A Runner’s Meditation on Heaven and Earth

There is a heaven,

I write with my knee slashed

And blood dribbling down my leg, dirty

From stumbling, stumbling

—running raving through the woods.

And I did emerge upon a gravel road,

Which went east and west and deep into wilderness.

I let hour run into hour.

I ran beneath the canopy of green and gold

The leafy banners bold against the autumn sun.

I’ve felt those cold draughts of air

Come charging down to my desperate lungs,

Explode within my chest.

And drive the rhythm of my footsteps

Through Chaos, masterful in purpose.

And it’s just as roots dug deep in soil

Reach the apotheosis of their expression

In burning leaves above.

That which makes live, is perfect

And I cannot live without this.

I actually wrote the first verses right after I’d finished a run.

I was in fact seated in my driver’s seat with a pretty nasty gash on my knee. Months later, I still wear the faint purple scar.

It was back in the fall, shortly before I had left for Wyoming. I had gone for a run in the Maine woods, and fallen through a booby trap of rotten branches, whacking my knee against a rock.

I had started that outing with a not-so brilliant plan to try running down a streambed. When the plan led to painful injury, I almost turned back.

Instead, I beat my way ahead through some nasty brush and discovered a gravel path, which went on forever through some of the most striking nature I have ever seen. Chances are I could have followed the network of logging roads and ATV trails all the way to Canada if I’d had the mind.

The day was uncommonly beautiful and the air was crisp. The still-warm October sun lit up the birch trees as they transitioned from green to gold, illuminating the leaves as though they were pieces of Tiffany glass.

I ran on, charging up hills as fast as I could, letting the exaltation of the day take me many miles further than I’d planned on going.

The simple, biological fact that I was breathing heavily and my heart was beating fast only intensified my feeling of elation. That relationship between emotion and cardiology is one reason why I hold that it may be nice to drive through scenery in a vehicle, but it can never be as exalting as experiencing the scenery while getting exercise.

As I ran I started thinking about:

How it is that the tree’s dying colors (okay, its shedding colors) are prettiest to look at.

All those leaves together form a simple shape, a single splotch of color in our line of sight.

That zone of color seems like an ideal to me, a perfection that transcends its reality. It exists like an equilateral triangle or a solitary note, plucked from a guitar string. When I look at a tree, I don’t think of the decomposing chlorophyll any more than I think of the nylon stitching on a flag or the ink molecules on the pages of a book.

The tree appears as more than the sum of its biological processes, but also much, much less.

After all, the beauty of that final, leafy display begins in that dirty mess of roots, plunging through the detritus of dead and rotting life. Why is it that we are more likely to rhapsodize over the final, brief display of color than we are to worship the roots, the weird grubs and bacteria below that make the display possible?

It must be our human instinct to focus not on the bits and pieces of things, but focus on the complete idea. Psychologists will talk about the symbols and other shortcuts that we use to understand our world. We can divide these symbols into smaller pieces — try to understand the roots, the bark, each strange leaf, but of course it would be impossible to hold all of this in our minds. We have no choice but to misunderstand everything we see, to stab blindly at the truth with simulation.

The idea of “perfection” can only be a byproduct of this sloppy mental arithmetic. I never cared for Plato’s model of the universe, where everything has a single perfect version of itself floating out in the ether somewhere. There might be a couple billion horses roaming the earth, but they are all based on the idea of a single, perfect horse floating out there. somewhere. All other horses suck compared to this one Plato would say.

I believe there are too many forms of beauty out there to assume there is one perfection of anything, not horses, not birch trees, certainly not human beings.

I’d rather think that everything that creates existence must be a part of the larger perfection, not just the tree’s brilliant leaves, but also the roots that feed them and all that plant sex needed to create baby trees.

Running through that imperfect world, I wondered why heaven had to be some separate kingdom, divorced from the breathing, farting life-processes down on earth. I was running, breathing and farting in that world now. The thinkers who spent their time obsessing on perfect angels, writing down the details of the One Truth and other iterations of inflexible dogma probably took breaks now and then to scratch their asses or eat some tubers.

The so-called imperfections of the world are what give it its authenticity. Otherwise, the reality we live in might as well be projected on a screen, incomplete as any other flawed idea that humans can conceive of.

The real world can cut you or kill you. We learn to respect the forces of nature that do this. We nourish our bodies with air, food and water from this earth. We make our minds come alive by embracing the world that we have, taking it in through our eyes and ears, breathing it in through our lungs. It leaves its mark on minds and flesh alike.