Run in the rain

It's raining this morning when you wake up at 4:30 AM as planned and then reset the alarm for 5:00 AM so you can return to your strange dreams and then again to 5:30 AM when the threat of impending shame finally kicks you out of bed. It's 20 degrees colder this morning - low 40's, dark and raining when you get to the trailhead. You wear a light jacket, your glasses, you decide to bring a flashlight, start your timer and head out for a thirty minute run. Within the first five, you can feel that you haven't run in four or five days. You've forgotten how to breathe. When you hit the fifteen minute mark - the turn around point - you are soaked through to the skin, blind from rain-streaked and breath-fogged glasses, and already seeing things due to the tricks the bouncing circle of light in front of you plays. You take off the glasses and put them in your pocket. You turn off the flashlight. A vast improvement. You decide it is a metaphor for letting go and trusting the process. You like to let your mind run when you're out here. You think about this girl and how she realized she had magical powers when she was with you (maybe she always knew). She practiced that magic on you a little. Stretched and tried her wings. And you, you stopped analyzing and observing and allowed yourself to be mystified completely. Surrender. You were also thinking about how a human body goes from a state of equilibrium to distress very quickly if the environmental conditions aren't favorable. The rain keeps coming despite your shivering. Nature doesn't care if you can't see well enough to stay on the trail. Nature has an indecipherable plan, I don't doubt that, but what it doesn't have is compassion. I'm amazed for a moment that we humans are capable of it. That we ourselves generated it as an antidote to our own cruel nature. We learn to give it because we, ourselves, are so desperately in need of it. A Palestinian cries, "Why are they killing us?" in perfect harmony with an Israeli crying the same words.