Cold Mountain

God, if I could sprout wings and fly, he thought. I would be done from this place, my great wings bearing me up and out, long feathers hissing in the wind. The world would unfurl below me like a bright picture on a scroll of paper and there would be nothing holding me to ground. The watercourses and hills passing under me effortless and simple. And me just rising and rising till I was but a dark speck on the clear sky. Gone on elsewhere. To live among the tree limbs and cliff rocks. Elements of humanity might come now and again like emissaries to draw me back to the society of people. Unsuccessful every time. Fly off to some high ridge and perch, observing the bright light of common day.

I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside me and it'll be me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me, out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it's finally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times ten thousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold onto the world tight someday. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as your change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. Th difference between the man who cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Fahreheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

I am NOT a runner

but I ran the Disneyland Half Marathon on Monday - 4 minutes slower than last year's time: 2:34. I'm pretty pleased with that. And this time I ran dressed as a pirate! I also didn't feel like my rib was going to bust out of my body, which I felt last year.

So a few days after I ran that race, I decided (I don't know what possessed me) to register for the North Face Endurance Challenge Half Marathon. I know I'm not a runner when I register to run the second shortest distance in the challenge - the longest distance is an Ultra Marathon - gulp!

I just went for a run on part of the course this morning and honestly I don't know how the fast runners do it - I kept up my normal pace (10-11 mm) but how people who go 7 or 8 mm are going to do it over that rough terrain I have no idea! I took a fall and had to cut my run short...

But we'll see!

Borrowing a script

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941