'I Am The Captain Of My Soul...'
Today we woke up to our sea view once more, and a flat running route!
Change is fun, and I have discovered that variety is suiting me. I recognise that this is not true of us all... Or was even true for me before my new lifestyle.
The rhythms that are the same can deepen the inner landscape, waking each morning to the same mountain view can take us deeper into its majesty and magic...
I have experienced this in the time that have stayed in one place... And even when I didn't, I sometimes had a constant place of beauty to visit...
For fourteen years I lived near Buxted in East Sussex, and I moved twelve times with my little cat Ferrit. My friend David said he knew where to find me because he simply had to look for the newly put in cat flap!
During this I had the constancy of the Ashdown forest... I ran for miles and miles on this expansive free land, which reminded me of Egdon Heath from 'The return of the native' by Thomas Hardy ...A book that had touched me deeply as a teenager...
In the book, the Heath is central to the novel, it is wild and untameable and has an energy and a character all of its own. It is personified and everyone is in relationship with Egdon Heath... Even the storm is described as its lover, and the wind it's friend....
I loved the forest the moment I set foot there, and it brought to life for me the Heath that I had inhabited for the time I read the book....
I had a relationship with the Ashdown Forest, so much so that I was reluctant to leave it....
But then I moved to Eastbourne and discovered the South Downs...
I thought I would never leave.... The downs and the sea were my friends, and each day I visited them and wondered at the ever changing beauty, and the constancy of my newfound land to run and run in.... The sea to visit each day, and to stand and listen to the sound of the waves, to look along the beach, see the groins stretching along and the Seven Sisters cliffs, stark, white, soft, beautiful....
But I did leave, and now I am finding other places that my soul resonates with, my body learns to run on, rocky, stony, sandy, hard Tarmac, hot sun, humid air, cool mountain sharpness, the rain, the wind....
And I am learning how to live out what I knew instinctively, that the true constancy comes from within... Being here now, in each day... The mountains that were my home, have transmuted to my football pitch once more...
And I am seeing and experincing more and more, that the stillness and the permanence are deep within us... This is what resonates with the earth's core, and expands to consciousness, the ethereal; the knowledge that nothing is actually permanent...
And yet we live within the rhythms of this earthly life... The rising and setting of the sun, the rain the wind the storms, and discover how to live knowing that everything changes... Whilst at the same time gradually stripping back the layers to discover the never changing stillness of our true self within....
This morning I interviewed Dwight for 'Encounters on the run'. It was a very good experience, sitting in the sun, hearing him tell his story, and understanding how his own love of sport, is mirrored the land of his birth, South Africa.
He spoke of how as a nation of sport, when their sport is working, everything is working...
He spoke of Nelson Mandella's insistence that the name 'Springbok' was kept for the rugby players, and how through sport he worked to unite the black people and the white people...
He went on to say that this is the same for him...
When he is fit and loving his sport everything goes well in his life....
Speaking with Dwight about Nelson Mandella's work to unite the nation in an unconventional way, made me think of one of my favourite poems, in fact Anadi and I had it as part of our wedding ceremony, from the film 'Invictus' about Nelson Mandella's influence in rugby and so the nation.
Invictus... By William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Later...
Anadi and I have been on a mission to see if we could find a shop that sells pre running sports drink... We found two; but both were closed.... And so instead we have drunk mint tea and eaten orange cake...!
This morning on returning to my white dusty football field, with the tufts of grass and wild flowers, I ran my session of 20 x 200.... Anadi ran it with me today.
'I'm enjoying this' I said at one point, 'Are you?' There was silence, so I turned to look at him, and he was smiling ruefully....
'As interval sessions go', he eventually replied.... 'I am...'