The soup, by the way, was an unqualified success. While the tomatoes smoked slowly I sweated off a generous double handfull of celery and onions and a few crushed cloves of garlic from our CSA farm box. I threw in a some odd bits of freezer-burned slab bacon, a few basil stems from the withering plant in the dooryard, and a pint of orange cherry tomatoes that were languishing in the fridge. Then I went out and ran four miles in the gentle rain while the soup cooked out.

The run was just what I needed. It's been six months now on the Wellbutrin and more than three since my last cigarette, but the running is a more recent and sporadic endeavor born from the same need for fundamental change. Nearly twenty years have elapsed between my tenure as a cross-country runner in high school and my renewed interest in the sport, and I am reminded once more why I was drawn to the sport initially.



I was never very fast, despite a 36" inseam and a distance runner's borderline anorexic physique. My attraction came more from the pleasure of moving through the lansdscape at my own pace, of traversing routes and distances more often reserved for motorized transport. I love the simple act of covering ground.

I have been reading Robert Bly again after much the same interval of years, and came across this short one called "In a Train" in his first collection:

"There has been a light snow
Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness
I stare at the train window marked with soft dust
I have awakened in Missoula, Montana, utterly happy"

For Bly, it is all about covering a huge swath of the country in the night and the unexpected awakening in a new and unknown place, the sense of distance covered, the knowledge that steady and directed movement has brought him somewhere. And so with running -- the movement is an end unto itself, the destination a secondary benefit.

In truth, I have been reading Bly in the hopes of finding once more a poem that I encountered late one night in college while swapping verses out loud with friends, a torrent of drunken recitation which ended when the campus police showed and broke it up. There was Whitman, I remember, and Rilke's "Tombs of the Hetaerae", and a single brief passage of Bly describing the image of fenceposts as seen through the window of a moving car such that perspective lent unto them a revolving motion like the the spokes of a wheel rotating slowly against yet another snowy Minnesota stubble-field backdrop.