Zen and the Art of Speedskating

Engaging in some serious coach-ordered rest, I went to see the Soldier Hollow Classic Sheepdog Championship with Jessica. I found it such a refreshing mental breeze to watch these dogs rocket about, especially in light of the continuing agonies of New Orleans.

Watching a sheepdog championship live, wow! Its so HARD what they ask these dogs to do! Me on my mountain bike with Jessica yelling directions, we would do far worse! The crucial difference between the owners & the dog though, is that the owners are competing, the dog is in the moment of work & accomplishing what they were bred to do, they are dogs being dogs 100% fulfilled. I wish I were more like a dog sometimes, unaware of winning and losing, just aware of being a DOG!!! Aware of just velocity and the pleasure of the chase & the job.

These pictures are of Bess, a 10 year old female Border Collie from Colorado, with her well-trained human Tony Stewart. Bess has some top level dog medals in her paws and was 3rd of 145 dogs (!!) at nationals last year and 2nd in this event last year of the 50 dogs entered. In my best race at nationals last year I finished 12th of 28!! Ha! The herding dog world is far more competitive than the human speedskating world, Bess & Tony probably train more hours than I do too. This was not a 100% successful run for this duo, although they qualified for the final round, and you can see it in Tony’s expression in the final picture. But look how Bess trots! Ahhhh! To be a dog fulfilled!

The following poem is by Miguel De Unamuno, (translated by Robert Bly) I am not sure why this moved me after seeing Border Collies tearing around so happy & focused, but somehow, it truly fit the mood of the day…

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
Sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
That brushes your heel as it turns going by,
The man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
Which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
But to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
Is the work, start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like a seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

5 Comments »
Filed under: Quotes, from home

I wrote about my friend Jeremy, Musician/High School friend/resident of America’s favorite underwater city, in my previous post. When I write about someone I know in this public place, I usually email them & let them know out of courtesy. After all, this is the Internet, and I respect other people’s desire for privacy. This blog gets 100+ readers a day from all over the world, so even though I started it for freinds/family to follow my progress towards Olympic trials, it’s not really private at all, I don’t mind, but others might.

Also, in the case of Jeremy, I emailed him out of worry. He has a 5 year old daughter & wife, so it’s not just a case of him being able to swim for it like Roy Scheider at the end of the movie Jaws, his guitars lashed together like pontoons. Jeremy is ok, he just wrote me back privately & also commented on the previous post. Like 80% of New Orleans residents, he got the hell out of town before Katrina came ashore. But his home & fellow ACS‘er Greg Schatz’s homes are almost certainly flooded, & his hometown of the last 13 years is going to be uninhabitable for a long time, it’s quickly turning into “a toxic swamp”. He’s going to have to relocate for a year or two. Put yourself in his shoes for a moment, really.

I want to reprint a part of his excellent comment on my previous post here. As I said before, disasters are hard to understand in simple numbers, storm surge stats, wind MPH, and vague pronouncements by the president looking down from Air Force One. Stuff like that does not reveal the lives impacted. When I wrote my previous post, I had just been sitting in front of my laptop screen, and following Internet links to satellite images. I live on a mountainside in the middle of a desert; it’s a little hard to imagine New Orleans right now, despite my own experience of having a knee-deep/front row seat to a water based natural disaster I wrote in abstract metaphor, later that day, I went to the Utah Olympic Oval’s weight room for my 2nd workout, and then I watched scenes of devastation & saw interviews with sobbing, distraught people, all of my metaphor seemed hollow & like tweedy professorial self-absorption.

These are Jeremy’s words, his take on what’s happening:

the other day I called one of these friends and left her a message, just to say hi because I hadn’t seen her in a while. She returned my call a day or two later, to say hi because we hadn’t seen each other in a while. We commiserated about how slow it is for musicians in New Orleans in August, and she gave me some suggestions about a place to get a gig. And she told me she loved me and hoped to see me soon.

A few days after that, I was calling her from Baton Rouge. “You’re staying? Why?” She and her husband, another street musician, as well as other dear old friends from the streets had decided to stick it out and weather the storm. “What if it floods the house?” Then they could go upstairs, she said. “What if the wind tears the roof off?” They could go downstairs, she said, apparently unaware of the fallibility of her plan. Well, now I have had no word of them. Have they reached a shelter? Did they get rescued? I have no idea, and I may not know for weeks, or months. They may still be sitting on their island, happily drinking the time away, until the booze runs out. Or they may have decided to go down with the ship they so dearly loved, and upon whose mercies they have always relied.
-Jeremy Lyons

I think that in moments like this, the Blogosphere is a great way for those of us so far away, to grasp what is going on & to move a few steps beyond what comes in over the TV & radio. Also socially open source software, like wikipedia’s developing Katrina page, are astonishing resources.

But nothing replaces the words of those who are most directly impacted. Thanks Jeremy.

No Comments »
Filed under: from home