My own personal road to perdition is lined with understatement, delusion, lies, ghosts, and prayers and sometimes, at 3:00 AM; the ghost women, who forgive my atrocities with a “well we’re past all that now and besides it wasn’t all all that bad,” show up in fragmentary images of destruction and renewal. So I need to stop apologizing, get back on my feet, get my sorry ass into the “right now” and keep on keeping on the way I am. I’m still here, you bastards (me, my addictions), you didn’t kill me… and I ain’t quit.

From a very different perspective, Yogi Berra once said “ when you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Well, okay then. Best thing I did today was to call my daughter who has upper respiratory misery. All a guy can do is stay in the game. Back to Yogi, Tarmac Meditations started out as a bunch of short pieces about me running and thinking about stuff. It changed into an umbrella for whatever I was writing at the moment, usually something about a moment in my past, an effort to explore my own voice and style as a writer or more accurately as a person/writer in recovery. Along the way I became an OK sports/ landscape photographer. The not so subtle fork in the road had showed up. But “Life” had it’s own plans for me in the form of several strokes and some seriously debilitating illness. I lost nearly all of my physicality, half of my vision and a lot of the fine motor control it takes to type. What to do and how to do it?

Just taking “it”, as Yogi suggested, looks like a potpourri of slow walking, light lifting, much complaining and some serious attention to good practices in handling my recovery. The physical deficits were bedeviling my ongoing efforts to shoot and write, let alone just getting to the store. Sounds awful when I read that last sentence back to myself. But it wasn’t awful at its heart, it was just hard. The long-distance runner I used to be employed all the tricks of the trade. The mental con games, the search for ways to push without causing more damage (gently) the use of “pacing” and “partitioning”, known more simply as going slower, taking breaks and REST. So here I am, healthier, stronger, older, humbled and looking for a new beginning.

It may be that the fork in the road is all in the mind and the person who lives inside our hearts and souls will make the effort to let clarity happen. Also known as “being here now”. I am still running (walking every now and then, lifting and shooting). I am slowly getting back to the world in the ways I know, having learned the most important lessons of my life. Letting go does NOT mean giving up. It means more precisely that the long distance runner in me has come to know how best to let the “run” come to him on the day; and whatever the results, pretty, ugly, awful or so-so that there are some days when “it” all comes together, as if in a dream. Those remarkable moments when the “flow” of a perfect turn in the deep powder, or a sunset’s back-lit miler’s stride in the stretch turn  is embraced once again, if only briefly.

I have come to know that keeping on is my only choice. That the shooting and the writing will be here only  so long as I am willing to use what I have learned from not running. it is part of my new life going forward, slower, humbled,  and grateful for the opportunity to make the miles ahead my own.

Photo Credits

Photos by Michael Lebowitz – All rights reserved.

“Tom Petty, who died Monday, was tuned in to the blank spaces between our catastrophes and triumphs, when we are desperately trying to sort out what comes next. When we take to running.”

The New Yorker, October3, 2017.

It has been that kind of week and, it is only Tuesday. RIP Tom petty (1950-2017)

A guy I know, from the running community here in town, said hello while we were waiting for coffee. I see him around from time to time and he always asks me, with a smile, “where is your camera?” and “are you shooting any events?”

I told him that I had cut back pretty much entirely but that I was still thinking I could run an event sometime in the near future. “My body is unwilling for the moment”, is what I said. “But my dreams are still alive”. Then he asked me if I liked poetry, I said, “yeah”. He said, “Langston Hughes wrote about dreams.”

Later I went home and looked it up.

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes, 1902 – 1967

Photo Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz – All rights reserved.

At the end of the affair your anger destroyed me,
mine diminished me.

“When hope is gone the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.”

Rain water on window glass has no meaning save that it is raining here,
or perhaps, that rain has been here.

“If you write it, has it happened twice:…” this life of mine might be more complicated than I thought.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I was standing by the window that early morning, just like I did every morning in those years. The sky was often dark and cloudy, the window streaked with last night’s rain. In the evanescent glow from the street lamps I watched the same impossible nightly show, the one where the hooligans in their gangster Borsalinos, their thirties Packards, their dolls and their dames all fought it out with Thompson sub machine guns amid snarling, teeth-bared violence. I asked whoever it was that I was with to have a look. All they ever saw was an empty early morning street, parked cars, the occasional wandering dog, distant headlights that created shadows dancing in the mist.

One morning, just like all the others, in the midst of the recurrent St. Valentine’s Day massacre outside the window, three runners came by. They were talking as they moved easily through the gunfire, laughing in the early morning rain; they were getting ready for the day.

I watched them from the living room window as they went around the corner, and then I ran back to the rear bedroom window where I could see them turn down the road to the beach. Their laughter hung in the breeze. The sound of their footsteps echoed through the house, like the whisper of an unseen tide.

I turned from the window, caught sight of a pair of scruffy runners on the closet floor, ancient mud dried to dust around them.

Window patrol, Charlie, she said, ain’t nobody there.

She shook her head and motioned for me to come back to the couch or the kitchen or wherever it was that we were getting high that morning.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Last week I did a three-hour meditation
on my past lives.
(no laughin’ matter).
I remembered tall grass,
rocks, wind.
Always wind.

Mountain fastness,
Frozen passes, river banks,
red with sunset.
Far off, the fires of home.

I am always not yet there.

These pasts remind me
that there are markers to follow,
Pathways in the foothills, the blowing grass, past misted lakes,
Now I am born Wolf.
I am so very tired.

The sun was gone when I wakened
to an uncertain night.
My guide asked me what I had learned.

I told her that in the beginning,
as in this fleeing moment,
I am here alone.

I step into the relentless now.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.