Be Still, Cold

I’m tired of the word commitment already. I can see the humor in that. Perhaps I’ll come back to it eventually – because I’m sure it will, in some way, relate. But for now, let’s call it what it is. A preface. And now, let’s leave it behind.

Today: my assignment: to be still.

Today I will remain focused: in place.

This place is wildly encompassed by winds of unrelenting tenor, tempertantrums of a mountain prone to fits of terrible cold.

It is Saturday, January 25, 2014. 3:23pm. Grandview Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My phone is smart enough to know that it’s 19 degrees out here. What it doesn’t know is that the wind is blowing it down to six degrees wind-chill (as noted by a newscaster).

From where I stand, Station Square is below me, slightly to the right. The cars in the lot look smaller than micromachines; they looks like miniature M&Ms (you know – the ones that are so small they don’t even taste like real chocolate?). In front of me is an overview of the city – buildings stacked and stuck along the rivers, jutting smoothly into the snowy sky. They are different colors, different heights – like trees, like people. It is a city, like all cities - made of stone and brick, slate, glass and marble. Bones of steel beams, these buildings are clothed with the still-skin of concrete, not bark or flesh. They have pores that hold ice, not moss roots or oil. They are blemished by erosive winds, not deer teeth, or hormones. But what of it? And what about this tree-loving, green-needing, obsessed-with-natural-nature-like-forests-full-of-trees girl has chosen the cityscape as her means of exploring naturescape?

(I like hypens - by the way - they are like rivers that attach the city to its people to its water to its land - like veins, strands of wire, capillaries, tree roots, or web).

[Line break]

I am triple-layered and booted, coat-scarved-and-mittened. I am actualizing this assignment as fully as I can. Despite the cold, I remain still.

The wind whips furious gusts spiked with ice particles we lovingly call snow. Snow is a soft word, a word that betrays the vicious nature of its bite against warm skin. Soft skin.

I know this because a small slip of my wrist has been exposed to this frigid air and while its slice elicits nothing bloody, it still stings like the surgery of nerves.

I remind myself of my assignment: no walking. be present. be still.

The cold prods at me like tines, digs at me like a spoon into frozen cream, cuts me like a serrated edge. And still, I stand here – face against the plate, soaked with organic winter winds. If this cold is meat, it is Pittsburgh-rare. Quick-seared. Blue.

[Line break = focus broken = thoughts break down = blown from place like flakes]

Here’s where my mind wanders in this terrific cold: George Saunders. More specifically, his May 2006 GQ article entitled, Buddha Boy. It’s a funny essay on a serious topic. It’s the story of a boy - 15-years old and Nepalese - who had purportedly been meditating for 7-months without food or water, while people watched on in disbelief. Saunders went to observe this boy and then he wrote about it.  

The night Saunders stayed in Nepal – overnight, in the bitter cold, in the rain – he, like me, was loaded with clothes and loathed the cold. The Buddha Boy wore only a thin robe. Nothing on his feet, his hands, his head. Nothing at all but a thin robe. The essay goes on for a long time to describe Saunders struggles with the cold, with the passage of time, with his disbelief that a boy could survive this climate without clothes.

For me, it was an incredible reminder of the power of being present - despite being cold, or being in pain. Because cold is a form of pain, isn’t it? An interpretation of the nerves to a physical aspect of nature. But that essay made me remember something else. I can’t say it’s more important, but it certainly isn’t less – that is - our inherent ability to imagine, to translate a place to tell the story of our pain.

And maybe today’s blog isn’t about emotional pain, some great love lost or unwieldy mistake made, but only the most simple of physical pain – being cold.

But it’s still a story. This extreme notion of nature is something most of us snow-bunnies understand - that when winter comes, it will condense the space between molecules. It will slow them down, so that even they are more focused on the place at hand, so their stillness is akin to a placid river frozen over or a mountaintop whipped with cruel wind. In my fingertips and toes, this cold is beginning to deceive. It feels a little like heat. Am I imagining things? Am I translating my pain to tell a story of this place? 

LINK FOR SAUNDER'S PIECE: http://longform.org/stories/the-incredible-buddha-boy

Narrowing the View of Choice, subtly.

In my last blog, I noted that I was afraid of commitment, and that to counteract my fear, I had committed. At least to a place. To Grandview Avenue. To the road that cuts along the top of the mountain overlooking the whole city of Pittsburgh. In the last blog entry, I pondered what it might mean to have to choose even after having already made a choice. Because let's be honest - a mountain top view of a city, three rivers, more bridges than Venice, a sky the same proportion as the land, and my own mind trying to write about it - explodes the meaning of focus.

Sometimes, when I think of making a choice, I get anxious because there are so many options from which to choose - and only one life in which to choose them. Like the bridges that arch their backs over the brackish colored rivers, I know that there are often numerous ways to reach one bustling place - that place we are sure we're meant to be - the place we think we can see, even when we're far from it. But sometimes, making a choice isn't really about deciding something at all. It's about letting go and noticing that what you need is obvious - and so overwhelmingly clear. Sometimes you want to call it a choice, just so you don't have to know it's a need.

Today I need to talk about color. But first, I'll talk about the walk it took to get there.

Like last week, I feel the compulsion to walk. While I like the feel of walking - the way it clears my head and brings me back to the present moment - today I admit I'm not doing it for the right reasons - at least not reasons that feel right. I'm doing it to multi-task. This week is bulging with things I need to do, down to the hour, the minute, the bone. So today, this walk is nature-writing is exercising is meditation is school work. And unfortunately, meditation is not conducive to multi-tasking. Apparently neither is nature-writing, or exercising, or even, much to my chagrin, school work. The cause of my realization? That my socks are slipping from my ankles and down to my heels. Again. Like last week. Even though I am wearing proper foot attire. For a moment, I consider going the short distance back, to sit on a bench and allow myself the luxury of being still enough to just watch.

But of course, that's not what I decide. I need to exercise, see things in passing, move. And so every step up the steep hill pulls my socks down under my feet until I have to stop, reach a cold finger into my shoe and pull them back up, like they are baggy pants without a belt. After the third time, I curse under my breath. I can't write in my head like this. I can't even get into a pace that feels rhythmic, calming, good. And I need this. Desperately. I need to clear my head. I need to pay attention. And not just because I have a blog due, but because I think this will help me relax.

But it doesn't. Because my sock has again slipped down under my heel. Now to my arch, so that I might be walking on a slender rolling pin. The cold bites the tender skin of my exposed ankle and now I'm pissed.

I stop. Slam my foot up on a concrete curb. Yank at my sock so hard I hear cloth tear. The sound is so sweet, so cathartic, I pull harder on the sock until I feel the cloth give way completely. Now it hangs like a baggy sweatshirt from my shoe and a smile of retribution spreads across my face. Because I know I've ripped an entire hole in the heel of my sock. Then I hear heavy breathing from behind and know that a runner is coming up the hill. Suddenly, I'm embarrassed at how silly I've been. I just ripped a hole in my own sock - and I'm sure they've seen me do it. So I remain hovering over my shoe, as if looking for something I've dropped.

It's only then, peering to where my foot is propped, that I notice this concrete made of tiny balls of stone - it is the color of broken seashells, and ocean water, and storm clouds. And I'm not that interested in the blandness of these colors until I look up, notice the runner is gone, know that my breathing has slowed, realize: The whole city is the color of these little stones.

At first, this realization - it does not excite me. Because while it is surely sepia-toned - and if it wasn't so cold and I wasn't so desperate for sunshine, I might color this image nostalgic - I don't find the industrial colors of steel blue, silver matter and lead gray very romantic. Regardless, something about the view draws me forward, out onto the circular overlook covered in ice and snow, to hold onto the black railing and look out over the city. I let my gaze scan the visage, hoping it will snag on some bright color like red, or yellow, or orange; like a kite might catch on the edge of a branch because the wind has forced it to stop. I lean forward for a glimmer of color like I am looking for hope.

But there is nothing. A little red flashing light - a warning for airplanes or helicopters, maybe. Hardly the ruby I was hoping for. Then below, in my periphery, I notice the slow and steady movement of a barge on the river. It's a rusty barge, red as clay and pushes three huge containers of coal piled high. I watch it crawl over the water, so slow that I have time to wonder about the men whose job it is to steer it, what colors they have to see, when I notice a subtle cloud of brown emerging from the white water that ripples out terse from behind the barge. It's this muddy line of sediment, the color of porcini dust, that allows me to see that the river is not brown, but really - it's green. Like dried oregano or basil.

My eyes flicker from the opaque river to the sky and then back. It's when words of color start to breeze through my mind. Terracotta banks, a soot black treeline, buildings the color of cumin, and dirty sheets, and tortoise shells, and white wine. When I glance up at the sky, it holds the vaguest of peach and pink. It may only be the contrast of all the cool blue hues that I've noticed, or it may be that there is snow in the air, but the color is there. I can see it now. I can see that it's been all around me and I've been too busy to stop and understand it. I wanted to walk my way through my day, through my assignment. I wanted to move through relaxation, to finish it so that I could move on.

But then the sock slipped, and the barge moved, and the colors began to separate. And what I had to write about wasn't a choice, but a revelation. And the subtle nature of what it means to see what you need.

Grandview, Mt. Washington: Week One - Commitment

I am afraid of commitment. Commitment of most things - big things - life things - but this fear doesn't just stop with the huge decisions. It also encompasses the smaller decisions in my life. Like what place to choose to write a blog. In this fear comes my perpetual attempt to foresee what I will learn before I learn it, what I will write before I write it, what conclusions I will draw from the unknown... before I even face it. It's not hard to see the inherent problem with this line of thought. But it's in actualizing a change that I'm most apt to focus on now. So...

I'll say that Grandview was not my first choice of a nature blog-spot. My first spot was going to be my front porch, if only because I knew I had already seen change there. A pumpkin decaying, a small seed of Russian Sage already taking hold under the rhododendron - a sixty yeas old shrub with a proficiency bloomer, surreal in its display of magenta in April. But see, I've already noticed these things - already come to see these changes, colors, aspects, every time I leave my house.

So I thought I would expand my horizon. Quite literally. And make a commitment - to look out over a vast land and see it as it is, imagine it as it was, and find myself as spectator - both of the thick, solid arms of water that reach out as rivers down below, and of the sky that spreads out and fills every other empty space.

Today it's too cold to sit on a bench or stand on an outlook and hold on to the verdi-gris railings, that hold back a body from open, empty space. So, I walk. The wind whips through my hair so that often what I see are strands of gray sky through thick clumps of brown waves and curls. The air smells a little like snow, a little like rain, a little like shampoo.

The whole time I walk, first down the slow descents of slope, then up the steeper flights of hill, I listen to the clomp of my boot heels, feel my socks begin to slip down into the soft arches of my feet, because these are the wrong shoes for this kind of mountain. The whole time I walk, I write in my head.

I start at the place on Grandview closest to the Southside slopes, where the incline cuts through the trees like a smooth zipper, taking people from the air to the ground, and back up again. Here, the view is wide open and I can see all three rivers. Only until recently - very recently, I'm embarrassed to admit - have I learned which of the rivers is which. From here, on this winter day of cold and dry, the lackluster clouds are so massive they don't accent the sky, so much as make it up, grey as an old dime or river stone. From here, I can see my whole city. I say 'my' unintentionally, but realize that's what it is when I'm up here. A deposit of buildings that give my home a name. Pittsburgh.

This view, this place up here, it's so expansive, so wide and open and all-encompassing, that it will be difficult to decide what I am going to write about each week. Maybe that's where this fear of commitment can come into play. Because this view is like life - there are so many options - so many places to look. The rivers, the steep slopes that drop from the railings and hold grasses that look like hay, the plastic cups thrown over the edge, the massive stone blocks that are used to keep the hillside from sliping and sliding away. Then there's the sky - the clouds that will catch all manner of sunlight when the sun decides to shine, or the way I can watch the weather cross miles of the land to come and settle over this spot. Even the time of day I write will be a choice, because here, when the sun sets, the sky can be so cerulean it blows your mind - it stops you so that you stop, regardless of whatever you were doing, wherever you were going, because now that you see this blue, you want nothing else for awhile. At least not until it fades. Or the nighttime darkness from above - the way the night lights cling to every imperfection along the surface of the rivers and glitters it back, moves it so that it looks like an impasto painting.

In short, after so much looking out over the expanse, seeing how much there is to take in, it is clear that I will need to focus. And then commit. To what most catches my eye and moves my heart. And then follow it, stay with it, watch it and learn it - the same way I aspire to live my life - with the things that are important to me, the people I love, the ideas that move me to write.