December 22, 2009, journal entry

Five miles.

Yesterday morning’s deep navy blue broke into a thick barrage of rain that fell heavily all day and into the night. This morning, with the longest night of the year behind me and the rebirth of Sun before me, Dawn brews as I slip into my running costume, bundled up in purple and pigtails with my found reflective vest, to celebrate Winter’s start of a new solar year as the spinning wheel of Seasons begins to weave more threads of daylight into her crazy quilt of darkness.

The road is a sheet of ice. The sidewalk, too. The thick rain that fell yesterday and overnight has become a centimeter of ice I cannot run over, under, around, or through. The treadmill tempts me, but I like being outdoors in my suburban safari in the fresh chill Winter brings as nothing clears my mind like the senses of touch, taste, sight, sound, and feel of air. It sets loose the wild landscape of my imagination, its magic making sentient the quiescence of rocks and trees.

I love running in Dawn.

I head back indoors and strap on my new REI YakTrax tractions to my broken-down Brooks, its coiled metal in a diamondback pattern. I nervously head back outside. I don’t mind running in heat and cold (I’ve run in more than 100 degree temperatures to -17), overbearing wind and calm, and drenching rain and snow, but, although I love the word ice, how it sounds, how it changes colors from refrigerator ice cubes to the white marbleized ice of a frozen pond and blue of deep ice, I hate running on it. I gingerly gage the slipperyness factor and am surprised at how grounded I feel. Stable. As I begin, I keep my pace slow to preserve my footing though I remember I have prepared for ice’s slippery, difficult path. My tractioned shoes crunch the ice, sound like crinkling notebook paper, and I begin to pick up my pace.

Shadows somnambulate in dark under street lamps which distort the silhouette’s length of my already long legs wrapped in darkness like my favorite black velvet and lace skirt. Soughing wind sucks and stretches my breath which is protected by my black scarf collecting spangled five-pointed crystals dressed in white.

I trace the lines of bare tree branches with my eye and then with my mittened hand. Their roots are deep though most limbs are now stripped of their leaves. A murder of crows…or is it the murmuration of starlings? Perhaps an unkindness of ravens?...shifts on layered high wires like black musical notes jumping lines on a staff. I bow to the marcescent leaves that hang on balustrades of tree branches.

Even in chill, my breath is plucky, stubbornly running the diameter of my lungs. I finish strong.

The Sun has begun her return to Earth, the shortening of days reversing, now lengthening like the ebb and flow of water. And she begins in the only way she can. In Winter and cold.

I am prepared.

~

All in calmness
the earth with half-opened eyes
moves into winter.
(Dakotsu haiku)

~

GL, 12/22/2009. Prevail.