It is all I can do...
to keep myself afloat I must sweat: running, hiking, swimming, biking, yoga; get the heart pounding, and the blood coursing, the cells are a trillion life rafts taking me away. There is something so satisfying in seeing the muscles of your own thighs stretch and flex, they appear out from under your stomach, a curved v pointing down towards the knee. And if you run on a dirt path this sensous visual is accompanied by a soft grinding noise as the rubber sole of your shoe twists into the earth again and again; small moments of aural decadence. And of course there's the butt-clench on the hiking days. Striding up-hill you feel yourself, by your own might, fashioning a girdle of muscel to hold up those two - often troublesome - moons of flesh. Later, in the pool, speeding away in front crawl, it's the scapulae and rotator cuff where you feel it most: "it" being THE WORK that you've donned your suit and goggles to do. This back and forth back and forth between the plastic lane ropes, one narrow path, one firm diretion, back and forth and back and forth, breath breath, another rhythmic breath, head to the sun, you bob and bob, all for the pleasure of feeling a burn and then a loosening through the shoulders and down the length of your back. Discovering the lift that pumping blood can give to the soul is like getting a key out of jail; you've crawled, if only momentarily, from the tunnel.
And then you can sit back in your kitchen: listen to Hollywood, try to find the silence here, try not to get sucked into the sadened eyes of the baboushkas that totter up and down the street in their headscarves, try not to stare too long at the distended guts of the Russian men who undo their buttons to the navel and glare at you through their silvery sunglasses, patting at their tufts of white chest hair. Go to the Sprout Man at the market on Mondays who'll hand you a shot of wheatgrass in a silver tray and say, as you shoot the green stuff right in front of him, "may the power be with you."
And then you can sit back in your kitchen: listen to Hollywood, try to find the silence here, try not to get sucked into the sadened eyes of the baboushkas that totter up and down the street in their headscarves, try not to stare too long at the distended guts of the Russian men who undo their buttons to the navel and glare at you through their silvery sunglasses, patting at their tufts of white chest hair. Go to the Sprout Man at the market on Mondays who'll hand you a shot of wheatgrass in a silver tray and say, as you shoot the green stuff right in front of him, "may the power be with you."