Are you ready for this? Say goodbye to your head, heart and gut then, ‘cause they’ll stay behind for a few seconds if you come with me and we jump our skis off this little precipice. You’ll suck a lungful of air, your pulse will leap, and maybe you’ll see a flash of red. But then silver lights will wink on in your soul and the excitement will mount with the acceleration. You aren’t gonna die. I mean, sure, sure, Sonny Bono and one of the Kennedys bought theirs on a ski slope, but we are laying our skis down solid on the hissing snow – this ain’t the terrible silence of a cliff dive off Acapulco.

Believe me, I freak out on heights. Thing is, though, when something transcendent distracts you, like descending the Grand Canyon or Nordic skiing the hills and arcs of an icy Black Diamond trail, you leave your body and sashay the light fantastic wherever gravity takes you. Ooh – wazzat? Did we just whiz past a lavender unicorn with molten wings and eyes like St. Elmo’s fire?

Grab the brass ring when we circle the bone-white moon and squint through crystal snowflakes into the next blind sweep through a half-pipe snow tunnel. Kick out of the other end as if Virgin Galactic just launched you, and tell me those majestic sentinel pines crowned with snow don’t look like the Pillars of Creation aglow in the Eagle Nebula. Luminous snow borrowed by God from Disney.

We’re standing still now, and though our souls are still floating away with the steam from our bodies, it’s time to chill – meaning let wordless prayers of gratitude burst from our hearts. That exhilaration you feel lingering rock steady in your soul is because parts of you that have lain fallow nearly forever have just kick-started back to life.

The longer I live, the deeper I live. Carving through the accumulating snow of life allows me to set my own track upon the terra firma. Some people do that. Not enough, but some.

The track most people follow is prescribed, laid down and groomed by institutions and instruments of human culture. The agendas hammer like a snowstorm from journalism, media, entertainment, commerce, judicial activism, governance and formal “education.” Collectively they are imposing a new social order and a new morality, while an old one of each is being demonized. You may welcome it or you may try to ignore it, but it is a sea change in your life at every level from speech to personal relationships. Change. Did you think morality is an absolute?

Not according to history. Almost anything considered moral or immoral in one culture has its opposite in another somewhere sometime. Morality is, after all, a bias that serves some greater good – a bias because the question must be asked: whose greater good? If morality can only be defined in terms such as “good and bad” or “right and wrong,” then “good and bad” or “right and wrong” for who? These are value judgment words that depend on someone’s specific interests, specific benefit or specific point of view.

There is no universal good and bad for all competing forms of life and existence. A nation wins a war and proclaims it a moral triumph; the losing nation sees its defeat and occupation as immoral. A meat packer, on moral grounds, may practice humane processing of cattle bred for consumption; but from the cattle’s point of view, what’s moral about being slaughtered? Is it moral to take a drive on a hot muggy night knowing you will wantonly kill scores of insects with your windshield, and perhaps a frog or small mammal crossing the road, each one a miracle of life intended to share the bounty of planet Earth? Do you place your emotional security ahead of the right to survive of a harmless spider, mouse or snake that you murder on your property? And by what authority is it your property? God said so? Might-makes-right says so?

Most human laws, codes, ordinances, mores, values and principles are at root the protection of someone’s property or access or privilege – a greater good for someone’s specific interests. And how would God perceive it? Do divine entities hang around the registrars’ offices of each political constituency to bone up on the latest changes in codes, laws, certifications and socially or religiously sanctioned endorsements? And if they do, is that morality? Shouldn’t we call it regional morality, conditional morality, portable morality, temporary morality, amendable or arbitrary morality?

So, here we are skiing the white carpet, because the excesses of such change can drive you to seek sanctuary in common sense and natural truths. Papa Government vs. Mama Nature. We’ve seen this before and we know where it goes. Authors like Orwell and Huxley have written about it. Resist the groomed track and you are bullied, harassed and shamed toward a socially-engineered destination of politically correct truths. Designer truths.

No matter how keen the followers of pop-culture are, how perceptive, eventually the dominant media captures them in its ruts. Often it starts with the all-knowing young led by their academic pedagogues, cultural icons and gurus. They follow. They believe. Fed historical distortions, the outraged innocence of their souls cries out for justice! The social distortions they demand become a reflex that obliterates natural truths and common sense. Presto!...we declare a new social order and a new morality. Instead of living deeper – instead of carving their way free of the ruts – the submissive masses glide along on a controlled journey to a dictated destination.

So what about you standing out here in the middle of the trail? There are the groomed tracks and here is the blank snow (tabula rasa) inviting you to write upon it with your own skis. Are you chastened into submission with fear, short-term compassion and selective guilt? Or are you suspicious of manipulative morality used to shame people and rewrite social “norms”?

Socrates, so the story goes, drank the poison cup of hemlock not because he was ultimately guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens with his ideas, but because he accepted democracy and in that democracy the will of the majority condemned him. We accept democracy, but in our private lives where the will of the majority has no specific interest, it is ludicrous to drink the poison (or the Kool-Aid, if they aren’t the same thing). Better to live the truths of your heart and your mind in a frequent sanctuary somewhere than to blindly embrace the appearances that society demands or to lose yourself in the façades of someone else’s expectations and interests. Sometimes that simply means keeping your sanctuaries and partitions private.

It is difficult to think clearly without sanctuaries, without silence to quell the cacophony of indoctrination, and without the model of Mom Nature to separate truths from trends – truths for the greater good of who you really are. You don’t need to become an anarchist or a nihilist in order to avail yourself of those messages. You just need to get in touch with them…daily. This is what I mean by living deeply.

The benefits go beyond one’s personal integrity and private existence. Relieving inner hypocrisy empowers you to think for yourself and to interact with others of like mind. I come away from nature each day more able to discern what is in the hearts and minds of people I care about and want to help. Hearing WHAT people say means very little if that’s all you take in. Understanding WHY they say it is everything. What they want you to believe reveals so much more about them. Very often you find that the WHY reveals an unspoken and entirely opposite WHAT.

And the photos below speak for themselves. Magic is easy to find when you have a third place to stand.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan