Once I ran a trail race in a forest straddling the peninsular ridge that divides the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean.
It was one of those California days where the morning fog covers the early hours in a holy stillness. As the temperature rose, the marine layer burned off and sunlight trickled down through the redwood branches. To go running on such a morning is to feel like a Whitman poem, your very atoms singing electric in chorus with the cosmos.
A group of us ran from the starting line, switchbacking up the hillside. Trees lined the trail in disordered bunches, their roots hobbling the footpaths in wooden ripples of gnarled burls and fans that sheltered small puddles of moisture dripping off the tree limbs.
The woods smelled ancient and other than human. The ground was sponge-like, a living soil of leaves and compost and bacteria and everything that lets whole biomes arise from underfoot.
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