Run With Mu

Just back from a week at the Colorado Chautauqua near Boulder, where our family has made a tradition of renting a cabin every summer to temporarily escape the Texas heat. The wonderful aspect of the Chautauqua is the mix of culture and physical activity: days of long runs on mountain trails; evenings at the symphony and theater. I mixed daily trail runs at altitude with concerts of Wagner orchestral music, a fast-moving but oddly effective performance of King Lear at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and great meals and good times with family and friends.

What to take to the cabin – and what not to take – is always a big part of the pre-planning. It’s easy to be over-ambitious with the cabin book bag, since you never have as much time to sit and read as you think you will. I did enjoy my time with Shohaku Okumura’s highly accessible and insightful book on Dogen’s “Genjokoan,” which I urgently recommend to anyone wrestling with the false paradoxes of Dogen’s philosophy, but Thoreau, John Muir, and other choices went largely unread. When you’re in the middle of nature, it does seem a bit superfluous to read about it. You’re there; experience it! And experience it I did.

Other baggage, mostly mental, was packed somewhat loosely in its own compartments. I’m not talking about any major current issues; just the usual bundle of minor neuroses I assume most of us are lugging around most of the time: work, ailing senior family members, whether we left on the light in the bathroom back home (this one kept falling out of the bag all week). We often pack things in our mental suitcase without even realizing we’re doing it. But when I sat in the mornings on the cabin’s screened porch or ran on the trails and began my daily “inward hike,” all of those anxieties and worries came spilling out. It’s amusing (and yeah, more than a little annoying at times) to find what we’ve stuffed into our braincase and how trivial (yet persistent) most of it is, despite our best efforts to close it shut and leave it on the closet shelf back home.

There are ways to let that baggage go, and running technical trail in the mountains is some of the best zazen I know. When you’re hurtling down an incline on a rocky mountain trail, you really can’t afford to think of anything but all of those rocks beneath your feet and how you’re going to get over and around them. To reach the trailhead again without busting your ass or doing a face plant, you have to let things go and become “running the trail” — embodying the trail, running, and your breathing simultaneously. At that moment, you are not just running trail. You are, quite literally, Trail Running, and so is the universe. At that moment, there is nothing else at all.

You can lose your focus a little more easily running on roads because the surface is more predictable and doesn’t require the same attention, tempting you to be more easily diverted by the passing scenery. And all that mental baggage spills open again. But, as with sitting zazen, we can always return to our breath while running roads or trails, become Running, and just leave all of that junk behind us — like the rocks or pavement under our swiftly moving feet.

We often worry about what to carry or not carry when we run – water, energy gels, GPS devices, etc. — but we tend to pack a lot of unnecessary mental baggage regardless. What baggage are you carrying on your daily “runs” through road, trail, and life? Breathe in, breathe out and become intimate with how you can let it go, one step at a time. And don’t worry about checking with Baggage Claim later.