The animal poetry of the body: I am here to run in the woods

It is dawn. I have tugged on my running shoes, thrown a ball cap over my bedlam of hair and stepped out onto the damp porch. I begin walking east, still shaking off sleep, reclaiming the body memory of one foot in front of the other. Soon I am loping along, entering the woods, the rock-strewn trail, the dew-weighted leaves, the criss-crosses of fallen branches. The misty wetland on my left with its choirs of cattails. The teeming frogs, only just beginning to thrum, humbled by the dissolving night.

My feet are light and sure. I skim along the path like a water bug, a dragon fly, a ghost. I pass two fawns, speckled and trusting. They merely trace me with their eyes. To them, I belong, but I do not, myself, know why I am here. It does not fit the story I have been telling about myself. That I do not like to run. That I came to despise it so suddenly years ago that I literally stopped, turned tail, and walked home. My running gear abandoned for a decade in a box at the back of a closet.

I am a lapsed runner, yes, but here I am, prodigal child, cantering easily through the woods. In this moment, I feel at home as I never have. Feet padding over soft, sandy earth. Buzzy drunk on the scent of ferns, mossy bark, my own sweaty skin. I have the legs of a mountain lion, the sharp eyes of a condor, the measured breath of an alligator. It is summer and I am an animal. I am alive and so I run. And in this moment it is clear to me that it would be a sin to demand any greater “why” than that. And yet the temptation arises.

For I am a philosopher and a spiritual seeker. And I have spent lifetimes, millennia, eons interrogating and apologizing for my creaturehood. At times I have longed for escape, certain that I could do better than this clunky body and this rusty earth. My ropy hands and gangly arms. My clumsy big head and alien feet. The squirrel carcass on the side of the road. The broken fences and discarded cans. None of it nearly good enough, surely, for a philosopher and spiritual seeker?

No wonder that we disciplined philosophers so often become consummate observers and devotees of bodily management. Grudgingly accepting incarnation’s temporary necessity. Thirty minutes of meditation. An hour at the gym. The reward of “moderate” food and drink only after all dues have been paid and every account settled. Bodily pleasures kenneled away, to be exercised at regular intervals and only in scripted, acceptable ways. The planet itself carved up, domesticated, filed into oblivion.

We stand back and watch the forest. Photographing the doe from afar. Cataloguing the woodpecker, the blue jay, the goldfinch. We comment on the foibles and failures, critiquing the unforgivable, raging messiness of it all. We mark out the boundaries between the wild and the tame and write our names there. What we do not do is plunge recklessly into the fecund darkness. We do not fall out of bed at dawn and surrender ourselves to the woods.

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