Saxon Mountain

A brief run up Saxon Mountain today, my person lodged between two intermittent stormclouds which cast great grey shadows over the broad mountainsides. From the third switchback one looks down upon the lake in Georgetown, green-blue & stunning-cold. No sense of wonder attended my run. Willa stayed home, her tail flat, as it gets from time to time. A simple day & one barely worth a mention but for the heart beating in my chest, the air fanning my lungs, the dappled sunlight & the susurration of breeze & gale outside, the light & hurried shower of rain playing upon the red planks of the patio. Some days it is enough merely to look upon the grain of the oak of the fence-post, or the paint where it shows wear upon the table-top. These, our quotidian comings & goings, the unrecalled exigencies of the mundane. In running, I felt a finitude today, itself only remarkable in hindsight. At a good clip up the dirt road that zig-zags Saxon, I felt that rare almost mechanical precision that one encounters from time to time on runs, when the body seems complicit, aware, capable & carriage of a kind of sheer power. I ran fast, the sloping granite overhangs beside me blurring on the periphery, their looming foliage indistinct, the details around me secondary to the motion in which they were subsumed. There are runs, on trails especially, in which the eye captures its minutiae with vigorous precision. I can recall to my mind at present almost palpably a root system underfoot on a trail I ran last week, the diameter of the roots, their grey-dun bark, the soft glare where they’d been trod over & again. I can see each bifurcation, each intricate tailing laid out upon the soil like fine ink upon a page. & then there are runs in which what one can recall are internal phenomena: personal difficulties, sensations, thoughts that came & went. Finally, there are runs that fall into a quiet oblivion, a kind of pleasant identity founded on merely being nondescript. I think less & less that we can be responsible for the ebb & flow of any such days; that we are rather the carriage, borne along, a wake of time. We impose our will, to be sure, but what we impress it upon is in ceaseless flux. Time & being, ever changelings, ever their own entire, where we would hang our hats & call it an evening. & a day or two of oblivion, of watching a world unfurl in the whorl of an oak’s eye, ought not to be shunned. We figure our days as an endless struggle between posterity & enduring meaning & forget in so doing that there is meaning all around us. A run like this, I open my arms wide, I hum, I glide, & I disappear.