Wednesday, January 11
Temperature: 56 degrees
Overcast, as usual.
Today is a fluke.
I'm wearing shorts and a long sleeve t-shirt. The air is unseasonably warm. It feels like it could be early March, but the cut of the wind reminds that it's early January.
I stretch by my car and eye the mile long path in front of me. Since July I've come to Brady's Run Park to run, walk, and explore. I love its soaring trees. Sycamore. Elm. Oak. I love the open green space where children run and play.
I check my watch, fill my lungs with air, and take off. The path beneath my feet is solid, paved, manmade. I listen to my footfalls and am lost in its rhythmic pattern. Ground, air, ground. Ground, air, ground. The river runs with me. It rushes just twenty feet beyond and follows parallel to the path. The water teems with energy, fat and happy after a long night of rain.
Sweat beads on my forehead and threatens to trickle into my eyes. I wipe it away with my shirt sleeve. If the sun were shining, I would be over-warm. But the sun is not shining. The sun has not shone in days. The grey skies over Brady's Run are common place, to be expected. If the sun shone, I'm not sure I would recognize this place or this month.
I wonder, if the park misses the sun. After a week of perpetual cloud and mist, does the towering maple ever shrug and say "I think I'll just go back to sleep. Maybe give life a try again tomorrow"? Does the deer, frozen in the bushes struggle to keep its eyes open? Does nature, like me, need a sun lamp to get out of bed in the morning?
A bug buzzes dangerously close to my eyes, interrupting my thoughts. I swat it away, preventing its likely doom. That lucky bug will live another day and go on to fly into another person's eye tomorrow.
I leave the river behind and follow the trail as it circles back to the start. Now I run parallel to a busy road. My ears are filled with the scratch of tires on wet concrete and the rumbling of broken mufflers. The noise takes away from my run, disconnects me from nature. It reminds me of the human proclivity to hurriedness and stress. There is never enough time. In months past, I hadn't noticed the volume of the traffic. Perhaps the skeleton trees of the winter don't trap the noise like their summer counterparts.
The trail is nearly at its end. I see its start and my car parked and waiting. As I finish the mile, I look at this small portion of Brady's Run I've come to love. I breath in the air, so warm it's almost sweet. I feel the cool breeze on my face, its presence welcome on this unseasonably warm January day.
I keep running.
"I wonder, if the park misses the sun. After a week of perpetual cloud and mist, does the towering maple ever shrug and say "I think I'll just go back to sleep. Maybe give life a try again tomorrow"? Does the deer, frozen in the bushes struggle to keep its eyes open? Does nature, like me, need a sun lamp to get out of bed in the morning?"
ReplyDeleteA particularly strong section of your post was when you purposely brought nature into your run. You forced thoughts of the trees, of the deer into your minds-eye. You anthropomorphized these objects so that you could get outside of yourself, outside of your normal routines to connect with something larger than yourself: nature. By doing so, along with your "Ground, Air, Ground" mantra, you brought the natural world into yourself.
I'm intrigued to learn more about your place! I'd really love to see you slow down, stop, and reflect on your observations without the distraction of movement. As a runner who has run in the same places for almost a decade, my perspective is very different when I allow myself to sit still and observe than when I am just passing through quickly (well, not that quickly, as I am a slow runner...).
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