Ice Skating: A Small Experiment With Movement

 Mattie and I went ice skating yesterday in Dallas.  It was our summer sister date, something we've been planning since I got my car in the spring but not done till now.  All day we talked and laughed.  Shopped for nothing and finally made it to the skating rink.  Both of us have skated there before but I think I was twelve or something.  So for a few seconds, as a watched from dizzying height of the third-floor railing above the rink, I wondered if this idea I had that I could skate was just a fantasy.  Because you know, a surprising lot of people can't get off the rail at all without busting their tailbone.  

But we had to try.  After all, we had been planning this all summer.  Sure enough, after about a minute on the wall I began to glide gingerly across the ice.  Soon it wasn't gingerly any more, it was...fast!  Mattie got her bearings too, and we went round and round the rink for about 45 minutes, growing steadier and happier, wearing blisters into various parts of our feet and roses into our cheeks.  I felt at once five years old and as grown up as I've ever been.  And really, most of the people out there were about five.  All these cute kids with mom or dad or a trainer, some of them really good.  I saw a trainer set a stuffed animal on the ice and get the kid to skate to reach it.  Slippin' and slidin' everywhere.  There was a lot of clinging for dear life.  And that's how learning is.  But there they were, getting to know how their bodies work.  And on some level I was doing that too. 

It was a reconnection with my body that I needed.  Sometimes I realize that I am holding my breath. I realize that I am holding myself so still because I'm afraid that eventually someone will catch me in the act of living. It will be Messy and Awkward and Someone Will Have to Pay.  But now I know that I am free of that, so how should the new person that I am be acting?  Skating was a small experiment with movement.  When you are skating, posture is everything: remembering how your body wants to hold itself and what it can do when it is free, balancing, moving boldly against and into space, uninhibited.  Each movement a small act of faith until they flow together and you forget to think.