Micro-Essay - In-Between
Aww hello, dear friend, it’s only taken about twenty-four miles and five thousand feet of running, power hiking, and shuffling up and down the mountain trolls of Santee. This friend I speak of sends electoral currents down my hips, hamstrings, quads, knees, calves, ankles, and feet, right down to the end of my toes.
A feeling of pain with every step forward, a feeling of pleasure with another step forward, a change between action and reaction. Every step takes me through transitions of storytelling, the keyboard is the ground, and my feet are the fingers creating art with every step. With a strong, durable, and powerful body housing a warrior’s mind.
Tingling only intensifies as the rate of my heart beats increase, speeding up my footsteps, pulling waste from the muscles of my legs by the heart, and then pushing high amounts of oxygen back to my legs to feed my muscles. A dance on the slack rope of pain and pleasure trying to maintain a sustainable output for much longer than a marathon. For an output that will support; four times the distance of a marathon.
Pain is non-avoidable pushing the limits of life, and making living so beautiful, the opposite of breathing is numbness, getting much closer to death. Running far distances is a very selfish endeavor, no different then trying to be the best human possible: a brother, father, friend, husband, and son or the daughter, mother, sister, or wife plus the inbetweens. Story telling is about change, running far is the same for me. The change comes from the transitions between gesture and retort, life and death, positive and negative, love and hate, light and dark, hot and cold, sunshine and rain clouds, pain and pleasure. Tuning to this friend of mine again, brings new lessons, new experiences, new transitions being a teacher for all areas of life, as a husband, dad, son, brother, friend, and a soul with a spirit who craves to break bad habits of deeper genetic-make up.
Actions and reactions aren’t meant to create double negatives, and in story telling this ends the story from the start, the same with life, look at suicide it is one of the most powerful double negatives in our society today. This action and reaction doesn’t give life a beat, no tempo, no rhyme, no harmony. This heart of mine is learning to recongize the negative and make it a positive, and when the positive turns to a negative, find ways to get back to the positive. Rinse and Repeat, transitioning between the differences of life, enjoying the infinite loop of my story.
Photos by Eric D.
