Making Space

{image source Runner's World magazine Dec 2010}

Today, I think, right now, is the first time I have been home alone in over seven weeks. Visitors, bouts of illness, birthday celebrations; a braid of the beautiful, the mundane and the tedious have made the days full and exhausting.

The sun spills over my barrier of pillows. The scrape, scrape, scrape of sleds going down the icy hill make a rhythm not routine. A driver honks, annoyed and missing the spirit of the day. (I think about health insurance, helmets and hard cul-de-sacs and miss it for a moment, too.)

I make a list for Thanksgiving and put on the potato soup for dinner. I look at piles of wet snow clothes leaking damp all over the house.

I toy with thoughts of a nap, cleaning up, a book, prep for tonight... and realize what I need most is a run. But somehow after almost two months of other lists and other chores a run seems like another life-time.

How to kick-start that again becomes the question of the day. Reminders come back that to begin again is devotion and to sweat can be a rest.

And oh, the reward. The sunshine yellow leaves strewn out over pure white snow like petals for a bride. The folded red maple leaf tucked into an icy bank bringing smiles amidst the freeze. The achingly beautiful light filtering all through the forest.

I run the icy path carefully back towards home thrilling at the thought that I did it. I want to yell into the frozen quiet: I'm alive! And what a day to be alive. Stark sunshine, winds sending snow circling all around me like laughter, and the pink tinge of the early, early sunset coming down over the mountain range.

I hear him best out here. He fills the space I make and takes it back. In a way that nothing and no-one else does. He reminds me: make space for me, make it and I will fill it.

I did. He did. He does.