Solid Lines of Broken Glass

The oval has its advantages and disadvantages

As long as it is runnable outside (and my broad definition of runnable is a ground without blatant snow or ice), it provides a labyrinth of sorting that removes much of the chafe and challenge of the road or sidewalk.

The first few laps are the blood vessels reacquainting themselves with what it feels like to truly open to the demands in front of them. A steady white ache in the legs that burns quickly, then transfers up into the airways; heart picking up speed, lungs quickening.

This is the gross of the gross, the top of the colander as the shakedown and sorting unfolds. It stays up top, fading a little, as the next levels drop

down

And we're into the world of breath and heart and muscles and time and mind. Not as in your face difficult as the first level for sure, but there are subtle demons that more or less pull out their deck chairs and settle in for the run. There is a stridency here, in spite of the laizzez fare attitude. Time is clearly the ring leader. Even when all else is settling into rhythmic trance, Time has but to raise the baton and everybody else is backseated to the push, pull or discomfort he decides to manifest.

This too, can be shaken down staying up top as the even finer level of the run settles down.

Will and Itent.

Two brothers, these: Will the stable and predictable; Intent, the well meaning but sometimes fragile of the two.

And below these

Is.

Follow the non-linear linear tangent, the laser line from the finest level of oval the the intuitive level outside of Oval.

This would be fine weather sidewalk barefooting; salted face and saline sheet pulled from the stars to skin surface level; portable shade slipping down the olfactory awning, sear and pull, sear and pull as steady as a commuter train as I roll on slightly downhill to the turaround point until

diamond in front of me; image sharpened by the dull of the shades, a shift out of harms way, followed by a decision tree.

To the left, intuition, IS, run without fear but without direction.

To the right, hierarchy and structure, linear thought, the steps that might deliver me safely from shredded feet.

Inevitably, the left wins. It HAS to win, if I have any hope of navigating these lines of broken glass. And the lines collect and disperse like water through a creekbed; swaths scattered by an invisible reclusive gem gardener. Each sparkle a part of the mandala that will be pushed and pulled by traffic and weather and feet and wheels and paws and dust and time. Each sparkle a little cutting machine.

So it's a chosen path to NOT think. To be, a little thanks with each step that no damage has been done, a little hope with each following step that no damage WILL be done. Each lift and pull of the nekkid foot a whirlpool of belief, faith, hope, and a little fear...

Mantra beyond mantra, just trying to be in the arms of the divine, knowing that karma and fate and will and luck and disregard are all playing a part, drifting like billowing silk over the melting tar and embedded ego-checkers, until I'm through.

IS as intuitive grappling

IS a place of No-Thought and being.

Still in the world of the dual, but inexorably bound to the non-dual.

Because 'Is' is the non-dual, another form appearing and dissolving in and off the oval.

namaste