2.9.00

What a glorious day! Spring for sure a tease, but I saw the trees were believers and had started parting their little green lips. After some great mental feat I felt invincible and so drove to Magnolia bluff to sit before the mountains and the Sound. Many others were there too, sitting in their cars inexplicably, but pleasing for me as I was able to sit alone on one of the benches. Ahh, I know what it means. It's the warm breeze calling me to ride and work my reshaping legs. I thought of that. The pain is gone now and now legs grow longer and firmer and walk like a pro on stilts with a springing gait. At the gym the groove refinds itself and Sean pats me on the shoulder asking if I'm feeling good, which I am and which is why I must not stop again. Again. Again. I tell you, the body lives on and on in the breathing and I think more and more often of my dear friend who told me that the Hebrew word for God is wind...or breath - Oh God, can't remember it exactly now, but the knowledge lies deeper than language and you know what I mean anyway - the breath, the life and the deep expansion of my rib cage as my arms and legs move. Move. Oh, the ecstasy of movement! I close out the gym with a handful of others. We're a tight bunch, though not one of us speaks to another. We're the hardcore, in a funny way. Recently a woman of perfect dimensions, who is not the same as the other women of perfect dimensions I have mentioned before, has been working out with trainers in those last hours. Her presence changes the mood of our little hardcore group, but I try to ignore it. Even more recently an obese young woman has arrived, sweating and pulling on weights. Tonight she spoke a hello to me, caught me out of breath and I could only exhale a hello in return. Later she spoke again and we talked in smiles for two seconds. I liked that she broke the silence; that of our silence I was the approachable one. And how can I witness the night like this night and not think of last Wednesday? when Pam, Steve, and I rolled in a bowl of a mountain that could have been any volcano crater on any hemisphere, which I pretended it was, and from where one confronts the galaxy (even) and our largeness in this contained world. The planets clocked our ski lifting and we were the second hands ticking those orbits you thought were made by the sun. I confess to an infatuation with speed and discontrol. When I fantasize about it, the it is always a cleaner shallower curve deepening the sound of the arcs; and the feeling of the weight of those long planes pulling on the knees when the knees rise into the air over that ridge pushed by the plow to the smooth cushion of those same knees when those same planes make contact again. But it is never like that. Still, what is a fantasy but something to achieve? The fantasy dictates another pilgrimage to the mountain Friday. This time I will confront the jumps and I will work on pulling my knees toward my chest despite the weight of the skis; and I will focus on the angle of the planes upon landing, trying like all hell not to break my neck.

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