Oh, The Light
I arrive at the top of the mountain and the valley beyond is covered in clouds. I only see the mountaintops. It’s as if I’m in the Himalayas but without having to parcel out oxygen; by comparison, there’s a richness to the air here at only seven thousand feet.
I ski down. It is hard and I am challenged. I like being challenged but only on my schedule. This is not on my schedule. I stop to catch my breath like the people I judged previously for needing to rest in the middle of a run.
My legs hint at not being able to bear my weight much longer. I don’t like this feeling, it’s unfamiliar. But that’s not true. It is familiar but again - only on my schedule. Only as I wish it. I expected them to be strong and they are not. This is new. This is age. I don’t like it.
“The sky is blue, the clouds are in the valley, where they belong. But that’s not where they belong, they belong above. No matter. ”
I go up again but this time, I can’t see the ground. The foggy clouds from the valley have marched up me. I am inside of them, these clouds that have touched the pine trees and the deeply fallen untracked snow and the weasels darting between the tree trunks and the icicles hanging from the craggy rocks. This fog encircles me in its embrace and the light – oh, the light. It is lovely and it is confusing because I have no horizon to balance against. Only the chair beneath me and the steel cable sending me into oblivion. The only reason I know what’s forward is because my eyes point there.
Then, I break through. The sky is bluebird. The clouds are in the valley which is not where they belong. No matter. It makes more sense than being inside of one. It is glorious. I say out loud, it is glorious.
On the descent, I pass through the layer that just frightened me with its grip. Everything is bathed in the most ethereal blue I’ve ever seen. My goggles are making things confusing; I take them off. Then it’s yellow, the kind if you imagined you were on a beach and the fog rolled in. It smells like the ocean even though there isn’t one for thousands of miles. This, I imagine, is my mind scrabbling to unify my senses through the trick of memory.
When I reach the bottom, my legs are spent and my orientation is still confused but oh, what a thing I have finished. I have been below, within, and above the clouds today.
It is exhausting and exhilarating, being a celestial object. No wonder angels fly, it’s so they can arrive at a place of rest when they need to.
I look up and that band of blue is still there. It’s sitting right on top of the yellow light and together, they are saying:
look - we are the sky, we are the sun.
Inspired by events in Sun Valley, Idaho
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