the two hearts

the small one and the large one
they're nested, these two:
the small frail heart of who you are
and the wide expansive heart of who you strive to be.
mine in yours
and yours in mine
God's great heart and our small heart
and inside that
God's great heart again.

carving the candle

last year for the first time i carved and painted the paschal candle for our church. my design was simple, based on a 15th century design.

this year for a lot of reasons it wasn't clear whether or not i would do the candle, but in the end i had to. you know how it is sometimes.

i wanted something simple, but a little more ornate than last year. i also decided to go with inlaid wax instead of paint,a thing i have never done and so only have an idea about how to proceed.

graph paper! you maybe don't know this, but there are some really nice onlice sites where you can print up free graph paper.



so.



sketch design. in the sketch i don't include a couple of the details, and although i can visualize most of the design, i still don't know about some of the colors.

once the design is sketched, you have to wrap it around the candle and cut it into the candle's surface. beeswax can be ornery; while it doesn't crack as easily as cheaper candles, it also doesn't necessarily lift out of the cuts. it's sticky.







the reason i know about the cheaper candles is because before i started cutting into an expensive one-shot-only paschal candle blank, i needed to practice cutting design elements, working with the dyes, and inlaying wax. it's a complex process.

i also had to practice simple design elements like thin stripes, or outlines. wherever you lay two colors right next to each other, you run the risk or chunks falling out of your inlay when you cut near it, or else of the colors running together if you heat the area too much.











the crown was a risk for me; the pointier a thing is, the less likely it is that you will be able to cut it properly into the wax, the less likely it is that you will be able to fill it with color, the less likely it is that it won't chip and break when you work around it.

the yellow dye was also difficult for me to work. i had to keep thinning it with more and more beeswax to lighten it up. the other dyes needed to be strong for that deep color, but the yellow needed to be very dilute. a little yellow dye goes a long, long way.










so here's the process: after the basic design is lightly cut in, you take your knife and cut holes for real. you have to be sure you cut deep enough (a little over and eighth of an inch) and you have to be sure your edges are clean.





then you scoop the melted colored wax into the hole, making sure to fill right to the corners, and not leaving bubbles. the best wax consistency for this is that elusive point just when it starts to congeal; still clear and liquid-y, but thick enough to stay on the knife.

as you might imagine, this requires hundreds of meltings, and each time you melt and re-melt you have to add dye and wax to keep the color going.

it's best to seal the new inlay by going over it very lightly with a hot knife. if you seal it properly, it sets the colored wax into the tight corners and makes the surface easier to work later on without chipping.

the tricky bit is that if you press too hard with the hot knife or linger too long over a spot, you will ruin your clean cut and the colors will run. your lines will blur and there will be a hole.


once you've got all the wax laid in and sealed, the whole thing looks a mess. it's kind of a leap of faith, not seeing your pattern while you're working. but then, slowly and carefully, you use your knife to scrape away the excess surface wax and little by little your design emerges underneath.

now's the nervous time. now you get to see if you really did fill in the holes properly. now you have to be extra careful not to catch any edges and break an inlay.

scrape, polish, pray.

mood swings

righty-o.

so aside from being wildly unstable, i have noticed a few patterns. the tricky bit is that the patterns don't normally remain stable.

barring moods that are connected to actual life events, most people without a mood disorder have fluctuations that look kind of like this.



the amplitude of the wave isn't very great, nor is the frequency. just in case you're not familiar with the anatomy of a wave, the amplitude of it is the height of the wave and the frequency describes how often the waves occur. the peak is the highest point on the wave, the trough is the lowest point, and the node is the place (twice in a full cycle for this kind of wave) where it crosses center.

the problem for people with manic-depression is that the waves have too great an amplitude, and often too great a frequency. when you have full cycles more than three times a year, they call it rapid cycling. a year might be represented this way:



the problem for me is that i have a very extreme form of the illness, and my year looks more like this:



let me break it down for you.

a while ago i noticed that i was hitting a trough on average every 27 hours. that's hard to cope with, because although you can predict when it's going to happen, it's kind of like a rolling blackout and it makes it just that much more difficult to keep any kind of regular schedule to my day. a three day period looks kind of like this:



but then i was noticing that i was peaking 4 to 6 hours before the troughs, which would yield a wave-shape like this:



and that just doesn't make sense.

so i took into account that i might be cycling even during my hours of sleep, which over a three-day period looks like this:



when i matched this wave frequency with what i was experiencing, it fit a lot better. i'm still uncomfortable, but it helps to know why and to be able to predict the swings.

so i'm making a full cycle on average once every 13.5 hours. i sleep for nine hours, which is partly a function of my body clock, and partly a function of my medication. when i am at either extreme of amplitude, it is difficult to fall asleep and when i am at a trough it's very difficult to get out of bed. further complicate the whole thing with hormonal cycles and it's just one big clustertangle.

peggy dow

peggy dow's is my favorite trail at bolton valley.

if you need the refresher or have just joined us, it's off the top of the number one chair, up in the north corner. i have this thing for the elbow of peggy dow's; you come off the lift on this treed-in and level trail and then you go around the corner and it drops out from under you and it seems like all of creation or maybe just the pretty parts are laid out in front of you.

between haircuts

once i lost a bet and had to get my head shaved. it was a fundraising bet; the kind you hope to lose. the price tag for my hair along with that of another colleague was $15,000.

what wouldn't you do to your hair for $15,000? hair grows back.

it was an interesting experience, being shaved in front of a few hundred screaming adolescents. the striking thing was how breezy it was. the next day was when i started my still-current habit of wearing little round hats. someone asked me that day if i was ashamed to be seen bald.

"no", i said. "just cold."

every evening i took a picture of myself, right up until the night before my next haircut.

roll film.

speed

my mother will buy me sporting goods, but a lot of the time she doesn't want to know what i do with it.

yesterday on the mountain we suffered from the couple days' thaw and refreeze, but even with all that, the conditions weren't all that bad. sure, there were some hard patches where it was hard to get an edge, but even where it was scratchy there was mostly enough soft snow to dig in all right.

and you know those chunks of ice that get thrown up by the groomer? we used to call them "death cookies". they make for bumpy gritty skiing and you KNOW you're going to have to sharpen your edges (which i am at the moment putting off). anyway, they weren't so large that i'd have called them "death cookies"; maybe they were more like "death croutons".

but once i got acclimated, i was able to put some muscle into my turns and carve .

all last week i kept clocking my speed (yes, i was carrying my GPSr. so i'm nerdy. i hope this is not news to you)

-anyway, i was clocking my speed and no matter what trail i was on or what i did, i kept topping out at about thirty-seven MPH.

37.2
37.6
37.4

never 38. so yesterday i thought that maybe i could break forty and i really put some intent behind it.

still only 37 and change. but then i zipped up my jacket and went into a tight tuck.

49.7 MPH!

and i might have gotten a little faster on that run, except that i had a moment when i thought: if i fall at this speed, it's gonna HURT.

and i straightened up just a little and caught the wind.

i took a few more runs, but never did get that fast again. it's tricky to do, partly because when you get to the steep pitch there's always the possibility that people will be entering the trail just below you and you have to scrub a little speed until you can see.

of course if people are there, you have to scrub a LOT of speed.

if conditions are good tomorrow, i'll have to see if i can break 50. boy, that'd be something.

i have to go sharpen my edges.

lange bang

lange bange, maybe? lang bang? well, the second is closer to how it's pronounced.

do they still call it that? my ski boots are lange. my favorite pair ever were san marco, but they quit making them which doesn't surprise me since i have a hard-to-fit foot.

...which means any boot that fits me perfectly doesn't sell so well.

anyway, lange bang is what they call those bruises on the front of your shins; lange boots used to come up high and they were torsionally very stiff, hence the bruises. lange makes more comfortable boots these days but if it's early in your season and you're skiing a little aggressively, you still get it.

it's one of my favorite bruises.

we got seventeen inches of snow so they were deliriously happy up on the mountain and opened up all of the lifts even though it was midweek. which meant i got to ski peggy dow's, probably my all-time favorite. the view from the elbow of peggy dow's is a big favortie of mine, too, and now that i have a newer, smaller camera i'm bringing it along, so if i get ambitious i'll post pictures of that view as the season goes on.

i'm also experimenting with taking video while skiing, which makes me a little nervous, but i'd like to get just one video of one good run. i think it'd be cool.

right now i can't get a nice level picture.

it's cold on the number one chair (what the "new" people call the wilderness chair), and it is, i think, the slowest chair on the mountain. it's certainly one of the oldest chairs, and it's stuck waaaay over on the left side, the only chair that serves ricker mountain. when you're out there you're way out there, and they don't blow snow up there so you get what you get.

if you want to see it, here's the trail map, and here's the satellite image:


View Larger Map

it's contemplative on that chair. i get to think of a lot of things: art, music, lyrics. i have this recurring fantasy that comes unbidden right about at lift tower nineteen; never you mind.

today it was just about there a young man came flying off of that rock in the middle of the trail just as outlaw empties out under the lift.

we could hear him hit, and it was a pretty spectacular fall, with lots of post-impact flying but someone on the lift asked him if he was hurt and he said only his pride was injured, but that it was AWESOME.

and it is, too. the lift is also a place of prayer for me.


praise be to God, who watches the sparrow
God, who makes flourish every green leaf
teach me to love and make me to follow
hold me in joy and comfort my grief.