Follow the rain.

The storm beat furiously and now I am footslogging across the Brunswick Nature Park, a Tuesday morning solo run, and the trails are mired, tarred, full of difficult navigation. No jesus lizard footing, no skim-sole trick to it, drudging through slosh and slog. . . a pleasureless, laborious run.
The air has a vaporous sizzle carrying the sweet smoke of dead leaves. Beside the trail, Town Creek runs high and dark, lugubrious, with pine oils and winter paleness.  To watch the life of rainwater, to start seeing patterns in the rain and the earth, be in Nature is the point, the ideal of immersing oneself in nature and movement.  I remind myself to enjoy the run, to enjoy the journey of the run, to be present on the trail.  A visual meditation begins to focus on the way rain sculpts a trail, the natural berms of dirt on turns, the mild contours rolling with an easy cadence, the rivulets cutting veins into red clay, the rocks cleft into erratic rows by torrential runoff, and its a good time to study the footing dynamics of a trail, of my own footing.  I slow down, smooth it out, push from the ribs.  Footing is a universal meditation as we skim the various crusts of the earth and rain adds its own layer of concentration, of mindfulness, and also gives form to the narrative of a trail's deeper nature.  So regard the way the rain runs a trail, attempt to emulate that fluid ease, to follow with a poetic sensitivity, to run as the rain as you conform your efforts to the terrain beneath.

A bend in the form. . . . February and the Year of the Rabbit.

Less than two months until the Gator Trail 50k.  Forty Miles (and a mule) will get me to the finish, maybe, but my weekly total should be more like 60-70 miles and not 35-44. My endurance of mileage is making me nervous.

2.3.11 Lung Distance Logs & Pain Management: Brunswick Nature Park, ten miles. 

Blue Clay trails were closed again, making it the third time in two weeks, so a twenty minute drive had me pulling into the Brunswick Nature Park.  Originally a paper mill forest, this land was granted to Brunswick County to become the newest park to green-mark our coastal region map.  Situated in northern Brunswick County, the 911 acres display a magnificent variety of terrain everyone can enjoy, especially mountain bikers, day-hikers, or trail runners.  (Equestrian trails are in the works, and there are horseshoe prints on the road!)  My last visit was a year ago, Run for Ray 2010, so I drove around to get my bearings and see the recent work. First off: the land is beautiful.  Big improvements include: a. a sheltered picnic area, including a grill  b.  a permanent facility offers a shower and actual bathrooms, though they weren't open yet (meanwhile there are port-a-johns)  c. a new trail, running about 1.5 miles (thanks to SORBA and the volunteers), marked by a laminated sign which had been tacked up on a tree.  The new trail plus the existing system of fireroads, animal trails, and previously blazed trails makes it easily five miles of trail, interconnected to keep navigation slightly confusing, but making difficult any desperate disorientation.  

As the damp cold was leveling my motivation for the run, I grabbed a water bottle and headed down a gravel road towards the Town Creek, towards the new kayak launch where a trail crosses, allowing a left or right turn into the trail network. I made a left and ran through a picnic area overlooking the creek, where a few lazy sandwiches with Kyote and the Wife could be enjoyed.  The trail took a more serious breath as the first mile started burning the hips and abdomens, leaning into and out of turns and berms and trees-turned-pikes (careful y'all!!). . . x-slope reblistered both feet through jackrabbit turns, quick pitch shifts, root-knobs bulging obscurely through pine-straw and dead leaves, spear-ended spits pointing into the trail at every twist and turn (one damn near getting a nick on my neck on one of two falls). . . a massive pile of unidentifiable feces that, if I didn't know better, I'd call bear shit, distant choruses of angry dogs, sudden mud-slicks slinging legs multiple directions like a cartoon, and the sheer beauty of it all, running along the Town Creek river, her black surface full of resin and lazy drift. . . and while I ran slow and steady across the varied & unpredictable terrain, while I was pushing up root-riddled hills to sand-slides knotted by ropes and branches, the pleasure was erratic, intermittent, because, honestly, it was work.  Plain and simple work.. . keeping the legs milling and not crashing into the next pined corner, plain work avoiding the deep holes where trees were pulled up by their roots by unknown forces, plain work keeping eyes focused on the next ten feet of foot-falls. . . tunnel-vision trails. . . by mile six the wheels were coming off the wagon, felt like I got hacked down by a bushwhacker. . . thought to myself “holy shit” a few times. . . and my pace slowed until I was shuffling along, side-stepping the bear shit, thankful to stop and step aside for the four other mountain bikers out there, catch a breath, then resume into the sporadic lunges of pace along the new trail, bumpy and rooty, primitive and fun, over fallen trees with orange wood splintering, past with one heroic guy laying sand across stretches to “smooth it out for you”, and he was resting with a tin of pistachios during a lull, his empty wheelbarrow beside.  Another mile or so , a gulp of water and then to the car.  “So much depends upon a mountain bikers' wheelbarrow.”

2.4.11. Pain-management Run Number Two. . . Cold, wet slogging out at Poplar Grove. . . . four miles of wishing my wife could be running beside me, talking or not talking, just there. . . the weather was horrible, the run was rough, yesterday's run lingering, taxing the legs and knees. . . eyes cast down on the rivulets and trenches and puddles of rainwater, cast down blankly into footfalls, cast down on numb-hot legs. the highlight, a moment of pleasure for which I paused, was a wonderful blackbird cyclone spiraling onto long brown fields rolling towards unseen sea, their stark forms (individually, collectively) moving rhythmically onto the furrowed chunks of earth, searching for the worms emerging from the clay. . . . . rain dissolved the trees like an impressionist brush about a half-mile away, sfumati of the storm, the renaissance light of a winter rain in the woods, and rain pelted my jacket and legs and my legs burned red against rain and run, splashes of sand & cold on every step, sloshes of shoes and socks.  A pain management run, a weather-endurance  run. A run obsessed with the PCJ at the end, a medium tanzania (dark and bold, a slight roasted-nut note) and a delicious orange-cranberry muffin for the drive home, including some new song by the Decemberists before switching off to a late Beethoven piano sonata. 

Art Opening for Cody Justus-

Caprice Bistro will host an exhibit of paintings by Cody Justus in the upstairs Sofa Lounge gallery. His explorations of “internal structure (and) external surface” are visually powerful, pushing his painting-constructs off of the wall and into the viewer’s head, provoking questions on the nature of raw material versus finished product.  The paintings vibrate with color and texture, these equal forces arguing and commingling in shared spaces, pushing the clean & tight against the rustic & weathered.  Yet the non-objective canvases remain dynamic, united, a testimony to his intuitive sense of design. A holism is preserved in the work.  I have seen three paintings by Justus, and each piece conveys a wide knowledge of art history and art creation.  First impressions brought associations of Arte Povera, where construction of the piece,the physical elements (raw, unrefined) and their manifestation, was paramount over the ultimate image-composition. Ryman and Stella come to mind, with Ryman’s painterly white surfaces enunciating the hardware of a piece, or Stella’s funky canvas-constructs breaking traditional frames and forms of canvas.  Even Albers could show up in Justus’s understanding of color, which is superbly developed but subtle.  Ultimately, Justus’s work is his own, soundly independent and self-sufficient, impossible to cross-reference into another artist or school of thought. The dialogue of his materials is his own creative voice.  His canvases convey an intelligent presence, and he will surely create a lively dialogue of paint and material, of internal and external, of plasticity versus volume, and produce a fine show out of his explorations.  The opening reception will be held February 3rd from 6pm to 10pm.  

Visions, revisions, momentum of a thing. . . .

Visions & Revisions.

Walked by a brick wall, an older building yawning in its form, a downtown alley of fractured concrete and bulging bricks where thick-iron braces mount whole levels of 1800's architecture. . . the slight curve of the walls, cement patches tearing into fissures, seams, the age self-evident and aesthetically charmed, the inevitable yield to gravity, and I was passing towards the Cape Fear river and the inky churn of her day's angst. Knots of vine dangled by thick wires while beneath the tangle of electric city and wild-growth nature, a buildup & breakdown of paint in the rough face of the deep red bricks, the wild calligraphy of shapes told an interesting story. Layers of texture, testimony, bird shit, faded mural ads for coca-cola and shaving cream, signage for long-departed hardware stores, tarred pipes piercing the walls, the gallery of scars that is Front Street. The notion of layering and delayering, deconstruction & reconstruction, work acted upon work with rebuilding and restripping, the way Life is. . . how history embeds itself in the visual. . . and this meditation became a reclaiming of my image-repertoire, became a rekindling of visual thought and work, the new tendrils & roots pushing tiny fingers into the earth and air and water, pushing energy into the cycle of creativity. What a friend calls the “Momentum”.

(Meanwhile Dvorak's string cycle “cypresses” and what a full-sound suite.)

Excavation, this is the word I revisit, that I find myself confronted with, again. The word & the idea, Excavation, even a canvas by de Kooning, has reentered my vocabulary. To unbury the Self from external exploits and submissions, the stripping of false layers, of excess, the onion layers of Being. To re-examine Identity, what constitutes the I of the moment.

1.25.11  Slagging out on the trails of poplar grove plantation. . . . rain & cold air worked against the run, but nothing like Sunday's 16 miler. Sunday's run was a fury of wild, clumsy labor with wind beating ears and face, traffic ripping mind back to thighs and knees, eroding all determination. . . . today's run felt fast, felt fluid with long strides and higher knees, red legs burning with the pleasure of the work, short trees beat percussive in large rain, the quick dodge of puddles and the fast lean into slopes, the trails unwind and whisper life into lungs, restful eyes, unstraining, easy. A mantra/ visualization presented itself during the run: a mindful passage where I enjoyed the earth propelling me, the earth of the trail pushing my kicks into easy mud-full scoops of sole, was a direct positive collaboration, the earth and my body, a reconnection, an understanding, a union. Reminiscent of a meditation from years ago: inhale, feel the pull of air come from the soles of your feet, from beneath your feet, sourced in the earth, the breath entering the body from soil and what is beneath the soil, feel the pull as the grounding part of breath, soul inhaling soul, then blow your deep-colored earth into the air as white vapor, as light, as void, quietude. The cleansing cycle of breath carried the run, naught left but the earth, the rain, the run.

Rant & Pant, WRRC Survival Run 2011.

Sartre chokes on his own smoky words while Vegh String Quartet saws and hacks Beethoven’s Grand Fugue, opus 133. Now considered a canon of string chamber music, the piece was initially rejected and ridiculed, forcing a re-composing of the fourth movement.  Wonderful irony of histories.
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Lately, while running, i've been aware of my degrees of spirituality as I attempt to judge whether ego is consuming my runs.  And during a 12 miler at greenfield park last Thursday, the source of my ire revealed itself: the materialism of running, the culturally dominated aspects of the runner, the classic external definitions of what a runner is, that is to say, the cultural ego pressing me into paces that steal the landscape, steal the joy, steal the deeper momentum of a run.  I have unearthed my mythologies, exposing them like earthworms to the sun: the body type, the clothing, the pacing, the jaw and thighs and attitude and all of the demands society makes on even the most beautifully solitary of Acts (not so unrelated to the Act of painting or drawing or writing).  anyway, running claims no ego, and no ego drives me other than the fact that i think running makes me a better person, mellows out my temper and stabilizes my mood as any meditation may.  Unfortunately my creative ego struggles against bloated senses of self, and that is why the image-repertoire is currently barren and rocky, like an aesthetic object devoid of use.  But below is the rant that ensued after the run.

Billboard Life:  From Beauty to Banal. . . and sometimes it is the materialism that gets you, that removes you from the Core, depletes the Passion, gets you into the Label and the newest new, the most progressive progressions, swipes the ideal of a moment, robs the momentum & loses the meaning.  the pure Act becomes mired beneath peripheral aspects, against marketing plots, the collective sheep-song of consumerism. or the beauty of a thing becomes an obsession, a demise of itself, a self-devouring Bosch-form. . . the dreadful neurotic race that everything becomes.  Decay of american passions.  Guerilla capitalism. Van gogh’s delirium.  How something beautiful becomes a commercial exploit, a bark for power, an angle into profit: magazines stuffed with advertisements, marketing-strategy essays on dead artists (profiting living dealers), commercialized & mass-market painting (the Global Image), the namebrand artist or the omniscient namebrand society.  airbrushed runners on glossed covers, uberman mythologies embedded in every article, the gear and more gear and more ads about the gear.  the ongoing cannibalism/ consumerism of Politics. Renting out God.  Communions of breast of vulture in sauce of rotten teeth and fouled essence of what-can-i-get-from-you. Fuck that. Give me a farm, a community, and a chance at something Higher.  Give me minimalism and alchemy.  Give me arte povera, a monk's wooden beads, a raspy psalm.  Whatever.  Give me the eternal, seeded Core.

1.16.10   Sunday morning,  a  nine mile run with the folks from the WRRC, the 2011 Survival Run.  Was a real jackrabbit deal, the nine mile trail twisting back from Carolina Beach State Park into unknown areas where white sand was frosted with morning dew, steep sand-cliffs overlook picture-perfect Cape Fear drifts where lazy sails caught a slow breeze, onward through massive sand dunes with black needles webbing against brown brush (a natural drawing, an environmental happening), running right through the center of a live oak circle, into Sunny Point and the fantastic stretches of woods with complete silence and more sand dunes into the underground brick tunnel of rebar-laced cement, a bunker of busted chards, with lithe, quick steps across graying concrete chunks where shrubs shove out between, then passing through sharp dry grasses, reeds sweep knees, thigh-high with dry-scratch sounds on each piston-push, Marley’s “Hammer” providing the rhythm for the knee lifts (kick on the downbeat) and then 1.4 miles of road to the community center of Kure Beach where everyone congregated for a delicious and voracious breakfast of scrambled eggs & pancakes with coffee.

A Winter Interlude.

Miles & melancholy, 1.10.11, Bach’s cello suite, gray morning with pale snow, coffee like mahogany, and the lugubrious drift of Monday morning mind.

And towards the end of the winter storm, slow snow tumbling and stray flakes recycling in wind, ky began his afternoon nap and kas hunkered down into work. The window swirled with the strange weather and the idea of a winterstorm run was born.  Thus went on the trail shoes, a bright yellow top, shorts and their pockets filled with et cetera and cell.  Blockbuster was mapped as the destination, 7.5 miles for the out-and-back, the right distance for the day, and into the snow I trekked.  Navigating the road's shoulder became the deal, with capricious jolts of movement visible in the tracks left behind, the alternating cold of feet and thighs, the expressions of a random passing driver, the strange emptiness of roads around UNCW.  Ebulliance of motion. Inner-laughter became outer laughter as I passed a group of students working on a snowman. An angry-faced man in camouflage ripped a beat-up pickup into a turn where I paused, waved a neoprened finger.  Arriving at the midway point, the deep warmth of blockbuster was almost lustful, was an embrace of mansuetude, allowing a luxury of stillness.  Selections were made and wrapped, and I stretched back into the pale green-gray afternoon, where freezing rain and sleet and wet feet replaced the store’s heat.  Simple endurance of Cold became the theme, a darker deal, Man versus Self which is Nature, trudging onward. Emotionalism passed into work as cars passed and weather pulsed and legs numbed.  Only the journey matters in such lunacy, the completion of the passage, kicking Market street’s oiled slush and trusting shoes and strength-of-ankles to anchor upright the body on the next hidden-ground thrust.  Parking lot ice-lakes, the asphalt mires where freezing rain bounced and dappled, shocks of cold against muscle, traffic rips diagonal against the path, legs beat & tread, beet-red, and sweat and sleet meet as one slices through the smell-less air, rain pulsing on cheeks and shoulders, gray light deepening into labored breath and tense back and the countdown of miles ticks off.
Then, the final passage pulses by the smoking chimneys of my neighborhood to Home: my numb wet face smiling at my wife who smiles, laughs a little.  That was the proud mad moment, the climax of the deal.  We each bellied up to a meal of rare pleasure, steaming bowls full of chicken breast simmered in a gravy of hot, buttered curry, sopped up with a hunks of crusted bread and clean rice. Honied and peppered chai at the table with her, the movies no longer relevant, really never were much more than an excuse for the errand, and Ky awakens, starts his languageless songs from his crib.

Two running narratives. . . legs & language.

1.6.11

Thursday morning at Carolina Beach State Park, a gray coolness, a faint sun, hidden & dull behind clouds; a winter run on a winter day.
Ky and Kas left and I finished my coffee and a muffin.  Pulling into shorts and a warm top, I plugged in some Antibalas and faded into a strange sadness while driving to the park, a heavy gravity that I can only correlate to a family member’s surgery (achilles tendonitis). . . . maybe the winter funk that ebbs and flows like a collective melancholy is to blame.
The park was quiet in a flat lusterless light as clouds rolled in on cooler temperatures.  Rare sun moments layered the winterscape on mostly empty trails as my legs pumped across the blue blaze that connects the main office with Sugarloaf Trail. The sand was thick with strong, wet grips yanking at my shoes, shins splashed in cold mud as I stomped through puddles collected from the earlier rain.   The mood and conditions were challenging the very idea of the run.  The trees seemed dwarfed, brittle, elderly, hanging in the air like black smoke burning off of the ashen coals of the exposed sand. An inevitable eventuality, the state of the trees.  Eventually, slowly, my legs loosened and my eyes relaxed into the landscape.  An interesting pale, spongy moss sprouted along the side of the path, and looked for evidence of pitcher plants or venus fly traps (which I believe are warm-weather perennials). My ears zoned into the morning stillness and the cool air sizzled in my lungs and face.  A few dead ends forced abrupt turnarounds, but I allowed myself to run in new directions and follow sand roads and unmarked trails, trying to experience something organic, unmeasured, wild.   Something fresh and open, like a moving satori.  But mostly I found myself running, just running, the hoof-digs pulsing against strained breath, thoughts dispersed and fractured.  Sugarloaf was a nice reprieve though something nostalgic filtered the landscape, remembering states passed in which I viewed that landscape.  The sand mountain.  The poetic dynamics in the act of Erosion.  I looped the trail a couple more times to add up to seven miles, hitting no brilliant times nor any exceptional insights.  Ultimately, just a run, the work of the run, and sometimes that’s enough, and sometimes it is not.

1.7.11

A run at the beach. . . . today was a good run at the coast, returning to one of my favorite seven mile out-and-backs, from Landfall to the Loop including Summer Rest Trail on both legs.  I ran with my lungs open and my mind reeling, avoiding pace concerns, avoiding expectations, and trying to be engaged in my run.  Few people were out on the sidewalks and roads, though Starbucks was packed with folks. WB park was vacant. Two ducks were busy searching for fish, diving beneath the bridges, and they were amusing and serious.  Pelicans pushed heavy beaks into the wind above a choppy ocean chewing the shore.  A moment of sadness descended as I passed the shell of the retirement home, recently closed, along Summer Rest road.  The sun brightened as I sprinted my way to end the 52 minute run at a 7.2 minute pace before a two mile walk with my very grateful dog and some GlobeTrekker on public television.

What was I doing one year ago?  I was starting this blog.