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