The Days Dwindle

...down to a precious few. Clear skies, bare trees. Cool mornings, short evenings.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s I was a big Carole King fan. I had some rocky, emotional times back then, and found one way I could throw off a bit of the gloom was to force the lyrics of one particular song into my groggy brain before I even threw off the covers. "You've got to get up every morning / With a smile on your face / And show the world / All the love in your he-ea-art...." Do I need to say this was not one of her bigger hits? But it was very catchy, and served as a reminder that the gift of living is one to be cherished, even by the grumpy.

Also in those days I was immersed in a mad and passionate affair with photography, going so far as to return to school and put myself through that dubious adventure, graduate school in art. It almost ruined my love affair for good--I became so critical! So-o-o-o postmodern. I deconstructed everything I came in contact with and learned to talk like a real snot (that's not a typo for snob--I said snot, and that's what I meant). But I digress. Photography, the activity and the art, brought to me a new way to see and appreciate the world--namely, as a study in illumination. It was a watershed day when I realized that life itself is light.

I digress again!! All I wanted to say is that I still love photographic images. For a long time, everywhere I ran I would see photographically, which often necessitated my coming back to a path or an area after a run and taking pictures of everything. While I don't do that so much any more, I do still have a special sensitivity to images of trails, paths, roads; they're forever on my radar.

In my current occupation I get to use the Internet for a variety of purposes (some of them only marginally related to what I'm doing, but-- whatever). Today I was copyediting a book on using PowerPoint and I got to verify the URL for a site called morguefile.com. Be still my heart! Thousands of beautiful, free images! See above-- I would run down that path in a New York minute. (Cue the Brooklyn Bridge--I'd run there in a minute, too.)

Photos are great because you don't really need words in order to look at them. One of the more deadening aspects of a graduate course in "aht" was the having to talk ad nauseum about what were quintessentially visual experiences. I don't want to sound ungrateful for my educational opportunity. I realize it was an exceptional privilege, and I'm happy to have had it. I'll just leave the subject with this observation: Some of the most cherished memories I carried away from my two years at that spiffy Oakland women's college were of running down loamy paths through groves of eucalyptus, feeling the sun filter through the fragrant leaves as I soaked up the images that rained down upon my consciousness while my urgent feet, muffled by the falling leaves, pounded out the miles around the perimeter of the campus. On a scale of 1 to 10, the classes were a 5.5, the runs were a 9.

See, this is a post about running.