20 minutes of contemplative writing,
recorded 2 days + one year
after running farther
than I ever had
before
**
We ran straight when we should have turned right, the arrow pointed the correct way but we didn't see it, it was the falling light or the deep conversation - both, more likely - and the over fifty miles already run clouding my brain.
A year later. Writing class on a Monday the day after getting back from a weekend up north - just like a year ago. Another Monday, another year.
A year later and I still think about it all the time: getting lost in the woods in the dark and not finishing the race.
It was good to be there this past weekend, with some of the same friends, running some miles but not a race, hiking some and still getting delightfully sore from that.
I missed the feeling of being in the event -- the possibilities and limits pushed -- while at the same time I was also somewhat grateful to observe that energy and not be part of it in the same way.
In some ways its hard to believe it was a year ago.
It feels both close and at a distance.
Right under the surface and deeper down.
I think about it less but sometimes it feels like often: running through regrets and what ifs and gratitude and wonder and certainties and questions.
Have I processed it, by now? Sort of, maybe.
Grief and elation,
both, neither,
together, separate.
I wondered if I would write about this and I am.
I'm not sure I'm writing what it deserves. The experience, I mean.
But I'm writing what is, what's right there, which is always enough.
Changing direction
What has changed since then, about running?
I'm in the middle of a different exploration, I think. I am outside of structure. No clear goal aside from getting clearer about:
what I get from running,
what I give to running,
and what I want our relationship to feel like right now.
The word that pops in is harmony. What does that even mean. Notes played together in a way that sounds true.
I turned the page and lost my thought train.
I guess I
changed directions.
I want to be so clear about my relationship with running that when running leaves me finally...(and it will, it's impermanent like everything else - or rather my body is impermanent)...
Maybe running has an invisible magic like creativity that's always in the room and even when I can't channel it through my body the same way I can now, I will still be able to access it, still enjoy the magic.
Running is not my identity. It is one thing that makes up home for me. A place of ease and comfort, familiarity and safety, a port to charge.
Wait.
What is it about running that feels like home?
That running feels like home does not mean running IS home.
It's more like a mirror. Or maybe a prism?
Or am I the prism, and running passes through me, and on the other side I see colors.
Those colors seem to be the effect of running but they're really the effect of ME.
Running is just one kind of light that passes through the prism that is me.
Ah.
Running isn't home.
The prism --(ME)-- is home.
A beam of light passes though me, and my angles and edges and whatever else makes a prism work its magic cause the light to --
-- what? --
change direction?
I forget how it works but there's something there.
