aging

Facing Up To It

August 30, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

“Endurance? You’ve only got to get out there and do it. Face up to it: Man was meant to run.” –Percy Cerutty. I am swimming upstream. Come the end of Summer, cool air, touch of Fall, the beginning of the end of things in this cycle, time to take stock, stock up, buy school supplies, bring on the next chapter. With age, my age, comes nostalgia and excitement sometimes in equal doses. Once I was sailing on Lake Superior when the mast broke a long way from shore. We drifted for hours, panicked a little, got it back together, caught a break with a shift in the wind and finally got back to shore the help of neighbor who had seen us drifting away. It had been Summer, lazy, easy and sweet when we set out and Fall, chill, gray and foreboding, the few hours later when we returned to shore. Yeah, we were meant to run, we are also meant to ‘get out there and do it” by whatever means available, every single day, age and weight and troubles notwithstanding, on account of the river waits for no salmon and time waits for no man.

Waddayagonnado

August 23, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz 1 Comment

“There is nothing quite so gentle, deep, and irrational as our running—and nothing quite so savage, and so wild.” –Bernd Heinrich. It is no longer a matter of how fast or how far or how fast over how far for me. It used to be that way. It had to be that way. Now the “gentle deep and irrational” along with the “so savage and so wild” is mostly to be found in the writing, in the shooting, in getting to the high places, the hard places, the dark ledges on the trail and seeing “beyond the shadows”, in wrasslin’ to be free of yesterday and tomorrow… Hello Mr. Day, I’m comin’ for ya and I can tell you this, I need a goddam break from another day of shrug, what the hell, wadddayagonnado. You get my drift?

Roll On-Part Two

May 22, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Part 2
I had lunch with an old friend yesterday. We talked how we do about this and that, people and miles, races and writing, images and books to come, you know the stuff we do. It occurred to me that he is going more gently into what’s coming than am I and that seems a good thing. For him. For me, it’s not where I come from in the way back when and having given so much time to wrong turns and bad choices there is no gentle going for me, only the steady beat of getting down the road with whatever there is to do today. Roll on you rollin’ river…someone with rhythm said that.