HEAD(hed), (n.) 1. the top part of the human body or the front part of an animal where the eyes, nose, east and mouth are. "Your brain is in your head." DIBS(dibz), (n.) 2. a thick, sweet syrup made in countries of the East, especially the Middle East, from grape juice or dates. [Arabic "debs"]--World Book Dictionary, 1976.
I’ve been spending the last few months on something I’ve always wanted to do: write a book. I’m using every possible moment on this project and it’s really coming along. I am currently 7 chapters completed out of a potential 20. However, given the source material, each chapter is just a little bit longer than the previous. So who knows when I’ll be finished. I’m learning so much tho!
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Trail Run
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Took a trail run at lunch today. 2.67 miles in 40 minutes and some change.
I ran the trail "backwards" today because, well, this hill's been climbed enough. It was time to run down it today. A kind of a victory run, as it were. I needed a little victory run today. Tired of getting my butt kicked. Thought I would kick back today.
Don't get me wrong, there was plenty of work getting to the top and by the time I decided to record this part of the descent, I had already come down quite a ways. And there were two more very large hills yet to climb before I got back to the start. Impossible to get anywhere around here without climbing a hill or seven.
Today I just needed to get out in nature where nothing's in a hurry and everything's on time.
Out on the trails, the only sound heard is the wind in the trees, the birds and squirrels gossiping, the occasional "plop" of someone's fishing line as they hide in the bushes on the banks of a private lake and the huff of an old fat guy running through the woods.
Nature takes it's time out there. Took a gazillion years for every rock to find it's place, for every tree to grow and die and fall and grow again. A terribly busy place for so much to happen so slowly. And everything's right where it should be.
A place where leaves to sprout and grow and flourish and wither and die and fall and eventually find the light of day once as they push out the end of a branch all over again just as they've done a hundred or more tree rings ago.
A place where the Oak and Elm and Sassafras watch the rain peel away layers of earth like an onion, like the skin off some complicated and overly emotional ogre, like scales washing off a dragon who turns out to be an old man with a boyish heart . . . forever refusing to grow up and ancient.
I'm nearly finished reading Joan Didion's collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The book was discovered through another book I was reading, Jon Krakauer's Eiger Dreams . If Jon felt this book was good enough to pack along on a mountain climbing expedition, then I'm interested. Took me three tries, but I finally found my copy on Amazon. One of the best book buys I've made. Joan selected the title of this book from William Butler Yeats' classic poem, Second Coming . The book title is shared with one of her larger essays, a record of encounters with people in the 1960's drug culture. Didion's book is divided into three distinct parts: "Life Styles In The Golden Land," a collection of articles capturing the California experience of the 1960's; "Personals," a few of essays of the first-hand nature; and "Seven Places Of The Mind", some thoughts about those parts of California that are now long gone. One essay...
“VANITY, saith the preacher, vanity! Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back? Nephews—sons mine … ah God, I know not! Well— She, men would have to be your mother once, Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was! What’s done is done, and she is dead beside, Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since, And as she died so must we die ourselves, And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream. Life, how and what is it? As here I lie In this state-chamber, dying by degrees, Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask “Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all. Saint Praxed’s ever was the church for peace; And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know: —Old Gandolf cozened me, despite my care; Shrewd was that snatch from out the corner South He graced his carrion with, God curse the same! Yet still my niche is not so cramped...
