…the house I live in…

I can run again, if you call it that, since the hips were changed out a few years ago. It is a wonderous thing, replacing a body part, as if the truck broke down then got a new gasket. It helps to stay off pavement so I don’t run in the city. But here in Colorado, it’s a different story. The trail to the ridge behind us is dusty earth, not pavement, and that helps, as it seems a tad softer. Earth can be like that, forgiving, if you let it. As a younger man I ran a lot, which is probably why the system–my body–broke down as it did. I had something to prove: faster, faster, farther farther! Now, as I awkwardly transition into old age (YIKES!), it is the simple promise of movement that gets me out the doors. I have nothing to prove. Mary Oliver has a lovely line: “As I grew older the things I cared / about grew fewer, but were more / important.” That sums up much that is true about this stage of life.

At nine thousand feet elevation it takes me a while to get up to the top. I take it slow, and try to maintain an easy pace. I’m not kidding anyone and have no compunction about stopping if I need to. When I stop to catch my breath I try to turn my focus to the landscape, the lake and the surrounding mountains. Peak One and a few other peaks are still holding snow, though a fishing guide told me the snow pack melted too early and too fast this year. The earth can be like that also, not soft, but a reflection of our heart, too often rapacious and unforgiving. Nature is not something out there. It is us and we are it. This seems especially obvious to me this summer.
We’re into month two of life in the mountains and have more than three to go. I’ve not spent so much time out of doors since my summer camp days. We’re living in an Airstream trailer and hosting a campground in the White River National Forest. My morning runs underscore the personal transition that is occurring: that nature is not a thing “out there” so much as it is a place within, as well as without. It is easy to forget that we are born of nature when our lives are spent so often removed from it. With repetition–from the house to the car to the cubicle to the mall to the store and back to the house, repeat–with repetition, we forget the ancient connection to the larger world; we accept the notion that we are separate–separate from the natural world, and separate from one another. There is great danger in that, the belief of “otherness.”  We are seeing a good bit of this currently: people who are “not us,” a natural world for served up for subjugation, the want of civility. It would be best if everyone moved out of doors, took a run to the top of a mountain, and stopping to catch their breath, looked out over a morning valley. Everything seems fitting and orderly when this happens.