The End of Winter

I shall be a little sad to see the end of winter and the many and wonderful ways women wear tights and boots.

What is it I admire, besides the given fact that they are women?

There is the leather - tall, short, zippered, laced, smooth, sueded, tanned, in every color imaginable.

And I am grateful for the animal, who sacrificed his or her life for our food and our comfort and our style.

I am not being idle here. This is a matter of life and death.

My own death will come and I will be meat for the microbes, which will be meat for the plants, which will be meat for the animal, which will become beef and boots.

Of course we should treat the elements of the chain of life with respect, which we are hardly doing.

And when a life is cut short of its natural course we should honor the sacrifice, as we say we do when we send off young men and women in their army boots to die for freedom.

So let us not take life and death too lightly. Or too heavily.

We are here for a short time and we should savor and admire the fruits of evolution and of labor which is not our own.

If we are going to eat and wear creatures less smart and swift than we are, the least we should do is make ourselves fit for their sacrifice, not for mere vanity’s sake, but for the sharing of our admiration of the beauty and elegance of living beings, including, but by no means limited to ourselves - and to the restoration of our own souls.

It will be spring soon, then summer and fall. And then women will being wearing tights and boots again. Some of us will still be here to see it. Not all.

Respect life. There is an opportunity to honor those who came before us in every bite and every step.

Modern Motherhood

A young mother,

one child on her back,

a small boy and girl

at her side,

crossed against the light.

“Mom, the light is red,”

said the little girl,

skipping at her side. 

As they reached my side of the street,

the young mother looked at me with a weary smile, and said,

“Teach them young.”

Looking for the Soul of the Kaw

I stood on the bridge,

stopping the people as they crossed over.

What do you see? I asked.

The river.

Sky.

Water.

A sandbar.

The levee.

Trees.

Gulls.

Light.

Color.

Reflections.

The horizon.

A plastic bottle on its way to a snag, or maybe the Gulf of Mexico.

And much more,

they answered.

None of them saw me,

or at least they didn’t say so,

but that wasn’t the answer I was looking for either.

Like the captain of the ship, I will not abandon my post.

If there are words for what I see, I will find them.

Look for me on the bridge, scanning the visions entering my soul

for Truth and Beauty and Meaning and Mystery

and the words that will enshrine the essence of what I see.

If you check and detect no pulse,

toss my body over the railing

and I will commune there at the bottom of the river

with the elements.

There will be others to carry on my search.

Sledding at 55

    It snowed last night so I carried my red racer - my chariot of death - the plastic sled I crashed into a tree few years earlier breaking my leg and I headed back to the hills of KU. 

    The air was right at the freezing mark. The sky, gray. The world, hushed. 

    I walked to Campanile hill. It was completely deserted except for a small tractor plowing snow down at base near the stadium.

    I laid my torso down into my sled, lifting my legs at the knees, and then I pushed off with my mittened hands, holding my arms to my side. It was a long, easy run, the snow rushing past my face. When you sled head first down a hill, the part of you that is aware of where you are is barely inches above the snow-covered ground. 

    When I reached the bottom, I looked across the way to the steep hills on the other side. KU has since put in a parking lot across the path I took that fateful day, but there were plenty of good, steep slopes remaining.

    I headed on over. When I got to the top of the steepest hill, there were two KU students with snowboards trying out the slopes. One of them expressed some appreciation that I was the first sledder they had seen today. They made no mention of my age although I suspect it was implied.

    I thought for a while about not hitting the smaller trees and a light pole near where my downward path would take me. And then I looked over at the larger trees well off to the side, trees not unlike the one I ran my right leg into not so very many years ago.

    And then I dismissed the risks. I put my body onto my sled - my face, forward into the unknowable - and I flew down the hill.

    The sensations are much the same as they were a few years ago - or forty odd years ago. You feel the speed - it feels fast - the rush of adrenaline, an explosion of neurons firing, snow flying into your face, the guttural, involuntary grunt as your chest bounces over a bump and you then feel as if you are about to lift off even though it is only fractions of an inch that you are actually airborne. Mostly you feel the speed.

    And then, as you near the bottom of the hill, you dig your toes down into the snow, extending your arms to gradually catch the snow to help bring your body to a stop before you grate into the parking lot.

    And that's the moment when you pause as you wait for your spirit to catch up to your body. 

    Then you trudge back up the hill, look out across the snow, the bare trees, the gray horizon. You catch your breath. And then you fly down the hill again.

    I think the sensations are much the same. It is the context that is different. All the peripheral excitement I felt when I was a kid with my friends, the chatter about who went farther or faster, or which run we should try next, and just the giddiness of being out in the snow instead of in school - all that is not part of my experience now.

    And then there’s this: when I was young I had no inkling that those sensations I was experiencing and the various accompanying pleasures of life would one day come to an end.

    The context is different.

    I flew several times today. I will accept a little risk to feel that feeling of flying over the snow again. To fly just one more time before the earth finally spins into the sun and there are no hills for me to sled ever again.