Dolores LaChapelle Quotes

Powder snow skiing is not fun. It's life, fully lived - life lived in a blaze of reality.

Joy is the response of a lover receiving what he loves. This is the joy we feel when skiing powder… This overflowing gratitude is what produces the absolutely stupid, silly grins that we always flash at one another at the bottom of a powder run. We all agree that we never see these grins anywhere else in life.

Powder snow skiing is not fun. It is life, fully lived, life lived in a blaze of reality. What we experience in powder is the original human self, which lies deeply inside each of us, still undamaged in spite of what our present culture tries to do to us. Once experienced, this kind of living is recognized as the only way to live — fully aware of the earth and the sky and the gods and you, the mortal, playing among them.

One can never be bored by powder skiing because it is a special gift of the relationship between earth and sky. It only comes in sufficient amounts in particular places, at certain times on this earth; it lasts only a limited amount of time before sun and wind changes it. People devote their whole lives to it for the pleasure of being so purely played by gravity and snow.

The purpose of seasonal festivals is periodically to revive the topocosm. Gaster coined this word from the Greek - topo for place and cosmos for world order. Topocosm means "the world order of a particular place." The topocosm is the entire complex of any given locality conceived as a living organism, not just the human community but the total community - the plants, animals and soils of the place. The topocosm is not only the actual and present living community but also that continuous entity of which the present community is but the current manifestation.

Some people can never learn to ski powder snow without exerting tremendous effort and strength because they allow their rational, left-brain hemisphere to control the entire situation.

How could I live without powder?