Word After Word

So we come home from work in the early evening and there are annoying phone calls, little bits of business, the car problem, the father problem, the brokerage accounts, the Obama volunteer, the issue, the issue, the return, the future, and the day, the whole day, with its lint. The end of the day is a scritchy time. It’s really easy to get knocked out of alignment between the hours of 5 pm and 6:30 pm.

This is when, if I am brilliant, I put on my Nikes and run in the cemetery. In thirty minutes, I’m a new person. I run fast across the grass and think about the nearby dead people. I feel like an animal and I am  newly aware of what alive is all about. I notice all the headstones with two names, but only one death date; so many of the men here waiting for their wives to join them.

My day seems so small in the context of death and life long love and connection, both so large. Finally, finally at last, I stop thinking. I run three miles as fast as I can and it’s about halfway through that I feel myself running into myself. I am hot and sweaty even though it’s cold out and the moon is asserting itself, and I am smiling all over my body. My throat burns in an effective juicy way, and I’m flung back into the present moment and anchored here. The day is done. The evening can open, and I can join it.

Yoga would work well too. But running is very overt and loud and I like it a lot. I like pretending I have wings.

It all reminds me so much of Etch a Sketch.  All our running around all day is like the line we are drawing on the screen, busily dialing those little white wheels, trying to get everywhere, be everything to everybody, do it all right. We hustle about, make all these little designs, forward backward lines, a whole busy little line going every which way—that’s like the monkey mind of the day,all the running around everywhere and nowhere really. The track of the day, the trail of our rushing.

At the end of the day, we can shake the Etch a Sketch, and get all the filings to settle back down. We can clear the screen.  For me, the quick hard fast run is the shaking clear. I take the Etch of Sketch of me and run; the run shakes off all the lines and business and mistakes and switchbacks of the day. And I am ready to begin, to be written on.

I need, for evening to be good, a clear screen and open space so I can be present for my friends and beloved ones, so I can see their lines and paths, and listen. During that shift from day to evening, I need to reset the counter zero.