Power tools

An interesting aside to an interesting discussion on a blog I visit brought up the question of power tools. It occurred to me that I have never explained the photo of me in my profile. Though difficult to detect, slung over my shoulder, is an ice pick and bag of crampons. This is me moments before ascending Fox glacier in the south island of New Zealand last December. Ice is a dazzling medium and it evokes for me a feeling I have trouble expressing in words but will give it a go...the mix of hardness and softness, of permanence and transience - its power to shift mountains, valleys and forests and its ephemerality like so many streams and rivulets after a heavy rain. The silence of ice from afar, surveying its form, hulking as it bears down on the world. The roar from up close, wet and cold against its weeping flesh, voices of its disintegration as it breaks off and runs into cracks, fissures and the black sticky mass of its captured debris. I love its ugly gritty frozen lasting crying fragile hard cold solitary mix of mountain sky earth body water flow wind dark light ness. It reminds me of so many things.