breakthroughonskis.com

more than two decades of ski writing, ski teaching, and ski publishing by Lito Tejada-Flores

Ski Writing

          A New Season Begins

 

 

Letting go, shucking off gravity like a worn-out skin, dropping, flying, soaring. Back on skis. How long? six months, seven? Too long. Letting go, no need to walk any more, to climb stairs, to run, to jog. Just breathe, let go, enjoy the ride, imagine the next turn: it happens. Imagine the next slope: you are there. Imagine a giant arc: it unpeels beneath you feet, beneath your skis, beneath your astonished mind.

 

Trusting the mountain, trusting your skis, trusting the wind in your face. What’s not to trust? Trusting your memory of how easy it all was, how well your skis worked, how you fell over, downhill, into those turns and never really fell at all, supported on an imaginary, invisible pillow of empty air, of centifugal force that just happened, by itself—wow!—how your skis used to be your best friends. Surprise. They still are.

 

Celebrating the transition from too-long summer to never-long-enough winter, from walking to flying, from daydreaming about skiing to really skiing. What happened to politics? to those crises at work? to those endless to-do lists? Gone. All gone. Snow is there. It’s real. Mountains are there. Intensely real.

 

Gravity wraps its real fingers around you, pulls you down the mountain like an old friend. Liberates you from working the surface of yesterday’s planet, invites you into what feels more like playing with this tilted, roller-coaster, winter-white, surface of a new planet. Our real home: winter.

 

Welcome home. It’s a new season. You’re a new skier. But you’re home.