mercoledì, luglio 20, 2011

domenica, luglio 17, 2011

Running on water

Today I went for my first run by, and on, a beach here. It was spiritual - it gave me such a playful relationship for 20 minutes with the biggitude of the universe. Running is really pleasant in its childishness - in my case, anyways, the last time I ran for fun was as a child, and tearing around a pretty park full of birds puts me back in touch with that. And probably that, even more than laziness and misanthropy and an inclination to tardiness is why I'll never be a competitive runner; I'm not sure I ever want to run for anything except the fun of it. But running on a beach where the waves are lapping on to your feet, while the big Pacific waves are grinding away just 20 feet down the slope, is frolicking in a way that I haven't frolicked outside of the bedchamber since - gosh! - certainly more than 14 years.

It was also my first barefoot run - out of an hour, 20 minutes of it were bare, running in and out of the licking tops of the ebbing waves - and that was really pleasant too; I'm not used to my feet being tactile instruments, and they were happy. When I got back to the path to put them into the running shoes again, they were sad - they felt disappointed - and my feet have never felt that way before. I'm going out again - today was to Ballina, tomorrow will be to Byron Bay.

It's really beautiful here, you know. Yesterday I didn't run because we went for a little bushwalk instead at the Nightcap Range national park and that was the pure opposite of the ocean - a jungle of spiralling, coiling vines that looked like a photograph to me in their stillness, but in Plant Time, were probably intensely aware of some sort of immediate and pressing struggle. What a thing time is. How weird it is to think of how different time must be to a plant.

It's really nice to be happy, isn't it?