Weezyl and I hit the Ocho hard this afternoon. If you don't know what the Ocho is then we will show you sometime. It is a great course mapped out by a few of the Trailheads and it is approximately eight miles (hence the name Ocho and also a Dodgeball tribute as in ESPN Ocho). I've run the course a few times lately, and today was my last hard effort before the Uwharrie 20 in 12 days. Weez said it was his last workout too. I ran the course by myself very slowly once, and then met Weez at the start/finish at Unity Church.
We ran quickly in the cold rain. We took turns leading, and traded out the lead at opportune moments like the few times we hit fire roads. We are usually pretty chatty, but we kept our words to a minimum. We needed the extra oxygen flow for the selfishness of our lungs. We weren't in total oxygen debt, but we were never very far.
Here is a link to the technical aspects of the run as churned out and posted thanks to Weezyl's Garmin. Very cool. 2800 feet of elevation gain! That's pretty impressive for what I think of as a pretty flat track in Chapel Hill with an ounce of Carrboro.
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/7525346#
I'm ready for the 20.
Weez is ready for the 40.
Uwharrie is the most fun we have all year.
Those ancient rocks nearly brings you to tears, no matter your preparation,
but it is so much fun you've just got to put it on the schedule for the first Saturday of every February from now until dust.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
MLK's Seven Steps of Non-Violence
This morning I attended the 2009 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Triangle Interfaith Prayer Breakfast. We heard words and prayers from the Governor, a Muslim Minister, a Rabbi. We heard an introduction for the speaker by Thad Woodard, the President of the North Carolina Bankers Association. Mr. Woodard sponsored Durham Nativity School boys last year when Gen. Colin Powell spoke at the airport. Mr. Woodard also helps our rising 6th graders attend Camp Challenge in the summer before they begin studying at Durham Nativity School. Mr. Woodard told a story of segregation and health-care injustice when a black man, run over by a lawn mower and almost bleeding out from a leg injury was denied treatment at Rex Hospital in the early 1950s.
As the keynote speaker prepared to take the mic, my heart and mind were turned in the direction of economic justice. By Thursday, the 44th President will be long past the hurrah's of tomorrow's celebrations and will be knee deep in economic crisis, meeting with advisors to discuss plans and strategies. Will his new political role mean that the nations strategies cater only to the rich and the middle class, those who vote, and hold real political clout? I pray as each of you do that this President will be different than politics as usual--and I mean that both as a judgment on Democrats and Republicans of the past. Or will phrases like "Yes We Can," become living breathing embodied actions and the poor, the real poor, those who have no home and no job and no food, they will somehow have a voice. Who will speak for them? Will any of our strategies for returning to economic dominance include economic justice for those who go without food as my lunch digests? The appreciation on my home may be in the tank, but I am not going hungry.
Dr. Gregory Moss took the floor and I was ready to hear a sermon. His remarks were unsatisfying if one was really listening. They were unsatisfying not because they were poorly prepared or poorly delivered, in fact, I knew from my friend Dr. Steve Shoemaker who presided at my ordination last year that Dr. Moss was among the great ones. Instead, the pastor's remarks were unsatisfying because of the squirminess they invoked if the 1000 plus people gathered were really listening. He claimed that Violence and Poverty are in a direct relationship to one another. Reverend Moss claimed that to deny economic justice is to inflict violence. Now that is unsatisfying, because it means that I, a committed pacifist, am woven into the fabric of societal violence that denies economic justice to every brother and sister in my midst. I know this, ironically, because even now I am afforded the time and technology to type these words. I'm affluent and I must tell that truth and then turn and become a witness to sharing my resources with others.
How???
I'll start today, by returning to the very tenants of Non-Violence laid out by Martin King.
THE SEVEN STEPS OF NON-VIOLENT ACTION
1.Remain Calm and Gather Information:
In order to understand and articulate the issue or problem facing you, you must first research, investigate and gather vital information that will increase your understanding of the problem. Know all sides of the issue, including the other person's position.
2. Education:
It is essential to inform others about your issues. This minimizes misunderstandings, solidifies your resolve and gains you support and assistance.
3. Personal Commitment:
Eliminate hidden motives and prepare yourself to accept suffering, in necessary, in your quest to solve the problem.
4. Negotiation:
Using grace, humor, intelligence, confront the other party with a list of injustices and a plan for resolving these wrongs.
Nonviolent communication does not seek to humiliate, but to call forth the good in an opponent. Control emotional outbursts--they only compromise your strength and position.
5. Direct Action:
Used to morally force the opponent to work with you in resolving the injustices. Direct action imposes a "creative tension" into the conflict. Most people will change their behavior once they know that you are aware and determined to make things right.
6. Reconciliation:
Nonviolence does not seek to defeat the opponent, but to seek his/her understanding. It is directed against evil systems, policies and acts, not against persons.
7. Final Preparation:
Prepare yourself to live each day using techniques of nonviolence. If ill will or physical harm confronts you, protect yourself, vacate the premises, but refrain from initiating harsh or threatening language or violent reactions. Promptly report unprovoked attacks to your parents, teachers and law enforcement authorities.
Stay Calm!
If you live in the Triangle, get to know the source of this annual celebration for Dr. King, http://www.king-raleigh.org/welcome.cfm If you think this is just a weekend for people of color, come out next year, and see if you still think so.
As the keynote speaker prepared to take the mic, my heart and mind were turned in the direction of economic justice. By Thursday, the 44th President will be long past the hurrah's of tomorrow's celebrations and will be knee deep in economic crisis, meeting with advisors to discuss plans and strategies. Will his new political role mean that the nations strategies cater only to the rich and the middle class, those who vote, and hold real political clout? I pray as each of you do that this President will be different than politics as usual--and I mean that both as a judgment on Democrats and Republicans of the past. Or will phrases like "Yes We Can," become living breathing embodied actions and the poor, the real poor, those who have no home and no job and no food, they will somehow have a voice. Who will speak for them? Will any of our strategies for returning to economic dominance include economic justice for those who go without food as my lunch digests? The appreciation on my home may be in the tank, but I am not going hungry.
Dr. Gregory Moss took the floor and I was ready to hear a sermon. His remarks were unsatisfying if one was really listening. They were unsatisfying not because they were poorly prepared or poorly delivered, in fact, I knew from my friend Dr. Steve Shoemaker who presided at my ordination last year that Dr. Moss was among the great ones. Instead, the pastor's remarks were unsatisfying because of the squirminess they invoked if the 1000 plus people gathered were really listening. He claimed that Violence and Poverty are in a direct relationship to one another. Reverend Moss claimed that to deny economic justice is to inflict violence. Now that is unsatisfying, because it means that I, a committed pacifist, am woven into the fabric of societal violence that denies economic justice to every brother and sister in my midst. I know this, ironically, because even now I am afforded the time and technology to type these words. I'm affluent and I must tell that truth and then turn and become a witness to sharing my resources with others.
How???
I'll start today, by returning to the very tenants of Non-Violence laid out by Martin King.
THE SEVEN STEPS OF NON-VIOLENT ACTION
1.Remain Calm and Gather Information:
In order to understand and articulate the issue or problem facing you, you must first research, investigate and gather vital information that will increase your understanding of the problem. Know all sides of the issue, including the other person's position.
2. Education:
It is essential to inform others about your issues. This minimizes misunderstandings, solidifies your resolve and gains you support and assistance.
3. Personal Commitment:
Eliminate hidden motives and prepare yourself to accept suffering, in necessary, in your quest to solve the problem.
4. Negotiation:
Using grace, humor, intelligence, confront the other party with a list of injustices and a plan for resolving these wrongs.
Nonviolent communication does not seek to humiliate, but to call forth the good in an opponent. Control emotional outbursts--they only compromise your strength and position.
5. Direct Action:
Used to morally force the opponent to work with you in resolving the injustices. Direct action imposes a "creative tension" into the conflict. Most people will change their behavior once they know that you are aware and determined to make things right.
6. Reconciliation:
Nonviolence does not seek to defeat the opponent, but to seek his/her understanding. It is directed against evil systems, policies and acts, not against persons.
7. Final Preparation:
Prepare yourself to live each day using techniques of nonviolence. If ill will or physical harm confronts you, protect yourself, vacate the premises, but refrain from initiating harsh or threatening language or violent reactions. Promptly report unprovoked attacks to your parents, teachers and law enforcement authorities.
Stay Calm!
If you live in the Triangle, get to know the source of this annual celebration for Dr. King, http://www.king-raleigh.org/welcome.cfm If you think this is just a weekend for people of color, come out next year, and see if you still think so.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
the need for seasons, the need for change
This is a part of Joni Mitchell's, River:
But it don’t snow here
It stays pretty green
I’m going to make a lot of money
Then I’m going to quit this crazy scene
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
Reminds me of Neil Diamond's, I am, I said:
L.A.'s fine, the sun shines most the time
And the feeling is "lay back"
Palm trees grow and rents are low
But you know I keep thinkin' about
Making my way back
Both lament southern California at the holidays. It's too green, too warm. There are other relationships that are troubling for these writers, human relationships, but it resonates that the trouble is set in the context of seasonal trouble. If the weather is not right, too dark, too cold, too warm, too different from what you remember, the whole world can get out of balance.
I felt this way all of my winters in Florida, 1983 - 1995. I wanted to be back in the Carolinas. I didn't want to be at the North Pole, but 40 degrees would have been nice. It was generally too warm to be Christmastime. It put me in a bad mood during the month of December, in a funk, that I struggle to pull out of these last 30 years. I get you Joni. I get you Neil. Mitchell's River has become a holiday classic. The irony means the there really is room for whatever change has come and is coming as the year comes to an end. If you don't feel great, don't pretend that you do. Maybe we don't need to pretend to be happy at the holidays if we are not. It doesn't mean you don't welcome the new year or the birth of a savior. There are viable justifications for having a tough time at the year's end.
But it don’t snow here
It stays pretty green
I’m going to make a lot of money
Then I’m going to quit this crazy scene
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
Reminds me of Neil Diamond's, I am, I said:
L.A.'s fine, the sun shines most the time
And the feeling is "lay back"
Palm trees grow and rents are low
But you know I keep thinkin' about
Making my way back
Both lament southern California at the holidays. It's too green, too warm. There are other relationships that are troubling for these writers, human relationships, but it resonates that the trouble is set in the context of seasonal trouble. If the weather is not right, too dark, too cold, too warm, too different from what you remember, the whole world can get out of balance.
I felt this way all of my winters in Florida, 1983 - 1995. I wanted to be back in the Carolinas. I didn't want to be at the North Pole, but 40 degrees would have been nice. It was generally too warm to be Christmastime. It put me in a bad mood during the month of December, in a funk, that I struggle to pull out of these last 30 years. I get you Joni. I get you Neil. Mitchell's River has become a holiday classic. The irony means the there really is room for whatever change has come and is coming as the year comes to an end. If you don't feel great, don't pretend that you do. Maybe we don't need to pretend to be happy at the holidays if we are not. It doesn't mean you don't welcome the new year or the birth of a savior. There are viable justifications for having a tough time at the year's end.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Choose life as a difficult as it may be
Life is difficult, isn't it? I accept this as the true state of the world rather than a pessimistic outlook. Life is Good as the t-shirts say and so does God in Gen 1, but life is also difficult. If this premise is dealt with then there are two texts that are meaningful for reflection.
From Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, p. 53
"People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."
Deuteronomy 30:19b-20
Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestores, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
From Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, p. 53
"People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."
Deuteronomy 30:19b-20
Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestores, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Grin and Bear It
I wrote the piece below for Eagle's Nest Camp, a summer camp that formed me in the ball park of the shaping done to me by church and family.
Here's a poem I wrote for my blog, http://monkawe.blogspot.com/, and a reflection below. Picture is from Wikipedia--American Black Bear.
The Bear
Loping
not a care in the world
in the high grass
of a field
just up a hill
from the Little River Valley.
The blood red bear
pulsed and pumped
as I reared back from running
to watch the
loping
as she loped away
When I was 16 it was the summer of 1991. I was a Junior Counselor at Eagle's Nest in Cabin 10. I was given the okay to go running in the early mornings so long as I was back in the cabin by the time the bell rang. I'll never forget the morning that I ran into a black bear. There's a trail that runs up hill off the trail that connects The New Lodge and The Sun Lodge. This trail that heads up hill is pretty close to the Rabbit Hole. At the top of that climb is a small clearing before the trail picks back up on the way to the swing, and turtle overlook, and to the power lines. Some of you might know just where I mean. If you don't, imagine the best of the property that starts to feel like ENC's gateway to the rest of Pisgah Forest.
I saw a bear just as I was cresting the hill. She was less than 50 feet away and running away from me, thankfully. I felt safe. I took a good look and emblazoned the image into my mind and onto my heart and then headed back down the hill in a hurry. I did not think I would be chased and I wasn't. The bear was doing her morning run and I was doing mine. No harm, no foul. The image remains as one of the pristine moments of my life--an encounter with something powerful and beautiful, quiet and almost surreal. It was one of the watershed runs of my young life and I think I still run trails to this day in the hopes of recapturing moments like that one half a life ago.
By the time we were walking from flag raising to breakfast, the rumor had spread among all 200 or so people in our little community. I can remember my feet sinking into the white quad rocks, but the rest of me was on cloud nine as I shared the information. Helen Waite was ecstatic. For her, it was no coincidence that I was a Natseeho and therefore it made perfect sense that I might have such a run-in with a blood red bear. I thought then, as I do to this day, that she hung the moon. The story was a centerpiece of Indian Village the following Sunday. Grant Bullard mentioned that he had recently seen bear scat up that way and in talking to a Pisgah Forest ranger, there was an estimate that there might be as few as five bears in Pisgah Forest from the ENC property all the way to 276. That's thousands of acres, so I guess I was pretty lucky to catch a glimpse of one. In case you are wondering, I am pretty sure the bear population has grown in that neck of the woods which is good news for bears and good news for us. More of us might get to see them!
This encounter with a bear is one among many memories of my nine summers at ENC that only grow more and more vivid as the years pass. If you have vivid memories of your time as a camper or a counselor you should write them down or tell them to a loved one. Thanks for reading mine.
George Linney is an ordained minister in the Ecumenical Baptist Church and a middle school teacher in Durham, NC. He was a camper and counselor at ENC from 1986-1993. He can be reached at geliii@earthlink.net.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
26 days til Christmas? No. Little River!
Christmas is great and all and He's coming in nine days. The saviour of the world is born, but what I want to write about is a necessary diversion--The Little River Trail Run. It's 26 days away and I wonder if I will be ready. My calves are hurting a lot each morning and keeping me from doing the hard workouts that I would like to do. I raced ten days ago and my calves are still hurting particularly in the mornings. I'm running most days, but I am afraid to go really fast. I've already missed three workouts. Oh dear, the need to be patient. I've learned the hard way before, don't run fast on little injuries that need their time to heal. That's how little injuries become big injuries and there goes a season of racing. I'll have to try and remain in an Advent posture--patient and waiting. Silly church, your always teaching me how to live the rest of life.
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