last year.  I tied them all to stakes that were supposed to hold them up.  It seemed as though five of the six transplants died  and one sort of made it.  But I held out hope that they were nurturing themselves down below, mystically connecting and healing one another across the twelve feet of ground I’d planted them all in.  I went up to this one today to stand the stake back up  It had gotten bent in the snow.  I carefully pulled back the wet snow from the stem only to find that it had broken and was no longer connected to the earth.  In a few weeks we should be able to tell if any of the others made it through the winter.

 

Skiing in the drizzle but was wonderful.  The hard packed snow is easy to get speed on and you can slide convincingly with each thrust on the now like it was today.  Epiphany yesterday:  don’t count.  Training wheels, I’d needed support when I was getting started with this cross country skiing initiative this year.  Thrust with each foot once and then again and count it as one and then two and then three and see how many sets of one hundred you need to cover a half an hour out, then turn around and repeat the count home.   And it’s important to be able to measure your progress for a while.  Then it strikes you that it doesn’t matter at all.  You can just ski .

What possessed me this morning?  I read one and then another treatment of “The Songs of the South” by Qu Yuan.  The noble official who is devastated that the king doesn’t take his advice and is listening to slander about him, he throws himself into the river as a form of protest.  Yesterday I’d read the Arthur Waley translations of “The Book of Songs” the oldest collections of Chinese poetry.  Many of them simple, northern folk songs imbued with the potency of scripture.  “The Songs of the South”, from the kingdom of Chu is the next oldest collection of Chinese poems and it seems expressive, and experimental in comparison.  I had wanted to read the Six Dynasty poets before I dove into DuFu and that led back to the Han poets like SiMa Xiaongru  and with these, at least, there isn’t any extant material, further back to consider.

 

 

 

Sunday, 02/28/21