Monday, January 13, 2014

The Ceremony of Running

Sometimes all we need is to find a little magic in the universe.  Magic.  It can come to us in many forms, any and all forms; human form, e-form, expected and unexpected, big and small.  But always amazing and usually for me, just what I need in any particular moment.

Not too long ago, I read this facebook status from one of my favourite authors, Richard Wagamese:

"I am drawn to ceremony like Earth is drawn in its circle around the sun. To begin a day's journey without a smudge, a prayer and meditation is to lack a center. I'm not a holy man or a great ceremonialist. I only know that ceremony is the magnet that draws me closer to Creator, to the Grandmothers, to my essential and truest self. It doesn't have to be elaborate. Breathing is a ceremony when it's mindful. So is walking. So is looking at something that moves me. So is talking when the talk is real and earnest. When I inhabit something fully, when I am mindful, when it increases me, I am in ceremony - and there is joy in the recognition of myself..."

And it struck me.  Running is ceremony for me, important because, as he so eloquently states here, it is THE magnet that draws me closer to my truest self.  It is these moments on any given day when I am on the pavement accompanied by the repetitive rhythm of my footsteps, the  steady, strong beat of my heart and the sound of my breath that I am most at home and at peace within my soul, simply because I am all there.  All right there in that footstep in that moment of time. 

Running, for me, started as exercise.

Running shifted, for me, to moving meditation.

And now.  Running as ceremony. 

I like it.

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