Lana feels

I am so sore. And so happy. Though I'm still a little too tired and not awake enough yet to really feel any emotion at all, I'm happy in an inactive way. Yesterday, to quote Basia, I kissed the snow goddess. Snowmass mountain. Panda and I went up to the Big Burn, appropriately named because it's a loooooong way down from the top. There were powder mumps on the mountain. They're not moguls, they're just the places where the tracks of snowboard and ski have cut swaths through the blanket of powder previously there, so they look like a little like moguls but you can go right through them or over if you angle it right. I did flips. Not, mind you, on purpose. I just got going a little too fast a couple of times and then all of a sudden I was on my ass, on my head, on my back again. The term head over heels is finally literal and oddly enough it is much the same sensation as when you suddenly fall for somebody. You're zooming along, unexpecting, then you're knocked on your ass, then you're upside down in this foggy cloud of powder and everything looks different and feels different and then you're lying on your back with the wind knocked out of you, laughing like an idiot. I did this twice that first run down Big Burn. Where there were powder mumps that I slid through and they came up to my knees, where I screamed across an empty slope to the Bear that I had found an acceptable substitute for sex in the rhythm and movement of mind, muscles, joints in the control and coordination of the turning and swooping of a waxed board down an expanse of soft, weightless powder. When you, too, are weightless, free of identity, thought, or worry, your only sensations those of movement, of wind whipping and of flying, floating, becoming part of the world in which you live. I am truly alive on a powder day.