In trying to live an observant life, it seems that the process of anything we do is just as important as the ending, whether it's a journey like Robert Pirsig wrote about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or the effort involved in cooking a meal, which your family then gobbles up in a few minutes! Or reading a book from beginning to end, enjoying every sentence, and not cheating by looking at the last page, or fixing someone who has scraped their elbow very badly while skate-boarding, or going for a run.
So I put on my running clothes and Molly knows that soon, soon we will be on our way. I bound down two flights of stairs, with her heffalumping down behind me, as she is getting old. Then I find the only pair of long white socks that we have in the house, that I have hidden so no one else will take them (these are so that it is easier to see ticks who are trying to walk up my legs). I sit down on the couch and pull on the socks so that they go up over the bottoms of my tracksuit pants (this makes me look like a dork but it is, as I explained before, for the ticks). I then put on my comfortable brown hiking boots and carefully lace them up, with double bows. Molly is watching me all this time with her face inches from mine, making little soft whining sounds. When I stand up she is instantly beside herself and will sometimes bark, which can be annoying and which I try to discourage. I still need my belt with the pedometer, and the camera and cellphone for my pockets. Several pot-plants near the door, which have to come inside over the winter months, are the worse for wear from Molly's deranged dancing by this stage. And then we're off!
I ran 1.87 miles (just over 3km) today in about 25 minutes, although I was out for ages, distracted by signs of spring everywhere, and the water, the babbling brook running down the dirt road that leads to the meadow, causing soil erosion, just like a real river. When I was little and it rained a lot in Cape Town, I built dams with my dad in the gutters and gullies, and I passed on the skill to my children, who remember getting utterly soaked but being very happy diverting water, sailing home-made stick-boats. So today I began by running down the road, where I stopped for about an hour and built a wonderful dam and deflecting the little bubbling stream, helping it down the stony slope.
When I got home I had a cup of tea, and saw the latest National Geographic, a special issue on Water, lying on the table. So I glanced through it and then spent another hour reading it from cover to cover! (Yes, I do realise how lucky I am to have the time to be distracted.) Barbara Kingsolver, whom I admire enormously, has an article titled Water is Life, and my favourite quote comes from her: "Water takes up two-thirds of our bodies, just like the map of the world". Some amazing and horrifying statistics in the magazine, amazing: like the fact that Ecuador is the first country to put the rights of nature in its constitution! So rivers and forests are not simply property but maintain their own right to flourish. Horrifying: it takes 2 billion gallons of water a day to irrigate all the golf courses in America!
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