Back Road Peace, Dark Wood and Rebirth

Runners are creatures of habit. For the past 10 years, I have had known running routes mapped out in my head. When I walk out the front door, I know specific routes from two miles to 20 miles and everything in between. I know where to turn around for a 10 mile route. I've tread many of them many times.

Saturday I ran a new route, on a new road. It's a road I've driven and been driven on since before kindergarten, with friends that have lived down it. But I had never run it. Back roads, tree-lined, almost full shade. During a 6-mile run, two cars and a tractor passed. Some deer. The tail end of a fox making scarce. I went without music; the roads are narrow and I didn't want to end up an unwitting hood ornament.

There is a peace on running a back country road that exists nowhere else. Most of my road miles have been run on Oxford Road or St. Michaels Road, with cars and trucks whirring past. Or through Easton with small town hustle all around.

Saturday was a reset button. A new route. Solace. Back road peace.

Dark Wood. Tree-lined roads lead my mind to Dante. After studying the Inferno in college, Dante's dark wood has stuck with me.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
the very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.
How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.

Dante gives us the perfect losing our way metaphor. The opening lines to the most poetic mid-life crisis in history. I have a framed print of Dante and his guide Virgil navigating the dark wood together.

I frequently have those dark wood moments. I wonder if I am on the right path; I wonder if I am lost or have wandered astray; I wonder; I wander. My paths are more meandering than direct. Rather than the one true path, I often feel like mine is a singletrack trail or a country back road. Where do back roads lead?

Rebirth. Spring gets all the credit for new life and rebirth. It's the easy sell. But fall has always been my season for rebirth. Each fall is a new school year. A new grade for the girls, the clock turned back to zero, on top of the foundations they have built in the past years. New teachers. And new students for teachers.

Cooler weather, sloughing off the tired heat of summer. Needing to pull on a sweatshirt or sweater in the evening. Stout beer salivating. My energy usually resets in the fall as well. Fall races for our running peeps. Field hockey for the girls. Football taking over Sunday televisions.

For me, fall is about rebirth. It's about new running routes. It's about reconnecting and navigating the dark wood in the journey of our life. Dante will tell you about it. But nobody named a football team after the Divine Comedy.

Composing a Day

Louis Armstrong is playing walk-up music for a September storm. I don't know what God looks like, but I picture him blowing a horn, conducting a storm, looking a lot like Louis.

I'm sitting on the back deck, drinking a Pabst Blue Ribbon, Louis on the stereo blowing through the window, watching the storm approach. It's a singular moment. The day has been full of them. Watching our girls play field hockey. Making jambalaya for lunch. Getting out Halloween decorations. Buying mums. Sometimes the profound lives in the mundane. But I have to look for it.

Now it's morning coffee. Sunrise after a rain storm. Church. Sunday football. A Nationals double-header. A day with family.

The thing about Louis Armstrong's horn, you only know it by the pauses, the silences that surround the notes. Days are like that: notes and pauses and bridges between the two. Each day is a composition, part structure, part improvisation. The thing a jazz man can teach me about composing a day: always make room for improv--those singular, watching a storm roll in moments that you can't structure.

Confession

Forgive me Father (Creator), it's been 16 weeks since my last confession (run). And with cooler temperatures, it hurts not to be out there.

For the past seven plus years, running 10 miles has felt like running around the block. And that has been a point of pride for me. I've run long trail runs, a handful of marathons, a few ultras, and more half-marathons and 10-milers than I can recall. It's been a kind of confession from my feet, legs, lungs and soul to the earth.

Now tis the season of jeans, sweatshirts, football and the Ravens, bonfires and Octoberfest beer. It's the season where morning coffee warms as well as wakens. It's the season of trips to the pumpkin patch and the girls thinking about Halloween costumes.

It's the return to Tuckahoe State Park trail runs and the cool morning runs that remind me why I run, when I am able. It's the heyday of the Rise Up Runner group runs, where sunrises are met with conversations about kids and the cosmos, elevated heart rates and the sprint at the end of the run.

Forgive me Father, it's been 16 weeks since my last confession. Likely I've taken those confessions for granted. And I miss them.

Not to be confused with Colt Seavers

My mind is stuck on fall and it's only August 1. Maybe it's because I live with a teacher and summer vacation is on its last legs. Maybe it's because football season is upon us with training camps and free agent signings, and if you are a Baltimore fan, fall and football season have been the only sport to look forward to for more than a decade.

Either way, I'm a fall guy. Not THE Fall Guy, aka Colt Seavers, mind you. And hopefully not a fall guy, as in set up to take the blame. I just dig autumn. Jeans and sweatshirt evenings. Cooler running temps. NFL Sundays. Despite the leaves falling, autumn has always felt like a time of rebirth and energy for me. Of beginnings.

We'll have a fourth-grader and a first-grader in the house. Robin will be at a new school, in a new county, teaching a new grade. Field hockey and soccer for the girls. Hopefully a return to running for me, after now nine weeks off due to injury.

As much as I dig fall though, I'm not about to let go of summer. It's still on-the-water season. We've still got Nationals games on the calendar. And our house is still in vacation mode.

So I'll try to dwell, breathing summer deeply in. And at the same time, smile toward fall.

On fall & the space between rungs

There is an energy that comes with fall, a cool that wakes up the brain, the body, the soul more fully than summer. Not unlike existential jumper cables.

For running it's banked that cooler temperatures lead to better runs--lighter legs, a curiosity to push a few more miles. But it's an aesthetic experience as well. On the trails in tidal marsh country, the bugs start to slack, poison ivy and damnable trail overgrowth pull back, leaves let go to open up the trail and give a view of what's around. Mid-Atlantic trail runs in the fall hold their own cool.

Fall means football, which has made me happy from the Bert Jones years of the Baltimore Colts, through the teamless vagabond years, into the purple Poe-inspired madness of the Ravens. Fall football is a shared passion in our house (even if for different teams).

From elementary school days, summer has been a time for letting the mind swing easily in a hammock or skip stones with its feet in the river. Relax and recharge. I think that continues into adultdom, whether or not we are conscious of it.

We're in the land of imperfect metaphors here, but fall is the time when the mind gets pull-started and has the leaves raked off it, in turn.

Ellen McGirt is a writer I dig. She writes about people, companies and ideas that move the word for Fast Company magazine. She was recently covering the Idea Festival through live tweets and was pouring forth listening to Phillipe Petit (high wire artist who walked between Twin Towers in the 70s).

McGirt's direct words summarizing Petit were "a ladder is two posts that has a 'festival of holes'--think space not rungs." This thought latched on to me, thinking not of rungs, but the space between. What is a ladder, after all, with no space between rungs, but a wall? And walls are much tougher to climb than ladders.

As I think about this fall and the busy-ness of it with kids in sports and dance and back to school and my wife back to teaching, I am going to cultivate the space between the rungs--those times like now, on a Saturday afternoon, as I sit barefoot on the back deck, scribbling in a notebook, alongside our dog who breathes heavily of the fall cool, nose in the breeze.

And I send thanks and props to fall, for hooking up the cables and giving my soul a jump.

Fall afternoon

Fall afternoon. Warm breeze rustles across the yard.
I sit reading Seamus Heaney's Field Work,
hoping, like Heaney,
"to get back in my own head."

Ava's legs are crossed on my lap,
she is reclined, writing in my notebook--
her name, over again,
each with a new hand.

And I think, it's not so much my own
head I need to get back in, as it is
to keep my head in the world.