I was relatively new to Portland. I wanted to go for a hike, but I didn’t know my way around the area. I found I-5 easily enough, but decided I didn't want to take it. I roamed through residential streets for miles on end, occasionally hitting a commercial area. I finally wound up in the northwest hills and zig-zagged through hillside mansions. I rode through woodlands, found a hiking path in Forest Park--the largest urban park in the U.S.--got out of my CR-V, walked for a bit, stretched, walked some more, jogged at a leisurely pace for a mile, then sprinted, really hauling ass on a very slight downhill grade, almost flat but not quite, the weather still warm enough to really loosen my muscles and joints so that I could maximize flexibility, torque, agility, and dexterity in all of my muscles, loosening them enough to get at the extremes of their limits and into muscles that were all-but-impossible-to-activate before I really kicked the physical activity up a notch.
I could feel the tiniest knots of muscle I hadn’t even realized had been stressors, extending or flexing them just right to open capillaries that may never have had such a volume of blood cells per second flowing through them, the feelings like tiny explosive bubbling sensations, a release that started in one area, perhaps my shoulder, and then radiated a sensation of warmth and the feeling of being loved down my arm, across my chest, into my neck, creeping along sinewy fibers of muscle, rippling them into looser, stronger, and healthier muscles, until my awareness of myself as an independent entity separate from the earth and my surrounding environment ceased.
My perspective in those moments: I am panther, I am devourer, I absorb everything, the intricate patterns within individual leaves on a tree illuminated by sunlight from a specific angle in the sky telling most people "what time it is" but telling me, because I'm listening, why that leaf is fluorescent yellow at this moment from my specific position in relation to it as I'm running and then why it has a deeper green within it a few strides later, strides lasting less than a second, all the while paying attention to what is in the path in front of me, whether my hips, knees, elbows, neck, and other joints are a aligned or not, whether my heart rate is reaching a maximum level, and whether I should try to push to that level or change speeds in any way, if I should grab that branch "coming at me" as I run toward it, if I should say “Hi, beautiful” or blink an eye or smile wryly or do a cartwheel or look into the eyes of the sexy young woman jogging slowly toward me from the other direction on the path.
I do them all—in my head—and enjoy each one thoroughly before deciding, within a second, to look smilingly into her eyes as I run by at a slightly slower pace, just slow enough to soak up her beauty, and as I pass I look back up into the trees, the endlessness of trees along the paths up and down hills widening and narrowing here and there while straightening and curving everywhere. I look up to see not particular leaves but a fuller expanse of the canopy, shifting my focus down to a single leaf and then broadening it back to the widest possible focus including my peripheral vision, seeing the path ahead in focus while somehow still being a blur, eyeing the dense and varied green vegetation on either side of the path, and noticing the blue sky peaking through like irregularly-shaped pin holes while the whole of the experience continues in the most spontaneous ways yet always within my control.
I listen to my body. My body speaks to me. It tells me how it's feeling and it responds engagingly to the movements I choose and create. I am autonomous because of these things in ways I wish I could share with others. I have my own past for comparison of these experiences and they are shouting out something more extraordinary than any of the other exceptional experiences I've had. Everything is coming together. My understanding of everything—everything I need to understand for now—is accelerating in accordance to the acceleration of the intensity at which I am pushing my body. The processing of thought accelerates as greater levels of oxygen reach the brain and if the body is in alignment the possible thoughts that can be reached are beyond what I am currently capable of imagining. I can’t even see the beginning of the endless horizon. Then again, few ever reach their potentials of body, mind, and emotion. In the scheme of things, I’m just trying to head in the direction of the endless horizon. It feels like I’m running the right way.
This is what I mean when I say that the body determines the nature of one's thoughts, the rhythms, and even the content. If I am looking at leaves, I am thinking about leaves; if I am moving my legs and arms while running and am feeling the intense sensations then I am thinking about my arms and legs and how they are moving. The thoughts and actions occur simultaneously or in such a rapid-fire sequence that I can only perceive them as occurring simultaneously; they blend so fast that they form a flexible web in flux, a web I can seemingly touch and see and smell and taste and hear; the web is my nervous system, my body’s mind, sensory neurons firing at alarming speeds, speeds I cannot control, speeds that open pathways to speeds greater still, and when I sense and perceive this acceleration through thought I expand and contract simultaneously becoming the smallest particle dancing along a singular wave, a wave flowing along a string toward the unknown and unknowable, my being as particle appearing perceptibly in another universe during a momentary eclipse of its laws without ever exiting the space I occupy in this here and now.
Having exhausted my hunger for devouring the path and sucking in the light and colors penetrating my eyes, I slow to a walk. I’m breathing deeply, panting even, physically spent, entirely light headed, and feel like passing out. I might need to puke, no I think I'm okay; Oh My God that was intense! I stand up straight, blink my eyes, suck in a dee-eep breath, hold it, and then arch my back into as-close-to-perfect-alignment-as-I-can-get, pushing my shoulders down and back as far as I can while keeping my spine straight from the top of my head to the tip of my tailbone, my abdominal muscles tensed just enough to balance the position with the complementary help of my lower back muscles while my hips, knees, and ankles shift slightly into better alignment as I flex just the right combination of muscles … until I accidentally activate two muscles adjacent to one another when I only needed the one on the left before consciously willing the other muscle I did not intend to flex to relax while maintaining the same tension in the muscle I wanted to flex.
Time elapsed? About thirty seconds. I’m loose enough to balance myself quickly and, as I do, my breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure lower to healthy, relaxed-state ranges. My body feels as if I had never moved at all except for the sensation of perspiration and the wonderful feelings of euphoria, the oxygen flooding my blood stream creating tender aches in my muscles, telling me through emotion and thought that they adore me for giving the gift of those movements, perceptions, and sensations.
I stand still, straight as an arrow, feeling my body, all of its parts tensing and relaxing in a flow and rhythm that gives me a sense of the whole of my being within myself almost as if my body was disappearing from the surrounding environment, almost as if I was separate from me. I shift consciousness from specific thoughts to the web of my thoughts to the dissolution of thought to a fulfilling emptiness.
The light of my being comes back in fragments, breaking through the darkness just like the blue sky broke through the trees in the woods all around me, my being just a canopy shading me from the light before becoming the light, the light forming crystals, the lines of the crystals curving three-dimensionally into a cubist montage of colors with shocking geometrical shapes, myself forming in front of my eyes, the world part of me and I a part of the world. Neurons fire again full-throttle and I gulp in air, more gluttonous than desperate, smiling open-mouthed while swallowing and keeping my nostrils open to snort up even more of it. I smell the trees, the grass, and the dust from the path. My sweat smells sweet and sour. I can’t explain it.
That's when my imagination went to play. I thought of my sweat as Teriyaki sauce and pineapple juice then coconut oil and black moist soil before settling on malt liquor quacamole butter. I could harvest the flavor, soak some potato chips in it, and sell it at an organic food store. I could excrete strawberry jam in August, vegetable oil in September, caramel in October, lavender in November, Clamato juice in December, jenever in January, shark blood in February, rattlesnake venom in March, penicillin in April, chicken satay in May, bellini in June, and the blink of an eye next July.
There’s nothing like sprinting on a dirt path in the nether regions of Forest Park.
No comments:
Post a Comment