Tag: life

Olympics and Valentines

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This week I’ve been watching the Olympics, where athletes ski dangerously fast down dangerously steep slopes, slide across rock-hard ice on narrow steel blades while carrying other athletes or leaping into the air, wheel up and down curved walls on small boards, and do other activities where they are subject to, and frequently suffer from, very hard falls with dire results. After which a reporter holds a microphone to their exhausted lips, and they say it was fun and they loved it. 

As a person whose idea of a great time in February is sitting in a chair by a window, listening to music, drinking tea, writing, and taking the occasional photo, I have a hard time wrapping my head around this. Not only how do they love doing their sport now – how did they love it enough to do it enough to get this good at it? Then I hear their stories, how they knew it was who they were from an early age, and I understand that. I’ve felt I was a writer since I was eight years old. Something catches you by the heart, and there you are. Maybe you were born to do it, maybe it came sailing to you from the outside world, or maybe it’s some of each, but it nestles into your nature one way or another and you can’t not do it.

The closest we have to an athlete in our house is definitely Frassy, born fully equipped for hunting birds and mice. Mice show up from time to time, but she’s adapted to the lack of birds indoors by playing with feathers we dangle from a string. In the absence of even that, she makes moves anyway. I can’t say if she loves what she does, but she definitely can’t not do it. 

A very wise friend used to say “Love is not what you say. Love is what you do.” He was speaking of love in human relationships, but I’ve come to feel it applies much more broadly. It’s the way champion athletes love their sport. In fact a democratic civilization is built on saying anything you want, as long as you’re respectful in what you do. Love your neighbor, your city, your country, your world – it’s all in what you do. I hope you all got sweet, kind Valentine’s Day cards yesterday and gave and got kind deeds to go along with them.

Instead of counting medals as I watch the rest of the Olympics, I’ll be looking for more stories of how people fall in love with the crazy endeavors we call sports, and thinking about how anyone falls in love with anything – a sport, a person, anything. Some take losing harder than others, but it seems for many Olympians it’s better to have played and lost than never to have played at all. I wish success to all of them, but since that’s impossible I wish them all joy in the skid, the slide, the leap, the turn. The doing.

November Clouds

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Doug thinks of birthdays in astronomical terms. Congratulations on completing another orbit, he’ll say, and I picture myself zooming out into space, floating planet-like against a background of dark sky and bright stars, hair wafting, skirt billowing. Whereas in fact, on the evening completing this particular orbit, we were having dinner at a luxurious restaurant, consuming the products of sunlight on farm fields and pastures filtered through ten thousand years of agriculture and the hands of chefs and waiters, as anchored to earth as we could be as it rolled us through the universe.

When we look at the sky we don’t usually consider that we’re in it, even when clouds come all the way down to the ground. Sometimes we see in those clouds a metaphor for gloom, sadness, and unhappy fates; at other times an end to drought, a gift to farmers, a respite from heat. Was the storm coming or going in this photo? There was certainly a real answer, a weather map answer, at the moment the photo was taken. Lifted from its moment as a photo is, we can give it any story that suits us where we are now. 

Here’s another beautiful Michigan scene, enhanced, I would say, by clouds. It’s a local farm’s You Pick flower patch in its days of former glory, gone to standing seedheads, offering nourishment to such small creatures as hang on here while we orbit through the winter. The clouds, again, connect us to the sky.

Or here are some extremely, maybe even comically, muscular clouds, seen through my workroom window in their brief existence. I expected drama from such clouds – maybe a tornado? Hailstones? Nothing happened; they dissolved into airy nothing, the natural element of clouds. 

It’s an old saying, that you need clouds sometime, to appreciate the clear blue skies when they come. I say appreciate the clouds. They do wonderful things with the sun, which you can’t look at without their intercession. They decorate the sky, giving us a reason to keep our focus upward. I mean the real clouds here, but feel free to apply it as a metaphor wherever you need one. Happy orbiting.