Last night I looked up from the workbench in the studio and realized I had almost waited too long to go running. I quickly popped myself into a pair of fleece tights, threw on a wool base layer, zipped up a coat to break the breeze and tied on my shoes. While I was slipping my hands into my gloves I summoned the dogs and we all stepped outside, into the crisp winter air, and we tore down the road towards the sunset like a flock of wild beasties.
It was gorgeous out there. I ran the canyon rim, felt my lungs flare wide as I sucked cold air down into the bellows of my body and exhaled white against the gold of the sunset. I ran in and out of shadow and light, through the sage, around crumbling basalt, over coyote scat and rabbit tracks. I felt my body let go of its kinks and cramps. My spine straightened and my stride lengthened.
When I finally turned to head in the direction of home, a full moon was rising and the wind had grown frigid. My feet took me down the mesa onto an undulating trail by the river. There, as I traveled home, I watched the moon rise four times as my perspective shifted and changed, as my legs took me down into drainages and then up high on the river bank once more. I saw the light of that great stone peek out from behind the canyon wall and then hide away again, as though we were playing cat and mouse with each other.
I wondered, as I ran the last half mile home on the driveway, what it would be like to keep pace with the sunrise or sunset — what if I could move fast enough that I could hold my own against the spin of the earth and watch an unending diminishing of day? Then I wondered how fast I would need to run in order to sustain that kind of beauty. Naturally, I researched it and I discovered that if I wanted to keep pace with the sunrise, if I wanted to make it last and I was running along the equator of this beautiful planet, I would have to travel at 1040MPH.
That’s too fast.
I’ll take my sunsets and moonrises as they come, short-lived and magnificent.
Life is overfull here and our velocity is utterly unsustainable but there is a light at the end of the renovation tunnel and we can see it shining brightly. Below the house, the river flows ceaselessly and I think I know how it feels as it tumbles over the stones, cuts away at the canyon, urging itself faster and faster like a runaway freight train. I go down there every day to be closer to the rumble of the rapids and to be in the company of something else that seems wild and out of control. Maybe at the end of all this hustle and bustle I, too, will spill into a wide, calm sea and the sun will warm my tired bones and I’ll float for a while with my arms and legs splayed out in the style of a starfish.
In the meanwhile, I whisper my invocations into the whitewater and take my little pleasures whenever I can.
