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“The true martial arts teach non-resistance. The way of the trees bending in the wind. This attitude is far more important than physical technique. Never struggle with anyone or anything. When you’re pushed, pull; when you’re pulled, push. Find the natural course and bend with it. Join with nature’s power. Release attachment to outcomes. There is no ‘me’ left to do it. In forgetting yourself, you become what you do. Your actions are free, spontaneous, without ambition, inhibition, or fear.” Anonymous

It’s in the eyes. What it is varies from runner to runner but make no mistake: it’s there, and every ultra runner has it. Distance. Stillness. Fear. Acceptance. Exhaustion. Joy. Time. I am a photographer by choice and inclination, a writer by nature and a runner by something cellular that I have never truly understood. In none of these am I superb nor any better than generally competent, but in all of them I have learned that showing up is most of the battle, if battle it is, and that doing what there is in front of you to be done that day is the rest of it. I got involved recently in several ultra events as a photographer and while I can’t say that I have had epiphanies and revelations, I can tell you that not much about my working life has been the same since.

I responded to an offhanded Facebook request for a photographer who might possibly be interested in thinking about talking about shooting an upcoming 100K in the Willamette Pass area outside of Eugene. My response was pretty direct, Hell, yeah, sounds like artistic fun and some hard work; you can’t beat that…. Oh, and what about the money? (This is a paraphrase) Let’s have coffee and talk about it. So we did and so I did…find myself hiking into Pothole Meadows with too much weight around the middle and on my back. Shot some images, hiked back out went down the road over the hill, down the trail to the Lower Rosary Lake Creek and did it again. This was not your average photo shoot. More like a half marathon at elevation with weight training devices added in and the occasional photo op. One of my shooters told me later that he was worried that I might die. You and me both. The runners ran, the day went night, and the pictures caught some of it in a way that paid out the promise of the day in full measure.

Later on, I thought about what had happened out there. I realized that it had begun in Idaho at the Wild Idaho Endurance Runs (WIER) on the first weekend in August. I had gone out to shoot it, not really having given it much thought, as in, it’s a race, I shoot races, simple enough and besides, I’m doing Craig’s thing later on; this will be good practice. It took a couple of hours of talking to the 100-milers to get that this was no simple deal I had signed up for; this was beyond anything I had seen up close, more akin to a loosely organized vision quest, a tribal understanding without the drumming and face painting, a calmness that did not quite hide the underlying urgency that each of the runners had that it was time, that the gate was open and that the “real” world was to be left behind, that all of the concerns of the day to day were secondary and that the next 24/36/48 hrs were theirs and theirs alone, theirs to go forth and find out who they were that day.

I gave up my room at the inn down the road, slept in the front seat of my car if I slept at all, moved up the trails on foot and ATV and 38 hours later was finished shooting my first 100-miler. It is odd that, in as much as the effort is singular, everyone there, and now this includes me, becomes part of that community, and what they do and what I do is forever and intangibly linked; their efforts and mine, nowhere equal but complementary nonetheless, are bound together and because we care about what they do the tribe is united, community made stronger, made whole, made invulnerable, infinite and universal, made entirely human. Said Dennis upon finishing 38 hours after he began, his body bent severely to the left, “No, Michael, I’m not hurt. I’m just tired.” His smile broke through the dust and weariness like lightning in the summer sky.

Shooting ultra’s is physical. I put my sweat into the ground, my footprints into the trails. I wonder at the vistas and seek the comfort of the shade, the warmth of the sun. I have gone out before the runners get there to set up. I have worked hard to be good enough to be asked to do this work, to share this quest. I appreciate their effort. I wait for them in silence, aware of memory, ancient forests; the wild mountain sage and thyme change with the breeze. The runners’ footfall is signal; my response must equal theirs. Attention must be paid in similar ways: to light, to footing, to timing, to breath. Breathe in, exhale, find stillness, wait, shoot.

“Hey man, good work.” me to them. “Hey man, thanks for being here.” As old and honorable as Bedouin in the sands, as traders on the Silk Road, as Comanche hunting parties heading south under a sliding moon, we are here with our sweat and our blood; our dreams and our very best work will meet in this one moment. We are one and then we move on, the story to be told later around the modern versions of campfires and oases. It becomes legend. I felt like I understood the insides of the hunters who returned to Lascaux and started painting on the wall even as they ate their kill. The story needed telling; the immediacy of it spoke of a belief in a future that was bound to the past and present, all time in the single moment. My job, I realized, is to paint these stories on the wall. It takes everything I have on the day. And everything I have been. It has been a long time coming, this work of mine, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

This morning there was nothing to do about anything, so “I had to walk around the block like a little kid./ But kids don’t know,/ they can only guess.” John Prine said all that. Works for me; here, look at this image I made. I said that.

“They don’t know,/ they can only guess” is how most mornings feel these rainy spring days. I’ve been sleeping badly for weeks, beset, it seems, by a rolling dream journey in black and white and sometimes 3-D, a sweat inducing, dry mouth generating experience, which is emotionally and spiritually uncomfortable. I get up glad to be done with all the drama. Then I do the usual personal need things, make coffee and wonder I why I am not out “there,” running in the predawn, or more precisely, why I am not running at all. Running before daylight used to be my thing, my way of leaving the night demons behind, and welcoming myself to the day. “Used to be”: there’s the key.

My “used-to-be’s” need to be left behind and gone. They serve no purpose here. Melancholy, “used-to-be’s” close associate, will not get me out the door. Nor will depression, another old friend, parading about as sadness or anger. Nor, it turns out, will “Just do it, goddam it.” Getting up and being grateful for the orange streaks in the eastern sky, for the familiar morning quiet of my long lived-in house, is a better way to go, despite the lousy nights and the bad dreams, the aches and discomforts of aging. It means I am still here and able to get after “doin’ some bidness.”

If you are like me, all this happens in an instant, so instead of sitting about and mourning the loss of a quick ten-miler that never really happened, I do some pushups and go to a meeting, do my best to listen and sit still; when that fails to to get my engines running, I come home, lace up and walk around the block like a little kid, kicking the random stone and beginning to let the day happen. I’m not training for the Olympic Trials, I realize yet again. I am just doing what I can do with what I have to keep on keeping on. What choice do I really have?

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

“And when the going gets tough
When we look in the mirror and we want to give up
Sometimes we don’t even think we’ll try
Sometimes we cry “

Van Morrison, “Sometimes We Cry,” from The Healing Game, 1997

This song was around when I was in the heart of my last rodeo with crack cocaine. I had gotten sick and then gotten well and as a result thought I was bulletproof. I found my way to an island in the gulf, met a “girl.” We drank a little, drank a lot, laughed some and went off together that night. It seemed like we were destined to leave our mutually shared life sorrows behind and find our way to a better place. We went on like that for a while and before I knew it I had found my way back to the lost highway of my drug-laced writing and my addiction. We did not stand a piper’s chance in hell of getting out of our delusional alliance alive, and together, with our dreams intact. Crack cocaine does not support kindness for the good times gone by. Late one April night I found myself on my knees in the drifting smoke of another hopeless journey in search of peace, love and silence. The grey uncertain morning was coming hard, the light was unforgiving, indifferent. That lost highway of mine had had its way with me. I was done, the ride was over. In those moments there are no hallelujahs, burning bushes; there is just the creaking silence of another broke down o’l beast, slouching its way towards a lost grace before the end of things shows up and closes heaven’s gate.

These days I am many years clean and sober. But on days like today, grey and cold with a hard rain blowing flat from the north, there is no escaping the sense memories of those days. I can remember her laughter and the sunrise over the bay, I can remember thinking that I would get out of the hell I was in and we would walk forever on the beaches of our island in the gulf. We would watch the eagles soar on ancient thermals, and we believed that the rocks in the tide held the secrets of our dreams. It didn’t work out that way. On days like today, I will find a sad melancholy movie or tv show to watch, in which someone dies or someone’s dreams come true, I will get way too involved and sometimes I cry.

And then the sun comes up the next morning or the rain keeps blowing’ in and I get back to what I do to be who I am. I have no choice but to leave what is done behind and make the best of what is here for me to do. And like I used to do in the middle of long runs, suddenly, inexplicably to me, sometimes I cry.

Image Credit

Photographs by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Time to get off Facebook as a political forum, me. Mo’ betta, time for me to get to work changing shit with the folks to whom the results actually matter. Social change is where you find it. For me it ain’t here. Good luck to all of us; it’s likely to be a bumpy ride.

The image captures tools at rest; the gloves imply a human working hand. I shot this image because the light from a setting sun caused the handles and the wedge to glow, as if satisfied with their day’s work. The absent wood chopper is present in the objects at rest (Giacometti called it the presence of absence in his sculpted figures). It is an ongoing story of ritual, survival, and the peace that is often a part of the day’s end and work well done.

Getting off the Facebook chatter highway is related to many things, not the least of which was my growing sense of wasting my time in useless political debate for my own personal satisfaction. The issues we face as a nation are too big for a Trump-like aggrandizement of self. In other words, Michael , get up off yer butt, go to the woodshed (as metaphor) and start choppin’ wood. (Van Morrison once said that in song about his process).

Simply put, git to work.

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.