Insight Trails

In Praise of Falling

By Jon Berry

 “HOW OLD IS THAT KID?” We were four miles into the Leatherman’s Loop trail race Sunday, running through a woods in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Westchester County, NY, when the guy next to me asked the question. “Good question,” I replied, and turned back to ask. “Hey, how old are you?”

    And in an instant – just as our tow-headed, skinny, young friend chirped “11!” and we marveled back “Wow!” “Nice job!” – it happened. My left foot hooked under a tree root and I toppled forward like a felled tree – knees, chest, elbows, hands – in the first of what turned out to be three full-frontal face-plants. Luckily, I had an all-dirt landing; no rocks. I got up, made a joke (“Well, that’s out of the way”), and started anew.

    Rule #1 of trail running says you never, ever take your eye off the trail in front of you. But in 6.2 miles fording up-to-your-chest stream crossings, crossing suck-your-shoes-off mud flats, scrambling up and down hills, and hopping over more fallen trees, rocks and roots than you could imagine, at some point, inevitably, you forget.

    Falling is part of the experience. It wasn’t the first time recently that I heard that idea. A week before, going to church with my dad and brother in Indiana, we heard it in the Easter Sunday sermon. An “unwillingness to fall” is normal, the pastor said; no one likes to fall. But falling is “the central truth of the Christian gospel”: “Life springs from death,” not only in the Christian belief in resurrection but from “the many little deaths” of life. My friend Bill, who is Jewish, says the larger spiritual lesson of death-and-rebirth has made Easter his favorite Christian holiday.

    In falling, we come face-to-face with our smallness. And that’s OK. We gain humility (I love that "humble" and "humus" -- dirt -- have the same root). We learn. We move forward.

    In his new book, In the Valley of the Shadows, Biblical scholar James Kugel calls this recognition of smallness the starting point of belief. “Religion is first of all about fitting into the world.” We may think we're masters of our destiny. But we’re still subject to forces we can’t really conceive. And, in our “modern, clumsy” way, we moderns are in some ways less adept at relating to those forces than people in ancient times. Faced with the unexpected (as Kugel was, with a cancer diagnosis that, fortunately, he survived), we realize like the author of Psalm 102 that “all things tatter and fade like a garment” in the face of a power that stays “the same,” whose “years never end.”

          There’s always something larger. As the singer-songwriter Steve Earle says in the song that seems the centerpiece of his new album, “God ain’t me.” It’s not an easy concept to grasp in New York, where people can seem so big and the world so small. It’s one reason I go back to the farm country in Indiana where my family's from; you can almost feel history unpeel there, today’s sights and sounds giving way to the Great Depression and my Dad and his brothers damming the nearby stream to go swimming; travelers on the Civil War-era underground railroad stealing their way to freedom across these fields to the Quaker safe houses in New Garden; and hundreds of years earlier, Native Americans coming to the swampy woods here to hunt. Sometimes it all seems to be alive at once -- a feeling that is as awe-inspiring as any I know.

    Being small means surrendering, at least once in a while. Try as we may, we can’t control everything. "We're not in the outcomes business," as a friend says. That pretty much describes Sunday's face-plant #2. Coming down the last little slope of the race, I carefully put my foot down into gloppy, black mud – and the foot just slid back and I went down with a plop. I laughed again, and looked around. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day. The mud felt all right.

    So we try with our might but remember above all to enjoy the day (hello again, Ecclesiastes). That essentially seemed to be the message before the race from Danny Martin, the former Catholic priest who is the Leatherman’s spiritual director. He urged the runners to look on the day as an exercise in sustainability: All the environmental good works we do will mean nothing if we don't take the wonder of the earth into our hearts. It was a fitting preamble to the Irish/Navajo blessing he then led us in, that there is beauty before us, behind us, below us, above us, and within us.

    An hour later, arriving at the last, largest, deepest stream crossing, aka the “Splashdown,” just short of the finish line, it seemed only right, then, to end the day not with a ginger wading-across but -- why not?! -- to instead stretch my arms high, let out a "whoop!" and take a big, arcing water-face-planting dive forward…

That’s I.T.

For more on the Leatherman’s Loop, click here. Coverage of this year's race, including photos, are on the site. The Navajo/Irish blessing is in the FAQ section. Or go back to my Feb. 27 post, "A Spring-Seeking Blessing" which quotes it (amazing how this year's endless winter did turn to spring); click here.

To read the full transcript of "Our Own Resurrection," the Easter Sunday message at West Richmond Friends (IN) Meeting, delivered by Kelly Burk, director of religious life at Earlham College, click here. The quotation she cited is from the book Leaving Church, by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor.

For more on James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadows, or to buy a copy, click here.

For more on Steve Earle's new album, "I'll Never Get Out of this Life Alive," or to buy a copy, click here. To view Joan Baez's cover of "God Is God," click here.    

Practice: Running into Happiness

By Jon Berry

I'D JUST TURNED THE CORNER ONTO ELLIOT ROAD ON an 8-mile run from my Dad’s farm to the Indiana High Point Wednesday evening when that strange sensation returned. I did a quick inventory. Nothing actually wrong. No pains or strains. Just a feeling of lightness. Then it hit me. Right. I was experiencing happiness.

    Sealing the conclusion: I’d started singing along with the Springsteen song on my iPod (“I ain’t here on business, baby, I'm only here for fun…”). And my hands jet-winged out as I turned the corner, then started keeping time like a backup singer in an old Motown video.

    My mind drifted to wondering if Shakespeare had, in fact, gotten it right in the sonnets, that in midlife, with its attendant maturity, sadness, and clear-eyed realism (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red, than her lips red…”), happiness does not recede but grows more precious and real.

    How I got to this point, I don’t know. Eight months ago, hitting one of those emotional bottoms that come in middle age, I’d made a vow to get myself to a better place. We blew up the TV (OK, not exactly, more like canceled the cable service, but I’ve always loved that line from the John Prine song).

    I cleared the pantry of all the foods I reflexively reached for when I felt what the Buddhists call shenpa, that “tightening, tensing, closing-down,” poisoning, hooked sensation, in the words of the author and teacher Pema Chodron, of wanting to withdraw and “not be where we are” that can be set off by an event (“someone criticizes you”) or just unease, restlessness, or “insecurity of living in a world that is always changing.”

    I recommitted to meditating, and, moreover, to doing anything I could to keeping it fresh – including creating a guided meditation playlist of Motown songs. (Amazing, when you listen, how Psalms-like certain songs are – “As I walk this land of broken dreams, I have visions of many things…” What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?) I started reading more; started training more – running, biking, swimming; tried yoga (ha); stopped drinking; tried to reach out more to friends and family...and other things.

    But I can't honestly say whether those resolutions were cause-and-effect to my running up Elliott Road, smiling first at the miles of rolling farmland stretching to the horizon in all directions, then at the friendly black Lab who came out to greet me, then at the cow that wandered into the road, while I occasionally snatched a lyric to sing (“you were only waiting for this moment to arise”).

    Nor can I really explain the other similar feeling running a 10k in Central Park in New York the previous sunny, bloom-filled Sunday with a friend and his daughter, then joining a larger group for a walk. Or going to concerts, museums, and dinners recently. Or, back in November, running two miles of the NYC Marathon with the “running priest” of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (who eventually sped ahead to make his commitment to lead a 5:30 Mass).

    Which is the problem with happiness. We can do all we can to make a place for it in our lives. We can follow the self-help advice to “choose happiness.” We can pray for it. But in the end, it’s ephemeral. It comes. And it goes. There’s good reason “happiness” is so close “happenstance.” Both share the Middle English root “hap” which means “luck.” More than “pleasure,” “satisfaction,” or “joy,” happiness means “good fortune.” We can create space for it, but not expect it. When it comes, it is a surprise. One friend says he feels “attacked” by happiness. Rather than take credit, we can only give thanks.

    I’ve recently started reading In the Valley of the Shadows, the new book by James Kugel, a Biblical scholar and Harvard professor. The subject is far from happiness. It’s a meditation, set off by the author’s treatment for cancer, on the meaning of religious belief. The book is strikingly self-aware and beautifully written, perhaps most memorably for its depiction of how the author describes, when he receives his diagnosis, “the background music” of life suddenly stops. Life grows silent. He experiences a primal feeling of being very, very small. 

    Turning to Ecclesiastes, he realizes anew that we pass through seasons of life (which, he says, translates in Ecclesiastes as “Everyone is in a season, [for] there is a time of [doing] each thing in this world” – not “for everything there is a season” of the Byrds song). But we “never quite succeed” in understanding life. There is always “something hidden.” Life, to quote the original Hebrew, is “hebel” – not so much “vanity” (“all is vanity,” as Ecclesiastes is usually translated) as a quality of being “fleeting” and “ungraspable.”

    To the list of “To-Do’s” for happiness that I’ve worked through these past eight months, I’d add one more, then: try to have faith. In her book, Faith, the Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg says that in Buddhism, hard times are considered “the proximate cause of faith.” If we open our hearts and minds to take in suffering, there is healing –“not because the suffering itself is redemptive or healing” but because if we open ourselves fully in the face of suffering, we let in all life – including the capacity for healing, love, joy, and happiness. One of the meanings of saddah, the word for faith in Buddhism, she notes, is hospitality.

    I’ve been wondering if – in contast to the drawing inward of illness that Kugel describes, there’s a centrifugal force in happiness that propels us outward into connection. My friend who describes happiness as an attack says one of his first impulses, when he experiences happiness, is to tell someone. I wonder if it’s an impulse in all creatures. I’ve always loved how my dog, about 15 minutes into a walk, turns back and smiles. “Isn’t this great?” he seems to be saying to us. I wonder if the same thought goes through his mind when running toward a tennis ball we’ve just thrown, he suddenly breaks stride and, for no reason beyond the joy of it, leaps through the air. “Isn’t this great?”

    After 40 minutes of running, I reach Hoosier Hill. In truth, while it’s the highest point in Indiana, the "peak" (1,257 ft. elevation; pictured throughout) is only an ever-so-slight incline higher than the surrounding woods and farmland. I always stop to read the logbook where “summiteers” record their impressions. There’s usually some wry humor.  “Not as hard as Mt. Whitney,” note Carol and Jim from Baltimore, who have now summited 35 states' high points. “Raining. Morale low. Rations lower. But summit gained! Looking for safe descent,” quips Brooke, from Palo Alto, CA. “Failed in our first attempt to reach the summit 2 years ago. We needed help from Garmin GPS to locate,” jokes another person. “Meet me here when the levy breaks,” writes C.S.

    But then I come across a different kind of message, speaking directly to happiness, and it puts a goose-bumpy coda on the week. “Happy to be here today. Tomorrow makes 2 years clean. I am truly thankful for my life. Life ain’t so shitty.” He signs his name, and then writes “Indiana boy,” then “p.s. Thanks, God!”

That’s I.T.

I’ve lab-tested this 20-minute Motown guided meditation recently, and personally have found it happiness enhancing. Who knows, you may start the day with a dance move. Here’s the list: “What Does It Take (to Win Your Love)” (Junior Walker); “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted” (Jimmy Ruffin); “Mercy Mercy Me” (the marvelous Marvin Gaye); “Tracks of My Tears” (Smokey Robinson); “What’s Going On” (Gaye); and, to end with uplift (hey, this is Motown), “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” (Marvin Gaye and Tammy Tyrell) and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Marvin & Tammy). All can be previewed on YouTube.

For more on James Kugel’s In the Valley of the Shadow, or to buy a copy, click here.

For more on Sharon Salzberg’s Faith, or to buy a copy, click here.

The Puma Chodron quote is from the Shambala Sun article, “How We Get Hooked and How We Get Unhooked.” To read the article, click here.

And for more on Hoosier Hill, the Indiana high point, click here, here, or here.   

Practice: A Spring-Seeking Blessing

By Jon Berry

THE GEORGE HARRISON LYRIC GOT THIS year right: Little Darling, it has been a long, cold, lonely winter. More snow. More bone-chilling days. More people I know going through pain, loss, hardship, and harrowing near-misses that there-but-for-the-grace-of-God could have been worse, than any winter I can remember.

    This morning I walked the dog up to the Aqueduct Trail to see if I could go out for a run there this afternoon. No go. It’s still a river of ice.

    But in nature there is more sun – almost two hours more a day than the first of the year. The thaw has begun. As always, it’s not fast enough for me -- nature’s version of the 12-step world’s most sweetly humbling three words, “in God’s time.”

    A day in the 60s, then snow. A spring-like downpour beats away patches of ice; I look earthward with expectation (a.k.a. a “premeditated resentment,” another great 12-step turn of phrase). Any crocuses?  No. The next day, cold blows in; the puddles are frozen again.

    It’s natural in this in-between season for a mind to drift forward, then back. After all, Nature is going back-and-forth. Maybe the trick is to follow Nature’s lead: Bring a bit more light into our interior lives each day. Force Spring into our hearts, like the forsythia and quince on the kitchen counter (thanks, Robin). Get outdoors when we can, but keep the stocking-hats and gloves handy.

    I sometimes feel a bit old to call myself a runner. My PRs are likely long gone. But there’s a new season to look forward to. A friend, Stuart, called from the city this morning to report he’d just finished a couple loops of the reservoir in Central Park, and, yeah, it was icy, but it felt good. “When are you getting out?” “Now.” “Go to it.” "Right."

     Three weeks to Spring. By the Equinox, we’ll have another hour a day of sun. Sunset at 7 p.m. Imagine. Soon I’ll be sing-songing Cummings as I slosh along the trail in mudluscious just-spring.

    Leatherman’s Loop, a 10k rite of spring at the Ward Pound  Ridge Reservation in Katonah, NY, is two months away. It’s is romp of a run, coursing through streams, hills, woods, and a mud flat that last year almost pulled my shoes off, then more hills, winding up at the “splashdown,” a water crossing that, depending on recent rainfall, can be shin-to-chest deep. You finish soaked, muddy, happy, dizzy with gratitude. What’s better than that?

    A blessing is given every year before the race. It’s a sublime moment. The thousand runners pawing at the starting line fall silent all at once, and Danny Martin, the Irish-born retired priest who is the Leatherman’s spiritual counselor (he calls the race “a communion more than a competition”), gives the following prayer, a goosebumpily wonderful reminder of the grace of waking up to the world, perfect for this regrounding time of year:

Beauty before me when I run.

Beauty behind me when I run.

Beauty below me when I run.

Beauty above me when I run.

Beauty beside me when I run.

Beauty within me when I run.

I see Beauty all around.

In beauty may I walk.

In beauty may I see.

In beauty may we all be.

That’s I.T.

For more on the Leatherman’s Loop, including photos, stories, and information on signing up for future years’ races (sorry, 2011 was booked up long ago), go to the race’s web site. The blessing is in the FAQ section. Click here for more. 

To see how much more sun we’re getting each day, search the Internet for “sunrise sunset.” Or click here.

I didn’t realize it until researching this piece, but “Here Comes the Sun” actually did come out of a tough winter for George Harrison. The details are on the Wikipedia entry for the song. Or just go out and buy Abbey Road. It has one of the two best sides of a rock album that I know.

Last, for the full text of ee cummings' "In-Just Spring," go to the Poetry Foundation website (click here) and search by the poem's title.