I was thinking today how one of my best friends is the weather. I love that though I can see storms brewing miles away they always arrive overhead as a surprise of wind or rain or snow or lightening or wavy aired heat  and never once in a lifetime the same. The other day I skiied hard in a downpour sweat washing off as it appeared like being a fish underwater but with room between the water to breathe, and the sky black.

It is the way to be reminded that there can't be a certained safety in holding on to anything, in surrounding oneself with relationships and possesions against the world. Along with some sad pangs when I feel loss, there is also a rush of a lovely feeling of  another window opening allowing more life to flood in.

There is not one story that is more important than any other. I love that if it were written down, whole pieces planned out would be crossed out and new ones scribbled in. Yesterday evening I was planning to go to some Italian Film with a friend. I drove the twenty miles to see it and found out on the way that it might not be good so I went into the mountains instead hiked for a movies length in time to a high ice floed lake took off my dress and splashed and dunked in the melted ice and sat on the mossy wild flowered shore line while the sun set. Gnomi and Sticky chased after the whistles of pikas. 

I think living does, the responses with being open encourage more opening, and closing seems impossible seems like death. I look at the ground high in the mountains and see how it lies exposed.

I think art allows the eye to play and through eyes, the spirit and through spirit, everything. I could post a thousand pictures.

I like the pattern of the water slipping thin over this concrete. I caught one moment in the changing flow.

Summer has bounded into this valley. I have roller skis such a silly thing but my body loves the motion of skiing so some days I ski up long paved mountain roads and hitch hike back down.  The rides are always interesting. I skied on Friday. All around the snow melt water was crashing down the valleys flooding roads and making much noise. I had tickets to see Joshua Bell in the evening gifted from the local radio station and in the front row. The performance was like the first day of Summer like the new water. We ate late. I had blueberry ginger goat cheese salad it tasted like it was  re-telling my mouth a story about the day. We walked the dogs along the edge of town in the dark.
 Saturday was a nanny work day. I took the girls on a bike ride along the river. We filled my pack with drift wood picked out of an eddy full of flotsam and foam. We spit cherry pits from our lunch. Julia had dribbled some cherry juice on her leg and convinced me the ever gullible that she was truly injured. Fiona spit most of her pits into my hair by mistake. We collected stones and watched a wild green watered creek enter the brown silt of the bigger Colorado River. The day was hot and child slow. We ate dinner on the porch. I found some wrinkled blueberries in the back of their fridge and some crumbly old Gouda cheese and made a homemade sort of the salad like the fancy one from the night before. The girls drowsed off quickly after baths and books.
Sunday in the afternoon Katalin and I found each-other and hiked a fast sweat making trail I had never done before. It is called the Difficult Trail. It goes nowhere just ends.  Dawn and I had tickets to see Salman Rushdie talk in the evening at the Aspen Institute for the Aspen Writer's Foundation. He was brilliant formidable funny and we laughed that deep whole body unstoppable kind of laughter and sat spell-bound silent too.
And here is where the mystery comes in. Later that night a friend asked me about my father. It was a week end of being, of living like my father lived. I was thinking how he showed me how to question everything, not from a place of defiance, but of curiosity, and to find in that questioning not answers, not a wealth of knowledge, but mystery, bucketfuls of mystery.

I had planned on skiing high up with Katalin today. She decided to stay home with a cold and a book so I went alone under swooping clouds. The snow is deep melting fast half turned splashing into a stream. I was thinking about relationship and being alone. I looked down at the snow, at the ground and there was, right there, the relationship I have with the ground. Always supporting my body, there under every step and wonderfully full of surprises. So stable, so changeable, so full of mystery and beauty, and with that down looking and acknowledgement there was such peace.
It has been summer hot for several days. I found a jade green bevel-backed beetle with pale pink wing tails cold bodied slow on the snow surface. Then I passed another and soon too many to count. There were some ladybugs too. Gnomi and Sticky flushed out a pair of ptarmigans mixed half winter-white half summer-brown. It was my last ski until next year. The snow was too engaged in it's transformation and urging me into summer.

I think there is a mystery to everything especially the things I know most of all.

I think there are as many ways of being a father as there are ways of being a daughter or son. Sometime people become who they are with more struggle and some seem to ease along. I like to remind about the trees in the biosphere that couldn't grow straight and tall because they missed the wind that trees need to push against to find their strength. Sometimes fathers nurture that resistance and sometimes other people or circumstances. The important thing, like the wind is being a presence.