Hope

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

(Yesterday I finally watched the movie based on Yann Martel's book. The book challenges you with its first hundred pages. But once you cross that threshold, you're in for the long haul. The movie is a beautiful thing to behold. Watch it, enjoy it.)

Yesterday, after supper, after watching Life of Pi, I headed out for a walk. Had I not dressed for said walk three hours prior, there is a strong possibility I would not have made it out the door. But there I was, in my shirt and shorts, my shoes and socks waiting by the door. So I went.

Eastern NC missed out on most of Sunday's Super Moon due to substantial cloud cover. But last night, too, the moon hung heavy and golden and low. A fat, juicy grape of a moon, glowing behind a curtain of clouds.

Once again, heading out the door just before 10 o'clock, I was reminded of my first forays into running nearly a decade and a half ago. Last night was much like that first summer, when I was sixteen. I was alone in a quiet neighborhood. The darkness so thick with humidity the sweat begins immediately and you feel like you're breathing through a moist cotton mask.

Make no mistake: I do love to walk. I love to walk until I'm bone tired and my feet pulse and my head is a pleasant fog of everything I've just seen while walking, drunk a little bit on all of the fresh air. But.

I do not like walking when I'd rather be running.

Last night I forced myself to walk. A mile. A mile and a quarter. But then, because my knee seemed to be holding up and I had just turned onto a straightaway...I ran.

I told myself as soon as another mile clicked over I would stop. And, surprisingly, when my watch beeped, I did. The knee was painfree, but it felt foreign. The hope nestled deep in my chest, like a small swallow beating against my rib cage, told me, Heed the strangeness. Tread carefully.

And for once, I listened.

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Today, more storms in the sandflats. In the early afternoon, I ran some errands. On the way back to work, a pop-up storm appeared. Summer storms have a specific smell to them in hot humid climates like Eastern NC, like the Midwestern town I call my hometown. I took this, writing:

More rain. The kind that lifts the warm dusty dirt from the pavement and floods your nose with the scent of baked earth. The kind where you sit in your car a moment longer, listening to the radio, and watch the raindrops bounce off the hood just because.

A pop-up storm like this is a reprieve from the heat. A reminder that so much of this life is cycles. That injury, when tended properly, often yields to health. That a sweet summer rain will blast away the stale barren earth.

That delving into the darkness often illuminates the light.