Seeds feed awhile on ground,
then lift up into the sun.

So you should taste the filtered light
and work your way toward wisdom
with no personal covering.

That's how you came here, like a star
without a name. Move across the night sky
with those anonymous lights.

-Rumi, trans. by Coleman Barks (1994)

10K today on a difficult trail. Like I used to sing in church:

I got a river of life flowing out of me.

Hungry

From Gwendolyn Brooks:

I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep my eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home...

from her poem, "My Dreams, My Works, Must Wait Till After Hell"

I'll go first
I'll be on the road first--
then you'll go
then you'll follow the road

I'll be the first to cross
all the desert lands
all the canyon lands

I'll pass swiftly over
the Earth's smooth face--

she won't hinder me
no matter what truly lies
on her smooth face:

up in the sky
I shall go
I shall [run].

-ancient Nahuatl poem from Central Mexico

Strong Fragile House

Today I had to suffer running a couple of miles out of breath and unfocused before mentally and physically hitting my stride. Instead of giving up, I had to accept my frailty with humility and keep going.

In both Judaism and Orthodox Christianity, the Eternal is born from frailty. Be it a word uttered from the mouth or a child born from a womb, the infinite seems vulnerable at the start.

Jewish mystics in Northeast Spain in the 13th century believed that an entire heaven is born each time a new word or phrase is uttered in the act of studying the Torah. According to the Zohar, the rabbis also believed that God consulted the Torah four times before enacting Creation, making studying an expression of Eternal love. For Jews, to study is to fashion eternity anew, and you don't have to be God to do the work: the order of the universe can change from one student's humble word.

In Orthodox Christianity, study is less important than meditating on acts of divine love, in which God assumes a lowly position. Theotokos (Mary) has a special place in the cosmos because of her mystic womb that delivered the Eternal into the world as a helpless child. For the Orthodox, pondering the miracle of that moment has saving power.

For my running life, I take strength knowing that the limits of my abilities do not diminish my capacity to touch the Eternal in myself. Perhaps they make me more attuned to the small voice that calls to me, saying:

my love is building a building
around you,a frail slippery
house,a strong fragile house
--.e.e cummings

From St. Vladimir's Seminary Men's Choir, a beautiful Theotokion (hymn to Mary):

Today I am...

no woman at all but an excuse for wind –
  passage of light-and-shade we know
wind by – just as his pond was no pond
  but a globe at his feet turning to show
how the liquid, dry, go topsy-turvy, how far
  sky goes down in water
....
Coming your way.

-from an untitled poem by Mimi Khalvati

Running Out

It may very well be the beginning of a new universe on the day that we can be truly ourselves.

Adrienne Rich in her poem, "Yom Kippur 1984," asks us to consider that day:

What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid
far from your own or those you have called your own?
What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man?
In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert
what in this world as it is can solitude mean?
....
when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude
in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?