Running, Connection, and Timely Silence

Running connects me. It connects me to the earth. It connects me to the sky. It connects me to my breath, my body, my soul.

It makes me stop thinking, and start thinking. It makes me take stock, and let go.

Running lets me see the world and find myself. It is prayer, meditation, and inspiration. By the end of a run, even a not so great one, I am transformed.

Running is a way to be, a way to be outside, and a way to be quiet. It cultivates silence, even if I am listening to music or saying hello to folks I encounter. It is funny how it is easier for me to be silent, to empty my head and listen when I run, than it is sitting still.

Lately I've been hanging in the desert, in the wilderness, with the Desert Fathers. Fascinating folks, Christian hermits that lived in the third century, and decided they needed to get out of Dodge, cultivate their solitude and silence, so that they could shine their light to the world and beyond. They have drawn me for a while and I finally picked up Thomas Merton's "Wisdom of the Desert," and as I am reading Henri Nouwen, his second book in the collected tome is "The Way of the Heart: the Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers." Sneaky hermits are ganging up on me.

Nouwen looks at the desert folk and points out the need for solitude in order for transformation--"solitude is the furnace of transformation"--to take place. He also points out that, "compassion is the fruit of solitude," and I can see that, I tend to be able to be around people, and look forward to it more, when I have had quiet/down time.

We live in a society that doesn't dig silence. It doesn't seem to value it. Nouwen points out how the constant stream of words that comes at us, takes away the value and meaning of any of the words themselves. You need silence to hear anything words might say.

Silence is the home of the word... The word is the instrument of the present and silence is the mystery of the future. In the sayings of the Desert Fathers, we can distinguish three aspects of silence... First, silence makes us pilgrims. Secondly, silence guards the fire within. Thirdly, silence teaches us to speak. - Henri Nouwen

We've talked about pilgrims and pilgrimages here before, and we'll come back to that. Part of what prompted these words this morning is the notion of silence guarding the fire within. That is a fire I have been coming to know and feel more and more of late. Running is part of what stokes mine.

Nouwen quotes Diadochus of Photiki, who says:

When the door of the steambath is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good... Ideas of value always shun verbosity... Timely silence, then, is precious, for it is nothing less than the mother of the wisest thoughts.

Timely silence. That's it. That is something that I find when I run. That is something I find outside, with the sunrise or sunset. And that is my part, make the time, find the time, whether to run, or be silent outside somewhere. To guard the fire within. Because when I do, I find a hand that isn't mine, comes along and stokes the inner fire.

Life is a Song; Turn it up, man!

Life is a song the Universe is constantly playing. The notes, the structure, the chords, can be heard and felt whenever we listen. Our lives, when they are in sync, contribute a part to the larger Song. A part that no one else's life can. The Song was going on before we arrived and will continue after we are gone, but what we contribute is our part.

We didn't write the Song/the Universe. Let's give God/Creator (or you can insert your answer here) credit as the composer. That being the case, if we just bust out a drum solo with our lives, that doesn't contribute to the greater Song, we can feel out of tune. Isolated. But I think most of us have been lucky enough, even if for a little while, to feel what it feels like when we are a part of the larger Song.

I have no idea what the Song is, where it's going, what it sounds like ultimately. I get snippets when I sit still at the sunrise. When I run. When I read or write or pray or meditate. When I love. I get snippets when I stand in the snow and rain on a lacrosse sideline, drenched and cold, and see my daughters make an incredible defensive play and lead a fast break, or score a goal. I hear the Song having coffee rocking in a blue-hued swing, watching blackbirds, grackles, rabbits and squirrels unfold their morning.

Our lives are a continuous song. We don't change what we've played, what is behind us, but we can be conscious of what we are playing now. Jim Harrison has been speaking (singing?) to me of late:

The song stays.
No new one carries us, bears
us so high, more swiftly.
And it has no place,
it changes as we change

Our song, our past, is a part of us, it is what gets the song/our lives to where we are. And there are times when it feels familiar, like it's our jam maybe, we can headbang, waltz, slow dance, kitchen dance, what have you, and we feel comfortable in knowing the tune. And there are times, speaking for myself, where the tune seems new, novel, unknown. I don't know where it's going. And that can be thrilling, exhilarating and downright terrifying at some points.

But maybe it's like Zeppelin always said, "the song remains the same." It keeps playing. And we can hear it and join in. Trust the song, trust the Universe, trust the Composer.

River at spring crest,
sky clear blue,
forest at June greenness,
delight of eye in brain fully flowering,
delight of air and light and breath.

What do you do with all that? When we can feel it; when we can hear it; we know we can be a part of it, with our lives?

"Hey man, is that Freedom Rock?"

"Yeah, man!"

"Well turn it up, man!"

Hosanna

I've been searching for a writer to remind me why I love to read, why I love to write. Sometimes I go through a dry spell; a longing where I pick up 10 different books and put each down. Books and words are right when they are right. Mood, time of year, what my soul is seeking.

Hosanna. Yesterday was Palm Sunday. Hosanna is a word that takes me back to St. James church services, "Hosanna in the highest, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Just before communion.

It's a word I've always dug. Just the sound of it, to say, to hear. Hosanna.

March 18 was Franz Wright's birthday. He died last May of lung cancer at age 62. It's not a name most people will know, despite winning a Pulitzer Prize. Poets don't get to be on Oprah or make the best seller list.

Wright is one of those writers, who lights up my soul, points it in different directions.  Yesterday I picked his "Walking to Martha's Vineyard," up off the bookshelf. He is a writer who has been to, lived in, the depths, the mud, the suck, and found religious transcendence; used his struggles to fuel him:

This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught
    glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have
    I described it, I can't, somehow I never will.

Hosanna. Palm Sunday. The crowd is going crazy. Rock star Jesus is coming in to town and Hosanna is the word they are using to sing his praises, thinking he is going to overthrow Rome. But they got it wrong. That's not what He was up to. Yesterday's sermon in church touched on the crowd, waving their palms, waiting and pleading for the wrong thing.

Back to Wright, last night, on the couch:

Rilke in one of his letters said that Christ
is a pointing,
a finger pointing
at something and we are like dogs
who keep barking and lunging
at the hand

Spring is rebirth. Renewal. It's a return. Saturday was a return, on a cold, rainy afternoon, to Tuckahoe State Park, and a 10-mile trail run loop that we've done countless times over the years, but I'm not sure when I'd run the full loop last.

I went out there to put a hurting on myself, to make good on a promise to log some trail miles and find something in me that I haven't found another way to access. And there were times on the trail, particularly the parts I hadn't seen in some time, that I found myself smiling, laughing, for having returned. I found some part of myself that maybe I keep out there as a reminder.

Hosanna. I was playing with the word like a puzzle, like a challenge. I was repeating it in my head, the sounds, the word, the language. But mulling the meaning. A friend pointed out that "Hosanna" is frequently translated as, "Lord, help us."

And then I saw someone talk about how the word has changed over time: "It used to be what you would say when you fell off the diving board. But it came to be what you would say when you see the lifeguard coming to save you... the word moved from plea to praise; from cry to confidence."

During the course of a run, during the course of years, during the course of a day, perspectives, words, meanings can change. When I am active, exploring, paying attention, I can have something to do with that. The weekend was/is a journey of meals, runs, worship, dog walking, reading, reflecting. It takes getting my feet wet, metaphorically and literally, to get on that path.

As I came down to the creek in the middle of Saturday's run, a Great Blue Heron flew horizontal to and parallel with the creek. One of my favorite things to experience while running.

Wright, in his searching, in his writing, in my reading...

Still sleeping bees in the grove's heart
(my heart's) till the sun
its "wake now"
kiss, the million
friendly gold huddlings
and burrowings of them hearing the shining
wind
I hear, my only
cure for the loneliness I go through:

more.

I believe one day the distance between myself and God will
              disappear.

Hosanna.

Finding Purple

Colors change me. Mentally, emotionally, maybe spiritually. Especially blues, purples, greens, but really any color found and experienced fully. It's hard to explain, but it's unmistakable when felt.

After running the Seaside 10-Miler in Ocean City, Halloween Saturday morning turned into walking trails, dunes, and beach on Assateague. I had Alice Walker's words in my head seeing flashes of purple like soul breadcrumbs:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

It was everywhere, scattered like puzzle pieces, wanting to form one larger purple spectrum, like there was some larger purple shell that had been shattered and wanted to be put back together again.

So I gathered a few, to have some puzzle pieces to remember, study, ponder. And I left some for the next folks who come along to find.

What I kept (and keep) thinking about is the purple that connects them all, not the separate shells. And that got me mulling Oscar Wilde:

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

When I first read that thought from Wilde, my mind went to the sky or the sea, where there are expanses and variations of unspoiled color, without form. All-encompassing. But the shells were carrying it also--through broken, partial forms, it was something about the color itself, what connected them.

I'm going to make a little leap here, if you'll permit me. Let's secretly replace color with Love (capital L Love), and swap out the shells for people. There are times when maybe we all feel like we have some part of that purple within us. Whether for kids, parents, partners, pets, I hope there are moments when everyone has felt something like that. Our own part of the purple.

But what about the larger purple that runs through everyone. If we all have that purple within us, and from time to time, we recognize that purple, that love, the commonality, in someone else. Or in everyone else.

There are times when I have felt that purple in a gathered group, that I can't explain any other way. When Bobby Banks sang a hymn at my great uncle's funeral, I swear I felt connected to everyone else there around me. It was a profound, sublime, visceral experience. When I crossed the finish line of the JFK 50-Miler after 11-plus hours of forward motion, I was so overwhelmed and felt so humbly and greatly connected to everyone around me. And it can come in silly, unexpected ways, seeing a video of people doing something for others, an unexpected act of kindness; a glimmer in someone's eyes; a smile about to become a laugh.

I can't explain it, but it was there. I think in the best and deepest moments I've contemplated life, religion, the Universe, sometimes, when I'm lucky, a feeling that goes further than where my thoughts can reach is there. Transcendent and underlying.

I won't swear to it, but that connecting thread, that piece that ties us altogether, it's not impossible that it's Love. Or purple :)

Cruising Town and the Cosmos

Since moving to Oxford in July, the girls have newly found the bed of the pick-up truck I have had for 12 years. When the speed limit is 25 (and you have checked with local law enforcement to make sure they are permitted to travel in the back of the truck) and the sun is shining, the bed of a pick up can feel a lot like a horse-drawn carriage. Cruising to the beach at the Strand, or to the park, or for ice cream at the Scottish Highland Creamery warrants Will Smith's "Summertime" for a soundtrack.

We've taken to different means and times for cruising the town. Longboarding to and from work has put a perma-grin on my face. Thirty years ago I rode my first skateboard down these same streets as a vagrant youth, now I wave and talk to folks skating to work. The symmetry is not lost on me.

Another new habit, rekindling an old wonder, is night walks, fully staring at the star-filled sky.

Life over the past year-plus has taken some unexpected turns. New houses, new jobs, new life in so many ways, but still connected to all that has come before and all that is still to come. Ava's return home from a month in the hospital; her return to school and seeing friends and family; life getting into a familiar, but new fall rhythm. When I walk under the sky, pondering constellations and the cosmos, the vast scale of it all and wondering how all the dots connect--what, if anything, my walk to the market for lunch has to do with the broader order of the Universe--it makes my mind both spin and sit still. So I've called in the experts, picking up Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," of which Neil deGrasse Tyson has done a documentary reboot; cultivating gratitude while walking, running, skateboarding, sitting, or going to church.

It's all a cosmic puzzle I doubt I will ever be able to put together. And I'm okay with that. Here's why...

I got off work on Wednesday and went for a run. At different points along the way, I stopped and took in the sunset, both visually and breathing it in. Taking pictures to remember it. Each scene was stretches of river and horizon I have seen countless thousands of times. But not once did any of those previous times look exactly like it did that evening, on that run. Maybe that is because those exact colors, and those exact scenes had never been assembled quite like they were just then. I think that is true. But equally true is that my eyes see differently now than they ever have before.

Observations After Storms and Fire

After the storm, a watercolor washed sky. The colors were created by the storm, they didn't exist beforehand. Back out on the deck, listening to Big Bill Broonzy, a Great Blue Heron flies overhead. Clouds have stretched out lazy. Three deer are fanned across the yard.

Broonzy is singing stories. The sun stalls from dropping with the moon overhead, both wanting to hear about Joe Turner. The setting sun, the overhead moon, Broonzy, and me; we each have a part in this jam session, even if mine is just to be here to document it in some way.

I don't think anyone misses being 13. I watch a daughter trying to figure out whether to stand out or blend in. At that age, no one wants to call attention to themselves. You work hard to have friends while earning widespread anonymity.

That's the age I found skateboarding and punk music. The individualism each espoused hammered a hardcore riff in my soul. Listening to lyrics, imbibing street art, and learning to navigate a streetscape and teach a growing body and 10x30 board on wheels to ollie, railslide, powerslide, gave me something else to focus on.

For all the attitude problems that came during that period, skateboarding and what it meant helped steer me to the person I am still becoming. I have found that anytime I let myself blend in, fall in step, life intervenes, kicks my a** a bit, knocks me down, and says, "nope, that's not you." This past year has proven that all the more.

Gary Snyder is a writer I would dig meeting. He is a poet of rocks, of birds, of myths, of people, of the Earth. He includes and integrates everything into his writing. He also gets the real and symbolic cycle of death and rebirth:

"Lodgepole Pine: the wonderful reproductive power of this species on areas over which its stand has been killed by fire is dependent upon the ability of the closed cones to endure a fire which kills the tree without injuring its seed. After fire, the cones open and shed their seeds on the bared ground and a new growth springs up."

Fire. And after fire, growth. I can find that cycle over and over again looking back at my life. For me, rebirth and growth has often come through running. I find something of myself and the world on the road and trails and I'll have opportunity on both training for the Patapsco Valley 50K in October.

Storms, standing out, individualism, fire, growth, growing up. I'm not sure I ever come up with answers so much as observations. Being a father brings all kinds of stop-me-in-my-tracks observations. Especially cool are the times when I look around and notice a daughter in her element, taking everything in, completely comfortable in her own skin. And I realize that's how they all add up, the storms, the fire cycles, rebirth, trying to figure it all out, being a father--it's those moments when we're learning who we are, and we have those moments of "yep, something like this."

Blue Shoes, Blue Scholars

Running shoe companies don't make much money on me these days. My road running shoes are Saucony Kinvaras that I bought as a birthday present for myself at the end of March 2014. They have not been lost in a closet; they have run.

They have run me back in to shape and out of 30 pounds. They have run me through a troubled soul and a restless body. They have run me through town and onto the back roads. They have run me back into a few races, from a November half-marathon, to my daughters' first 5K.

My running shoes have introduced me to Eastern Bluebirds; to roads I'd not traveled in decades; to a self I'd not known until I met myself on the road alone. I keep thinking it is time to upgrade, to replace them, but they still feel good. Plus I'm cheap :)

My Sauconys (granted that doesn't sound as cool as "My Adidas") also re-introduced me to the Blue Scholars, a Seattle-based hip hop duo that a west coast boat builder got me hip to. The Scholars are smooth, intellectual and deeply spiritual. This past Sunday, their song "Burnt Offering" came up on the shuffled playlist. The whole song listens like a sermon, an offering of hard-won wisdom. The hook goes like this:

So I give thanks to the most, the least that I can do
I wear this skin to find the me inside of you
When I dream that I'm dreaming I feel most alive
Sacrifice nights, write to survive,
Proper hand gestures, conjure ancestors,
Drinking from the bottle that was meant
For the message that was sent from the tired and the true,
I give thanks to the most, the least that I can do.

Tapping into something larger than yourself; giving thanks to the most; getting in touch with dreams; connecting to the past.

Blue has long been my color. This past year plus it has come to the forefront of my soul and my world. Blue shoes and Blue Scholars. "I give thanks to the most, the least that I can do."

In the Field

My mind works better when my legs are moving. Thoughts are terrain, felt and experienced. There are things to be learned in the field that can't be learned seated in the classroom, or behind a desk.

My reading of late has been sucked up by Kenn Kaufman's "Kingbird Highway." It's a bit like "On the Road," if Kerouac was a birder. Kaufman dropped out of high school at age 16 and spent a year hitchhiking and getting himself around the country to see as many birds as he could. It's a look into the obsessed birding culture, as it was taking shape in the 1970s. He is now known as one of North America's top birders. I'm not a birder, but I've been a bit taken by certain members of the feathered fliers in recent months. Kaufman's book chronicles his search for himself and how he found his place on the road; in the field.

I dig the notion of field guides. Where those who have taken their search out into the world, share what they have found. Some field books describe geography, or species, some describe the writer's inner landscape as influenced by its surroundings. For some reason in the spring, I seem to reach for Seamus Heaney's "Field Work" and Robert Hass's "Field Guide." Their words, their experiences don't give answers, they make me want to get off the couch and go find things out for myself.

Words come up necessarily short. Hass gets it. Sitting in the woods, checking out birds and flowers, he wants to get them down, capture them:

                                    But I had the odd
feeling, walking to the house
to write this down, that I had left
the birds and the flowers in the field,
rooted or feeding. They are not in my
head, are not now on this page.

Warm sun on still snow-filled, frozen yard, we were building snowmen, throwing snowballs, exploring, laughing. In the trees all around us, in a moment of recognition were Eastern Bluebirds. They were close, they were playing, they were darting between pine trees. In my life, I have never seen anything like it; it was a totally new and novel experience. But I can't recreate it here. I can't conjure it or make it real for anyone who hasn't experienced the same thing, in the field. And I couldn't have known it from a book, no matter how well written. Though I guess I can recall it, if prompted by someone else's experience.

Science and spirituality have the same shortcomings, when left to be found and learned in books. I can know that the Earth goes around the sun and the sun rises in the east, but that takes on a much more profound reality when running my first ultramarathon on a 15 degree February morning, when the warmth of the sun hits a group of us runners, headlamps are switched off, and the heart and body are warmed and lighter. And whether sitting in a church or walking through the woods, faith or a glimpse or intuition of something bigger than yourself, something not quite explainable enters the soul of its own accord, not through words alone.

Clearly I have some spring restlessness going on. The need to get out and explore. But one of the things I am digging the most these days, are how many new experiences, in the field, are right under my nose; in my yard; nearby. Birds I've never paid attention to. Remembering the shakiness of being on ice skates. Running with good friends. Neither Thoreau nor Annie Dillard had to go far afield to find themselves, nature, the Universe. They just had to look for themselves.

Woods, Visions, Sons, Kings, Runs

There were sheep in the woods. Right next to the road on Baileys Neck on Christmas Eve. Big Foot might have been there as well, but daughter Anna couldn't catch him in the photo. We stopped along the road and did a double-take. This particular stretch of woods, I run by on three sides on one of my running routes and drive by everyday. I haven't seen them there before or since. Maybe it was a Christmas miracle.

The first weekend of the New Year has been a reclusive one for me. I got out of my truck with groceries on Thursday and won't get back in a vehicle until Monday morning, to take the girls to school. It has been me, running, lifting, yoga, reading, coffee, a couple meals, reading, writing, cooking out with my dad for the Ravens game, and binge-watching Sons of Anarchy.

Sunday (this) afternoon, I wanted to stretch the legs and the soul, so through on running shoes and went for a back road 6-mile run, running by the sheep hallucination woods along the way.

Running clears my mind as much as it does anything for my body. There is a stillwater pond at the corner of the sheep woods, more tranquil and likely more stagnant than my mind on a run. I was feeling good, but still slowed to take it in. Up the road 50 yards or so was a hawk feeding on a deer carcass in a ditch. I know hawks and buzzards--the buzzard came in after I startled the hawk. I stopped again, this time playing chess with the hawk in the trees--he made one hop as I moved closer, I tried to keep from spooking him, just to watch him.

I got back to normal running pace, focused back in on my music, zoned out scanning the woods for sheep or hawks, when I scared a heron out of the ditch just ahead. If you've read along just a little here, you know I have a thing for herons. Spirit animal typed thing. Nothing major. But I took my cue from the Universe here to slow down and walk a stretch, not be in so much of a hurry, even though everything felt good. Heart rate was up, back covered in sweat, slowed down to walk the road along open fields and listen.

I got thinking about Sons of Anarchy, storytelling and Jungian archetypes, and life.

I've written about SOA here before. Among other things, Sons is the story of Jax Teller, the son of one of the founders and former Presidents of the Samcro Motorcycle Club. It's the story of him as Vice President, struggling with his father's legacy and the man who has helped raise him since Jax's father's death. This stepfather figure is the President of the club, who took over after Jack's father died. I give you all this to say that part of the storyline is the story of the prince becoming the king. I dig Carl Jung. Archetypes and myths factor into my thinking and the way I view storytelling.

To some degree, I think the story of every man's coming of age is dealing with, the struggle with that transformation of going from prince to king. Jungian psychologist Robert Moore and mythologist Douglas Gillette say that there are four archetypal male energies that are in all of us XY folk: king, warrior, lover, magician. They wrote a book about it that a lot of people seem to dig. The king archetype is the most important and generally the last to develop in the personality.

When you hit 42 years old, lose a job that was the result of 15 years of moving in a solid career direction, and wonder about work, vocation, passion, what direction you want your life to go, there is no shortage of shit that can occupy space in your head. I don't have ready answers, but occasional vacancy in my head, you bet.

It seems to me the struggle, to become and embody the king, that isn't something that happens like childbirth and there you are. Perhaps more often than each day, the boulder rolls back down the hill and you have to go get that fu**er and roll it back up again. It's not just given to you, you have to manifest it. You've got to own that shit.

Father and son relationships are some of the coolest, strangest things on the planet. I've been asked more than once why I am not an accountant like my father. In my mind it's a bit like asking why I am not an NFL offensive lineman: because I am not, it's not how I am wired or built. But the two of us can sit around a family dinner table and spin stories with the same humor and the same outlook on life, and we can watch the Ravens play and scream the same profanities at the television.

Life, visions, the Universe, archetypes, they are spinning through my head like a slot machine. I speed up, get back to running. I come back by the deer carcass and the stagnant pond. Jane's Addiction's "Mountain Song" comes on. I drop the hammer coming up Locust Grove, decide to run hard through the end of the song. I pass a blue Volvo, the drive waves, I wave back, but I have to think he is wondering what the vagabond in the red ski hat and green shorts is running so fast for--likely running from the cops.

I hang on redlining as the song comes to an end, looking forward to a slower interval. But it's Damian Marley's "Move" that cues up next. Another song I can't run slowly to. I shake my head, laugh out loud, mumble, "Motherfu**er!" and try to hold the pace. "Exodus" was the first Bob Marley song I ever heard. Still one of my favorites. "Move" is Damian reworking the chorus of his father's song, but making it his own. I get thinking about that as way of building on a father's legacy. As much as I dig the song for running, it also can't touch "Exodus" as a song, so what does that mean for a legacy? All Bob's musician sons will be forever in his shadow.



I don't give it much thought because I am trying to follow Damian's advice and move. I wind around a couple of bends. Maybe Junior Gong has a set of stones to dare to try to follow in his father's musical footsteps. He is wired for it. He is not a pioneer, but I listen to him all the time.

Generally, the home stretch of the run is where I run hardest. I like to finish spent. Today's run has been different--there were stops, walking stretches, intervals. As I get to where I can see the driveway, Katastro's "That Place You Know" comes on. I have no idea why, but this song makes me unreasonably happy and at peace. It makes me smile. Today it puts my mind to park benches, Newman and Redford in "The Sting," mix tapes and kindness. I ease the throttle, to run in light. Katastro aren't the deepest dudes, and the song isn't memorable so much for its lyrics, but its vibe. But still I hear this:

Back to the place you know
where all you have to do is come this way
Back to the way you run,
And I'm just gonna let you know
that I'ma be here and do my thing
that's just the way I know.

That's just the way I know.

Things that make you go hhmmm...

Monk: What happens when the leaves are falling, and the trees bare?

Ummon: The golden wind, revealed!

- Hegikan Roku (The Blue Cliff Records, via Peter Matthiessen, "The Snow Leopard")

Life has a funny way of showing you things. Things that maybe at first you'd rather not see, hear, think about or experience. But that end up with you being exactly where you need to be, when you need to be there.

As Peter Matthiessen and his crew turn their trek through the Himalayas from westward to northward, he cites the quote above. It's kind of a sky is falling moment. Shit, what do we do? What happens when the last of the leaves have fallen? Chill. That's when we find out what's really there, underneath.

Oh. Okay. Cool.

If I ever write a proper book, it will be non-fiction, extended memoir, something, not a novel. And I hope I can bring even a fraction of what Matthiessen does to the table, in his ability to tell a razor wire tight/taut story, and then go for pages talking about cosmology, and how modern science and ancient Eastern philosophy are saying the same things about the nature of the Universe, and keep your attention rapt in doing so, not make you mad that the travel narrative has taken a tangent:

Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron.

When I was at N.C. State, a friend of ours married a girl who went to a nearby all girls college in Raleigh. She was Samoan; her cousin played nose tackle for State and went on to play for a time for the Detroit Lions. He was a beast. She was a self-proclaimed witch (let's call her a good witch). A number of us went to their engagement party and I don't know that I have ever unexpectedly laughed so hard, at these giant Samoan dudes, who could rip your limbs off, engaged in side-splittingly hilarious "your mama" joke one-ups-manship. Random and fantastic. My roommate and I quoted them for weeks.

We hung with our friend and the Samoan witch for a while, until they dropped out of school and seemed to drop off the face of the earth. One night on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, she was reading palms. Why not?

She told me some of the basic stuff you'd hope to hear: long life; two and a half children (have two girls and a miscarriage, so maybe that's what that was?); and an active love line. She said that the love of my life would be someone who I knew first as a friend, then wouldn't talk to for some time, fall out of touch, and then would reconnect with later.

I can't say I have given that a lot of thought, other than to play it back in my head a few times here and there any wonder about it and file it back under the C & C Music Factory mental category of "Things that make you go hhmmmm..." At the least, great cocktail party fodder to be able to say that you've had your palm read by a Samoan witch (self-proclaimed).

This fall hasn't been my most active time for running. But it's been better than it has been in a few years. I guess 2008 to 2010-ish were the heyday for the Rise Up Runners in terms of how often we ran and raced and got together. But as I've said on here before, so much of that group is about the camaraderie, the goofy challenges, the eccentric friendships and connections.

 In September, a friend turned 40. It happens to the best of us. Instead of a party, he challenged us: swim 0.4 miles, bike 40 km, run 4 miles, and to officially finish, you must have finished a 40oz of beer or malt liquor. The 40Tri (copyrighted ;). That event was a blast.

We then threw out a schedule that asked those who were game to complete a race on the Eastern Shore, each month, from Sept. to Dec.: 4 MONTHS, 4 RACES, 4 SHORE. The 40TRI. The Horn Point Spat Dash in Cambridge. The Chester River Challenge Half-Marathon and 5K in Chestertown or the Across the Bay 10K, and this month, the Pain in the Neck 50K in Cambridge.

The goal was not to finish the races per se, but to get the band back together. To run, to hang, to train, to push each other with ridiculous challenges.

Today is the Pain in the Neck, the last leg. A friend from N.C. State who lives in Delaware is coming over for it. It's a 5K loop, that runners can run up to 10 times. It is going to be in the 40s to 50 degrees and rainy. A bunch of fools running circles in the woods in December.

Yep, file that under the same C&C Music Factory mental category: Things that make you go hhmmm...

(Not) Only the Lonely

I ran probably 10 of the 13.1 miles of the Chester River Challenge with a girl I'd never met and will likely never see again. About three miles into the race, a group of us settled into a comfortable pace and pushed along as a pack. Running face first into a 30-40 mph headwind on the second half of the course, this girl in blue and I pushed ahead of the pack.

I've run with a number of folks, but I don't think any of them have had the same foot strike pace that I do. Blue girl did. You only heard one set of feet pounding pavement. We didn't talk much. But at one point, we turned out of the wind down a stretch of hilly, country road, were off mostly on our own, and the thought of running that road, in that weather, as a training run was in my mind, since the rest of my body hurt.

"Sometimes this whole running thing is a bleak, solitary pursuit," I said.

"Yeah, it is," she laughed.

But for those miles, for the couple shared comments, for those common footfalls it wasn't.

Human loneliness seem to be the basic condition for two of my life loves: running and writing. Both have solitude as a building block. Both require you to turn inside, to see what is there and to do something with it. And maybe in the end, both are an answer to this condition of loneliness.

The medium of poetry isn't language, really: it's human loneliness, a loneliness that poets, having received it themselves from earlier poets, transfer to their readers. Like bees in a honeycomb, writers and readers experience isolation and solitude communally and collaboratively. - Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, reviewing Olena Kalytiak Davis's new book.

Maybe writing, especially writing as personal as poetry, is the writer saying, "Hey, this fu**ing sucks. Anyone else?" And the act of writing, the reaching out, if we stumble across some universal feeling or nerve, or at least one other nerve in one other person, the loneliness might abate.

Music can probably be included as a means of combating the lonely. I am not a musician, but I hear it in Delta blues. And I hear it in Sturgill Simpson. Simpson seems to be connecting with a number of folks, Rolling Stone Magazine called his "Metamodern Sounds in Country Music" one of the 50 best albums in 2014.

I dig the way Rolling Stone blurbs it along with some Simpson lyrics:

"Marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, DMT, they all changed the way I see / But love's the only thing that ever saved my life," sings Simpson. The Kentucky-born singer-songwriter's breakthrough album features plenty more folk wisdom, delivered in a singular barrel-aged baritone.

Since a friend shoved me in Simpson's direction, I have been listening a lot, and he seems to fit any mood, from cleaning the house, to happy hour, to morning coffee, or sipping whiskey under the stars.

Running, writing, and music all seem to be born out of an elemental loneliness. They all feel like ways for the runner, writer, musician to bridge a perceived gap, to connect with something, or someone else. And, lucky us, the act of doing, or reading, or listening, can sometimes let us know that someone else out there gets it. Gets us.

Wanderlust or kick it root down?

I've never had a passport. I've driven to Colorado; driven to New Orleans for Mardi Gras; driven to Chicago; driven to Key West and to Maine. Put my feet in the Pacific Ocean at Santa Cruz. I've hiked in the White Mountains of New Hampshire; I've finished a 50-mile foot race. I say all that as background so that it may make some sense when I say that if I die without having left the country, my life won't be less for it.

The Universe itself is the scripture of Zen, for which religion is no more and no less than the apprehension of the infinite in every moment. - Peter Matthiessen, "The Snow Leopard."

A zen guru, I am not. But Matthiessen is on to something, that I try to bring to my life. I've spent a lot of time running, trails, roads, mountains, around lakes. I've spent a fair amount of time on a skateboard, looking at my surroundings differently than someone who hasn't marveled at a painted parking curb, a loading dock, or an embankment. I try to experience places deeply. I can go running at Tuckahoe State Park, where I can't begin to count how many miles I have logged there, and still see things I've never seen before. There is always something new. Part of that comes with the idea of beginner's mind; of not assuming I've seen all their is to see.

All that said, I don't sit still well. I have always been one ready to throw a backpack, running shoes or hiking boots, a book or two and a notebook in a car and hit the road. I have convinced others and been convinced for road trips with zero planning or budget and poor designs. Sleeping in cars has never been a deterrent. Wanderlust and I have always been good friends. Wandering and roving about. The thing about roving is that it doesn't need a clear direction.

The fact that I can't stand flying could sway my form of pilgrimage. But I will fly when it's warranted. If I do pop my passport cherry, it could well be to go check out Finca Bellavista, a treehouse community a friend and former classmate founded in Costa Rica. Or maybe to hike England's Lake District, a la Wordsworth, and hang in taverns or catch a Liverpool match at Anfield.

There is a difference between me and a nomad: my restless soul has deep roots. My family has been connected to Maryland's Eastern Shore since the 1600s. I can feel a source of strength in being on the Tred Avon or Choptank Rivers. I feel most at home here. I've described it before, but coming across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, eastbound, is a daily euphoria, of feeling like I am coming home to a magical place, all over again; its newness doesn't disappear because of my familiarity. There are parts of the Shore that I will likely never tire of experiencing.

Running and skateboarding have both allowed me the opportunity to keep my body, mind and soul in motion. So has being on the water in whatever form. Oddly, they've also helped me explore my roots. Roots are an interesting phenomenon. When we look at a tree, we look up. Maybe we climb it. But there is a huge part of the tree not visible to us. Not without some digging.

If we always explore, looking up, looking ahead, moving to the next thing, we are missing a shitload of what is in front of us and underneath us. Sometimes maybe exploring the wilderness means delving into the things around you that you have left unexplored.

"Know thyself." For some people to know themselves, to understand themselves, they have to cover new ground, explore new terrain. And that is awesome. But it's also possible that the push to move on to explore new things, abandons life around you with only a skimming of the surface.

Trees and people, we all have roots. Occasionally we can learn a thing or two from trees. Just ask Herman Hesse:

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk; in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured...

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward...

Hesse's wandering isn't an escape. It's a longing for home. And that's not the kind of longing that gets answered without going deep. You can't understand the tree, without knowing the roots. This kind of understanding came to folks like Aldo Leopold. Gary Snyder. Thoreau. It comes from depth and familiarity. And yet, it's hard to argue with Tom Robbins, when he reminds us:

People aren't trees, so it's false when they speak of roots.

Robbins of all people should understand metaphors. I dig being able to show Anna and Ava something of roots. Something of being connected to a place. Something of what home means. Sometimes it is a place. Sometimes it is a feeling, a state of mind. But it has to come from somewhere.

I will always have a backpack ready to go. My soul will always have restless legs and I've not traveled or explored my last mountains, trails, cities, towns. But if someone asks me how we're gonna kick it, I'll direct them to Mike D. (who just turned 49): we're gonna kick it root down.

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.

I Run to Meet Myself

In times of crisis, I run. Not away, but through. About a mile into a run, my soul, body and mind get in step, superfluous thoughts, those beyond breathing, those beyond don't trip, those beyond watch where you're going and take everything in, superfluous thoughts bead and roll away with my sweat.

It's not a surprise or a coincidence that during some of the biggest transitional times in my life, that running has been a means of knowing myself, of knowing my heart, and of being right in my body. It takes me to places that planes, trains, automobiles or bikes can't reach. In some ways, each run can be a pilgrimage.

Since ancient times pilgrimages have been conducted from place to place, in belief that a question can travel into an answer as water into thirst... the only rule of travel is, Don't come back the way you went. Come a new way. - Anne Carson, "The Anthropology of Water."

Pilgrimage is a word used to describe a journey, both physical and spiritual, to a sacred place. Maybe a temple, shrine, church, speakeasy, tavern (hey, don't question what sacred means to different folks ;), a journey that changes the pilgrim, transforms them in a meaningful way. I remember the first time I ran the 10-ish miles from Oxford to Easton, a trip made daily in a car, and that I had made a number of times by bike, but doing it on foot, never stopping to walk, felt like as significant a 10-miles as I could have run. My first trail race, my first marathon, the significance was finishing the distance, the course, not where I ended up. But the pilgrimage-typed runs for me are often not to anywhere in particular.

Pilgrims were people who figured things out as they walked. - Anne Carson, same as above.

Thank you, Anne. That's it exactly. Figuring things out as I run. Sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Sometimes it's the sweat that cleanses. Sometimes I've exhaled something I couldn't abide. Sometimes I've breathed in something I desperately needed, though I couldn't tell you at which point or mile I found it, just that I did. Maybe.

Where do I "go" on these personal pilgrimages? Maybe I go "away."

Being "away" is the true freedom. I escape to where I want to be, thinking what I want to think, creating what I want to create. - George Sheehan, "Running and Being"

Sheehan has as much to teach as maybe any other runner/writer has said about running, thinking and the soul. But I am not sure he has just what I mean here. There are times I run to escape, escape the day, escape bills, escape a mood, escape life, but there are just as many times that I run to live. To think. To solve.

I suck at sitting meditation. If my body is still, my mind wants to move faster. Yoga, Tai Chi, better. Running seems to put everything in place.

Motion and meditation are apparently a unity. "Sit as little as possible," wrote Nietzsche. "Give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors, while one moved about freely--in which the muscles are not celebrating a feast, too." - George Sheehan (and Nietzsche), "Running and Being"

Thank you, George. That's more to it. Motion and meditation are a unity. That's how it feels. Thoughts born or grown on a run seem to have more substance, because they have come after, or because of, other thoughts falling away.

So what is it I am trying to learn when I run? I wonder...

Pilgrims were people wondering, wondering. Whom shall I meet now? - Anne Carson, take a guess ;)

I've met some awesome people through running. A fair amount of my close friends now I have spent some time on the roads or trails with. I spend a lot more time wondering than knowing. Safe to say I don't know much. But where running becomes a pilgrimage, where it becomes a journey on foot to the soul, I know who I run to meet.

I run to meet myself.

Running alone through the dark and back yard happy hours

A packed house is when I feel the most alone. Bar scene, packed house, music blaring, I am pretty well alone. Background noise to the forefront, sound becomes gray, I float on the outside of conversations. I've always felt the outsider.

But that goes back further than bars and crowds. Never fully identifying. Never knowing exactly where I fit in. I remember, high school era, four of us cruising in a car one night and our friend sitting in the back seat next to me looked around the car and said, "Check it out man, we've got a rasta, a skinhead, a longhair, and a... a... a Mike!" And at the time feeling like, well, shit, how come I'm not anything? And then realizing that that may have been the greatest compliment I have ever received. At a time when we were labeling, no label fit.

Among soccer players, I became a skateboarder; among skateboarders, I became a writer; among writers, I became a runner; but was all those things. The thing about it, is all those things, shifts, evolution, I don't know what to call it, happened without thought. It felt more like peeling off some other superfluous part of me to get to what was inside. And when I didn't think about it, it felt good.

But thinking. And man, I am guilty of chronic over-thinking. When I would sit and think about it, the end result was... alone. And Camus is right, if you make too much of defining happiness, you likely won't be happy; if you make the search for the meaning of life everything, chances are you aren't living.

So what does that mean for the outsider, the over-thinker, the stuck in my head? It means happy hour. It means go for a run. It means paddleboarding, skateboarding. It means find your niche, maybe.

Funny things can happen with time. And this came up in conversation recently, where at one point, feeling always a little outside, a bit different, standing within but not a part of the group, sucked, at some point it became the only perspective I wanted. It became what I dug most, that it wasn't any one group. It was maybe a group of one.

And even more odd, when that made sense, comfort in difference, you start to know yourself, and show yourself a bit more, you start running into other folks more and more like you. I think about our group of running friends. On a morning when we would run, I would start out from my house, running through the still dark. Over the next few miles, other folks are doing the same, running alone through the dark. And then we would each come into a familiar glow, the streetlight of the corner where we always met. And there would be four or five of us, together, running through the dark, smiles, conversations, questions, stories, sweat, soles hitting pavement.

And I got thinking about that more clearly the other night, at a back yard happy hour, celebrating/seeing off friends who are moving out of town. And I talked to the elementary art teacher about skateboarding, about Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," and talking to the brewmaster about Liverpool, and talking to the physician's assistant about malt liquor and Camelbacks, and watching the photographer shotgun a craft beer, and watching all of our kids attempting to pole vault across the yard with bamboo poles, or playing soccer, or climbing on the swingset.

And I looked at the assembled group, the folks and families around me, and thought/felt, yep. That's it. I am not a crowded bar, I am a back yard happy hour.

And this may have nothing or everything to do with all this, but I read it this morning and it is stuck in my head. So now you can have it...

We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. - Anne Carson, "Plainwater."

The Gaslight Anthem: Clothing or Baring the Soul

Sometimes, fu** the good old days. Looking backwards makes it tough to walk forward. And I am one to tell stories, the good stories of where we've been, as much as any other. But you can't live there. And trying to negates where you are, where you are going. Which might be nowhere.

The Gaslight Anthem is the band I can't stop listening to at present. They are not new, but they are becoming my soundtrack for the spring and summer. I play them on the back deck with a beer, cooking or doing dishes in the kitchen. Or as a shuffled playlist on a run. And this is a line that stuck in my head as my Saucony's pounded the pavement:

And God help the man who says, "if you'd have known me when..."
Old haunts are for forgotten ghosts

And that sets me off. I never want to get to the point in my life where all I have are stories, where the past was more than the present. Where I was more interesting, funnier, faster, and can't find something to be, something offer, something to become, something to be, now. I don't want life to be a series of photo albums, scrap books, articles, memories. Not just those things. Even into old age, if I get there, I want to be a grandfather, or just an old druid/dude, who people want to hear what I have to say; be at ball games and drinking coffee with the sunrise; still writing as relevantly as W.S. Merwin; still going for bike rides or hikes; still going to concerts; still trying to do something in the garden; still sipping a Dale's Pale Ale in the evening; embracing the differences that life gives you over time.

Obviously we don't control everything, how we age, what happens to us (we have some control there), and I am not sure I am aging, or will age gracefully, I fight that clock as best I can, just by having fun and trying to enjoy what is in front of me. I hope I can continue doing that.

Change, like shit, happens. And that isn't always a bad thing. I think we all know people, we all have friends we love, who are still the exact same person they were 20 years ago. And as much fun as I had 20 years ago, it seems like being in that same place would get old. So here is the next Gaslight thought that hit me during the same run:

But the clothes I wore just don't fit my soul anymore.
No the clothes I wore just don't fit my soul anymore.

Different song. But the thread continued in my head. The soul grows, changes, doesn't fit into the same ways or clothes it did. That's not to say your soul is getting fat. Though a fat soul sounds jolly in its own right. But I don't think that's what is going on there. I think in how I see the soul evolving, it becomes more clear and more stated as you get to know it. It starts to bare itself. Maybe the soul doesn't need the clothes you used to put on it to conceal it, to keep it covered.

Maybe the soul needs to be naked. Maybe life is a striptease for the soul, until we get to that point in the dance where we are comfortable enough to bare our souls. And once we do that, who wants to put soul clothes back on?

So here's to looking forward. To not saying, if you'd have known me when. Of being worth knowing now. Carpe the diem. And here is to bare, naked souls. Leave your soul clothes at the door.

Scenes from a Run

Running is my repetition. It is my practice. It is what I do to reset my mind, body and soul. When I walk out the front door, running shoes, shorts, t-shirt, skull cap to keep my cheap ear buds in my ears, tunes on the phone in my hand, I both know what to expect and have no idea what I will find. My daylight runs generally start on the rail trail near our house.

It's a foot bridge now, but at some point, trains crossed over this stretch of stream. They were faster than I am and I can remember them. I am running, so I keep running, but I fight the urge to stand in the middle of the bridge and watch and listen to the wind.

When I turn off Rails to Trails, I am a ghost. My shadow is the only proof that I was here. But if you look for it, you won't find it. Shadows are slick like that.

Speaking of ghosts, it's Memorial Day. That's why I have time on a Monday for a daylight run. It's a day to remember, to hold in our memory those that have died for our country. Those that have died so that I can go for a run; so that I can drink coffee in the morning; take the girls paddleboarding in the afternoon; hit the grocery store; grill steaks out back; feed my family; and then sit on the front steps sipping Jameson's while watching our younger daughter ride her bike around "the loop" in our neighborhood. I owe it to those who have died, to make my life, and theirs, count for something.

Jack White's "Freedom in the 21st Century" is playing as I run by the church. Stone churches and wooden barns are sacred architecture to me, just as forms, even stripped away from what goes on inside them. They elevate my thoughts.

Back on Rails to Trails, I run hard, to feel my heart, to feel sweat pour down me, to make the run count. This run was the same and different from every other. Running is my repetition. Repeat.

Contemplating spring and destiny, which has no beeper

Apr. 13--I'm cheating on David Foster Wallace. It's not that  I don't love him. I do. Sometimes I'm cheating on DFW with himself. But "Infinite Jest" is a 1,000-plus page tome that is gumbo-dense, very few page breaks and minimal places to come up for air.

So I'll put it down and turn to Thomas Merton, whose faith I don't have, but I envy. Merton often carries me from winter to spring, through the last, darkest cold days before short sleeves and beer on the back deck. Merton gives way to Walt Whitman. I try to re-read "Leaves of Grass" every spring.

This is how my reading and mental life goes. Like House of Pain, I jump around. I chase down tangents, at times feeling like a certain writer was put in front of me at a certain time because he or she has something to tell me. That often seems the case.

When I pick "Infinite Jest" back up, I'll forage my way through and come across something like this:

...both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

And then I sit thinking, "daaaammn," existentially speaking, and I know that I'm with DFW for the long haul, even though it may take some time. But hopefully not a Time [that] came to him in the falcon-black of the library night in an orange mohawk and Merry Widow w/ tacky Amalfo pumps and nothing else. -DFW, because that shit would be crazy.

Apr. 9--My feet prayed today. It was a three and a half mile prayer of thanks. They prayed on asphalt, dirt, gravel, wood and concrete. Their prayer went something like this:

Thank you for another year. Thank you for spring and sun on skin, for daffodils in bloom. Thank you for friends and family and their creativity in helping us live our lives in community. Thank you for breath and sweat, thank you muscles that work and ache, thank you for fields and roads and for a means to connect them all.

I'm not sure whether the people I passed could hear what my feet were praying, but I think they could. After a couple years that included a five-month layoff for an ankle injury, the better part of a year with undiagnosed Lyme Disease, and a recent layoff for being sick, my feet and I will always be thankful for an easy run in warm spring weather, the day after my birthday.

Apr. 13--So prayer seems to be on my mind lately. Not the ask for things kind of prayer, but the Merton-style contemplative prayer. Something like this:

There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves. (Merton, "Love and Living")

That's how it comes together: spring, newness, renewal. Contemplation, whether it is inspired by DFW, or a spring run, or Merton.

"Existentialists in shorts," creating meaning on the run

"Running wasn't just exercise or a hobby, or even necessarily competition, for them. Basically they were existentialists is shorts. I wanted to be one, too." -Scott Jurek, "Eat & Run."

Sometimes you create meaning with each step of a run. Sometimes with none. Mostly it's a happy medium.

I start out noticing every step. The impact on landing, the effort to move my legs. The first part of a run is an in-body experience. Everyday mind.

Each step moves further into consciousness. The body starts to fade into the background. The mind wanders. Wanders with the music. Wanders, thoughts flitting like birds out of mind. The breath is still there, and the movement. The body doesn't hurt, yet. I don't notice the miles or effort.

Then it comes back, the body. The breath reconnects, the legs are pumping, the arms, everything is in sync, connected, but different from when I started.

On long runs I can drift between these states--in body, out. On those, exhilaration can meet delirium.

I am running right behind some deep revelation, something life changing, if I can only run a little faster, reach out and catch it, grab it, tackle it.

But it's rarely about that revelation. I'm not generally fast enough to catch it. It's then that I get that it's the first step where we create meaning in a run, and every step after, not just some elusive magical step.

It's the knowledge that two, four, 10, 20, 50 miles are underfoot, logged by will, effort, discipline. I've put some order on one small part of the day, in my own way. I've seen things that no one sitting inside got to see. I've lived. I've reminded my mind-body-soul that we are free and mobile, sometimes. When we ask.

Fishing with Son House

Sunday morning. Feet in the dirt. Light breeze on the skin. Sun on the face. Raking garden beds, rolling the wheelbarrow across the yard. It was meditative. And then Son House does this:



And I ask you, on Sunday morning, what can church do that that experience, in God's house, nature, working, with a transcendent song and voice hasn't opened up on the spot?

My most revealing (we are talking John the Revelator, after all) Sunday spiritual experiences have come this way. On a long sunrise run. At a state park. Working in the yard. Writing and reading and drinking coffee on the back deck. They are the moments I am most open. The moments that are most personal and most universal.

For me, a spiritual journey is a personal one. My path, whatever it may look like, has included a lot of different forks, turns, twists, traditions, overarchingly led by soul. It's been hard to find in just one book or just one church. Bodhidharma would say it isn't in any book or church. True zen (whatever that is) would probably say these experiences are available in any book or church, as long as the mind and spirit are open to it. Everything is available everywhere, infinitely.

Maybe a spiritual journey is like going fishing. You go where you are most likely to find fish. You base this on where you've caught them before, where others are catching them. You go on intuition and past experience.

I catch fish outside, early in the morning. I catch them running. I catch them in the spring. I catch them listening to Son House and the Delta blues. John the Revelator was a fisherman, apparently.