At -22 degrees, it's stuck-inside weather. I go running anyway.
My hands begin to sweat a half-mile into my run and the left side of my goggles fogs over as I reach my destination. The abandoned mill offers a visual escape from the snowy sameness; it’s a 3-storey skeleton, all sharp edges and gashes and too-bright colors of graffiti.
Just behind the mill, Bassett Creek flows into downtown Minneapolis. In a bend of the creek, I find a female and male mallard floating in a small opening of water.
Hey guys, you forgot to fly south, I think.
But I’m grateful to see life, so I slow on the ice-packed bank. Their necks and heads are high, invigorated. It’s enough company for today.
I read later that some waterfowl stay north in the winter, particularly mallards, and especially in urban settings. A duck’s legs warm and cool quickly, and can be 50 degrees cooler than their feathery-meaty bodies.
The pair was comfortable and I could hope – without wishing for their peril – to see them again. Unlike us, they are made for this weather.
In 2nd grade, I was near the cloakroom, beyond the reach of teachers. Heidi’s eyes and nose squinted, her lip curled as she spat, “You can’t use the Lord's name in vain!”
I didn’t know what it meant, the vain part. And her conviction was foreign. I wanted to laugh because that’s how I handle discomfort. But her disgust landed in my stomach. I was other.
As philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, “Nobody wants to spend their life going around being the 'village atheist’.”
Not long after I used the lord’s name in vain, Katie and I are enveloped in sleeping bags, staring at the moonlight on the ceiling of Rebecca’s room (not Bible Rebecca, but big sister Rebecca). Our small bodies find comfort on the hard floor and each other. We ask about the stars, and up there, and forever. No answer is big enough to capture these kinds of distances. It takes me a long time to fall asleep.
I am still that village atheist, a god-damner. But, I think my most damning feature is captured by Mary Oliver: “Only if there are angels in your head will you ever possibly, see one.” This, to me, means I have no hope.
It’s -11 degrees. My footsteps squeak, scree-scroo, scree-scroo, the soundtrack to these runs. Sometimes I glance back, adrenaline coursing as I anticipate a person – or shadow – on my heels.
My arms form right angles, on autopilot, moving me warily across the snow. The most vigorous part of me is my uterus, roiling as it sheds its inner lining. Usually, this monthly death makes it difficult to run for very long, my cramped hips resist intensity. But I long to see my new friends.
Hey, birds, I have eggs too!
At my turnaround point, I pluck the goggles off my face and pull the face mask from my nose. Peering into nooks of the creek bank, I look for the mallards huddled for warmth by the soil. Their water hole is covered with a thin layer of ice.
As I turn back home, I linger at the mill to study the broken windows and notice the chicken wire. Shards of glass dangle, as if waiting for the windows to be put back together again.
This seems an important faith to have these days – in our ability to put things back together. To imagine futures for the forsaken parts of us.
My body drips with sweat on the way home, and my face is clammy, unable to escape the face mask. For a moment I view the windswept path as if from an airplane, high above, looking down on miles of snowy tundra.
In the first half of John Updikes’ Bird Feathers, 14-year-old David is a non-believer. But then he shoots pigeons in his family’s barn, and upon studying the dead bird feathers he sees the “effortless mechanics” and “designs.” To the relief of his parents, he becomes a Believer.
The philosopher Blaise Pascal urges us all to skip over the proof step and just wager on God’s existence, because why not, just in case. It’s the rational thing to do.
Some might say my anxiety and depression are a rational response to the untethered expanses of the universe, pandemics, loneliness, and the like.
But I feel full of holes; I need to be educated or convinced. Or more proactive, like David.
A week after my coldest runs, I’m on the clinic table, gown pulled open to reveal my bare chest. My mind spins, imagining possibilities:
there is something wrong with my heart...
the echocardiogram technician has to stop, to talk me down. my heaving chest, unable to speak.
The technician traces the cold probe on my chest, occasionally twisting dials to turn up my heartbeat: tha-thum….tha-thum. An unwelcome self-awareness.
The sound transports me to the clinical table of my pregnancies, the bird-like flutterings. To the joy and fear tied so closely together, how can any one person bear the hope and responsibility at the same time? To the heartbreak of the flutter that wasn’t there after 9 weeks. Kagi was his name. Tears spring into my eyes, and I am transported again, to my live children. Miles away, at home, eating breakfast and complaining about the wrong dessert in their lunch boxes.
I prompt the technician for more information, “I know you can’t fully analyze it, but did you find anything?”
“We would keep you here longer if there was anything to worry about.”
It’s a half-answer, the most she can give me. How do I find faith in this small truth?
When I get home I go running and push on even when my arthritic ankle objects and hobbles me for 2 miles. I feel – or hope – I’m going to find something: the ducks in the creek; or, dead on the railroad tracks.
I feel small. Inside myself. No soundtrack to my run, only the effort of one human. I’m only a mile from home and with every step, I am a speck on the tundra.
In a photo from the opening ceremony of the 1988 Olympic Games, two doves are visible above the cauldron. We can’t see the 9 other birds of the 11 released.
Nor can the 3 torch-bearers, the cauldron being so tall, made for Gods. The athletes’ arms are above their heads, dipping to the middle of the cauldron.
Perhaps one of them noticed a flicker of movement above. A shadow fluttering across the spotlight. A feather. But this practiced moment needed to set in motion thousands of practiced moments in the days ahead.
In a photo taken shortly after the lighting of the torch, we can’t see the doves anymore. Likely their little bodies are engulfed in flame. Perhaps one escaped, but our view is obscured by the smoke and camera angle.
Every four years the Olympics leave ashes and abandoned buildings that grow weeds and graffiti. A 16-day performance of our shoulders-hunched big human Dreams. Hope blurs into desperation, and sometimes we kill the birds.
My primary doctor had said over the phone, “maybe a sign of a heart attack,” so two weeks later when the cardiologist tells me my heart is normal I don’t feel relief. I want to hear I’m abnormal. That the ECG and Echocardiogram results are irrefutable signs of an athlete’s heart. A super heart.
The cardiologist grabs a plastic model, pulls it apart, pointing with his middle finger at the atria, ventricles, and valves. I nod, not paying attention to the perplexing anatomy of my heart because his grace fills me as it fills the room.
He tells me that if I were his older sister, he wouldn’t advise further tests. Just keep an eye on it. He says, “Pay attention if pain or fatigue crops up.” Another half-answer, a thread tethering me.
In her poem The World I Live In, Mary Oliver asks,
And anyway,
what’s wrong with Maybe?
I had my first panic attack in graduate school, driving home for Thanksgiving. Alone, my head filled with big questions and too many truths, none of which fill or bridge or justify the chasm of my mom’s recent cancer diagnosis. My mind focused on death.
In an anonymous Wisconsin hotel room, the memory is best remembered on a slide projector, trotting out a vacation gone wrong:
stuffy air click!
hotel walls close in click!
heart racing click!
heart attack click!
pick up phone click!
white space click!
white space click!
white space click!
My sister’s calm voice over the phone; breathing...in….out…..in.
I finally emerged. It was only in believing small half-truths my sister whispered to me, that my anxiety finally loosened and I breathed my way back into my body. But I unearthed a new specter of otherness: This was possible.
I have a brain that can veer off safely worn paths, convince itself of its own demise, a peril so close that it chokes me.
Years ago I ran my fastest mile on a straight, downhill course through downtown Minneapolis. A quarter of a mile into the frenzy my hands grew numb and bladder muscles relaxed. Whatever it takes.
My vision narrowed toward the blur of legs in front of me and my brain was grateful for the basics: push, relax.
The number – 5:25 – irrefutable, Super (for me). This personal record was a culmination of countless miles and track workouts training with my running team.
Olympians need some self-deception in their view of themselves, or their competition, or their chance for glory. Belief in half-truths. Their dreams are both hubris and hope.
Perhaps this is how we stave off death, ultimately. We discover potential to get us through. We find ways to be stubborn, to simplify to a logic that equips us to pierce where the creek has frozen or to let pee run down our legs or to burn doves.
I force myself out into -16 degrees. The arctic blast is setting records, and I’ve given up on seeing the mallards.
After 30 minutes of a run, my body and its burdened thoughts sometimes find a rhythm. Each step holds potential for settling, calibrating. Scree-scroo...scree-scroo...the soundtrack that sews up something inside of me. Anxious thinking transforms into tolerable koans: What if my heart is actually bad? What if I die? Where are the angels?
It occurs to me on this lonely run that my trust in its mending potential is borne of consistency. I know, through repeated experience, that running brings me closer to myself, and my nothingness, in a half-answer sort of way that makes space for all of the truths I am living.
Birdsong along the path to the mill pulls me out of my thoughts. Moments later, a red-tailed hawk opens its wings in a large oak above me, and flies from tree to tree for a quarter-mile, just a step ahead of me. At the mill, the mallards aren’t in the creek, but I take a small turn off the main path, across a small tributary. A pudgy robin scrambles out of my path. A mile later and once again embedded in my thoughts, I suck in my breath when I turn a corner and find seven turkeys crossing the street.
As a young girl, I watched the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy with my anthropologist father. It’s about a Bushman ‘discovering’ modern society, and in the opening scene, a Coke bottle is thrown out of a helicopter window and found by a Bushman walking in the desert. The story flips the normal anthropological narrative on its head, by having the Bushman ‘discover’ modern civilization, helping us to (re-)see the strangeness of Coke bottles, tranquilizer guns, and our Western assumptions about what is good, moral, and important.
The lasting impression on me remains: Our outer and inner worlds are malleable and inextricably bound to our social world. To who and what we surround ourselves by. And how we move through those spaces.
Running keeps my shadows and hope dancing in the same body; shame and acceptance intact but not choking me. These days I am alone but I will lace up again, holding up my part of the wager, finding my “little islands of the articulable,” as Marilynn Robinson says.