On Tuesday night I went to see Jared Diamond speak at the historic Wheeler Opera House, a beautiful theater built in 1889, with seats in rich Moroccan leather and an azure ceiling with silver stars that appear as though they are popping out of an early evening sky.

Diamond, a professor of Geography and Physiology at the University of California, was being presented by  the Aspen’s Writers Foundation Winter Word Series as one of America’s most celebrated scholars.

The lights went down and the spotlight landed on Diamond, who would be speaking for the next hour about his latest book titled, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

I was immediately taken in by Diamond, an avuncular man dressed in hiking boots and high wasted brown pants with a tucked in pink Oxford shirt and I sat mesmerized as he spoke about how and why whole societies have lost their way in the past and descended into chaos.

He spoke of the demise of highly advanced civilizations like the Maya who developed astronomy, calendrical systems and hieroglyphic writing as far back as 200-400 AD and who were noted for elaborate and highly decorated ceremonial architecture all built without metal tools. They were also skilled farmers, clearing large sections of tropical rain forest and, where groundwater was scarce, building sizeable underground reservoirs for the storage of rainwater. The Maya were equally skilled as weavers and potters, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster extensive trade networks with distant peoples. Source.

Diamond also referred to the prehistoric Native American Anasazi Indians that lived from 200 to 1300 AD, in the Four Corners of the southwest United States. The Anasazi Indians were adept hunters and food gatherers discovering how to cultivate maize, squash and beans. They were also astute pottery makers.

He continued to talk about the people of Easter Island, “who in just a few centuries, wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?”

“Their vanishing touches us as the disappearance of other animals, even the dinosaurs, never can. No matter how exotic those lost civilizations seem, their framers were humans like us. Who is to say we won’t succumb to the same fate? Perhaps someday New York’s skyscrapers will stand derelict and overgrown with vegetation, like the temples at Angkor Wat and Tikal.”

Diamond was by no means taking an apocalyptic stance about the state of the world, giving us glimpses of hope by speaking of the people in Papua New Guinnea who have been around for 46,000 years because they have learned how to sustain themselves by reserving and transplanting their resources.

On my drive home in a blinding snowstorm with black iced roads, I thought about the message that this extremely fluent and amicable author was giving to us, a message that I have heard repeatedly that has always left me in a stone cold sweat.

If we don’t make the choice now to study the past and fix the problems that exist today, than in a mere fifty years time it is quite possible that we will be following in the footsteps of those intelligent civilizations who either were destroyed by civil wars or who committed “serial ecoside, straightforward abuse of their physical environment that precipitated their demise” and we will not be the ones to suffer but instead it will be our children and grandchildren.

At the end of his lecture Diamond directed his last sentence to the younger people in the audience and said, “It’s your choice on whether you want to make a world that is worth living in,” but it is our responsibility as well and we must take the environmental problems of today seriously and make the right choices together, now.

Oh yeah, the X-Games are here and Aspen is hopping with stretch limos and masses of dudes and dudettes walking around town with to go cups in their hands.

When people ask me if we are going to go to the X-Games I wonder what family with boys doesn’t go to watch these incredible athletes perform death-defying tricks.

We drove to the Snowmass intercept lot and were amazed to see how organized everything was as they herded the 30,000 + people into the lot to take the bus up to the venue.

The boys were dressed as if we were heading to the North Pole. The only thing I forgot were the ear plugs to mute the language of the teens who were never told to curtail their vulgarity when innocent children stood nearby.

We held on for dear life as we propelled forward to Buttermilk, a mountain which under normal circumstances is as gentle as it sounds.

It is true that as we locals raise our children in a place where extreme is the norm, we both revere and loathe hosting the X-games in Aspen as it only helps to fuel the minds of our children with delusional aspirations of achieving the insane.

As we walked through the crowd to watch the big air competition I noticed a young man dressed in a bright green lycra suit who couldn’t process, in his hallucinogenic state of mind, that the steps he had just climbed had ended.  I steered the boys away as he kept climbing to a place that I hope my children never attempt to reach.

The boys had a blast racing around grabbing swag and getting a super cool poster of their names written in graffiti from some of the masters who had become famous from their shaky past lives of obscurity.

The Big Air Competition was too surreal for me as I watched Bobbie Brown fly through the air performing his miraculous  Switch Double Pits To Misty 1260 thinking that these athletes are better to watch than superman as they perform their double corks, whiskey flips and rodeo tricks.

I am certain that every contender flies in their sleep, reaching greater heights as they perfect their tricks while creating names like Big Air Jon Olsson’s Switch Hexelfoot 900 and  I feel reassured that Wade and I made the right decision to stave off one more year of freestyle skiing for our boys.

“I don’t feel well Mommy,” Tucker announced yesterday morning.

“Nice try Tuck Tuck. That one doesn’t work with Mommy. I try it all the time,” Brevitt responded.

And boy was he right. After a week of being home with sick children, if one of my boys was going to complain of a new sickness he was going to have to prove it to me big time. Any sign of effervescence was going to be taken as an, “I’m okay”.

It all began with the day that Tucker and Axel went back for their H1N1 second vaccination and the next day they went down hard. Honestly, I don’t believe that it was related to the shot as they had been exposed to a similar illness a few days prior, but who knows? I do know that it will be difficult for me to convince them to get the vaccination next year.

Thankfully, everybody recovered by the time we went up to Aspen to enjoy ourselves over Winterskol and we had a thoroughly enjoyable time. What I enjoyed the most was listening to the bagpipes that brought memories forth of a trip that I took with Michele to Ireland when we were in our early twenties.  We hitchhiked our way around the country and fell in love with the people. “Are you Irish?” they would ask us and we hesitated to tell them the truth, that we actually had a British mother. When they found out, it was never an issue, “What does it matter anyway?” they would say. “We’ll adopt you as our own, regardless.”

One day we were happily sitting on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere with pristine blue skies above and brilliant green fields surrounding us. We were waiting for any car to come by and take us to our next adventure. Looking down the long stretch of road I saw a vision and had to wipe my eyes to make sure that it wasn’t just an illusion. Clip clopping down the road was an old, white donkey. His hoofs had not been clipped in ages and were curled over giving him the appearance that he was wearing clogs. He came right up to us for some affection and probably for a treat. I thought of the Carlos Castaneda books and I looked over at Michele and laughed. Could it be that this donkey was our spiritual animal?

Eventually, a big white van stopped for us. We most certainly should not have gotten in but when the door slid open there were a dozen musicians playing and singing inside. Who were we to refuse this opportunity and so we got in and ended up at a music festival in Lisdoonvarna.

It was by far one of our most spectacular moments in time as we met the wonderful  musicians who had traveled far and wide to join the others and play the  beautiful  music from their country.

We made many friends that evening and were invited to listen to the music into the wee hours of the morning inside the homes of the locals. To this day, Irish music will bring tears of emotion to my eyes and I will always remember those wonderful days of travel when life was all about the next adventure.

After Lisdoonvarna we visited the breathtaking Cliffs of Moher and Michele and I felt as though we had found heaven.

Anyway, I didn’t expect to take a trip down memory land but since my mind is on travel these days, I couldn’t help myself.

Enjoy my photos of Winterskol: