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I can yodel! We all can; it’s a tradition, an important part of our cultural heritage, that we are proud of. Do my friends know that I can jodel? No, they don’t, they wouldn’t understand. For them, and most in the US, jodeling is a part of beautiful Hollywood productions like “The Sound of Music,” and others, but sadly, the history of the jodel is never mentioned.
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When you put a child on two skis for the first time in its life, it will experience a feeling that it has never felt in this form before. It will glide downhill as if guided by magic because gravity has a stronger effect on the body than the frictional resistance of the snow under the skis. And long before the child realizes what is actually happening, it will come to a stop and it will stand at the bottom of the slope with a big grin on its face.
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You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Some things can only be said in pictures and metaphors. They are the language of the unconscious, transmitting preverbal wisdom directly into our hearts and souls.
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Right now in Austria, Switzerland, and in the South of Germany, you will see cows high up in the Alps, hiking on the trails, over bridges and steep hills up to the alpine pastures, where they will be staying all summer long.
At the top George Mallory wanted to leave a photograph of his wife. It hasn’t been found -yet. How far he got is unclear to this day. Clear is Mallory and Irvine had an accident. Unclear is if they were on there way up or down.
Sometimes, very seldom, I feel something like homesickness, even though it’s not for a home or family, but rather for a tradition and or perhaps rituals I remember so vividly. Right about now, at the beginning of summer, I was always called back home to our farm in Austria. I got an extra week of vacation, like so many of us farm-children who had to help.