Title
I like to run long. Generally, once a week, this means going out for two or three hours on trails, twelve to eighteen miles, and two or three thousand feet of vertical gain—uphill running. And two or three times a year, I'll run a really long race. Since graduating college, I've been working my way up. I ran two fifty-kilometer races first, then two fifty milers. About two months ago, I took another step up in distance, and ran a seventy-one-miler called the Georgia Death Race.
I'll tell the story of that experience—from the cringy name, to the eighteen-hour day in the Blue Ridge Mountains—another time. I bring it up because, in preparation for race day, I took two weeks in mid-March to taper.
All the time, when I am running, I am trying to build. More miles, more climbing, more minutes on my feet. It's called progressive overload: you ask your body to do a little more than it can comfortably handle, then back off, allowing it to recover, then load even more on, repeating the process. Inadequacy is built into this scheme. If you were comfortable with your abilities, your performance, your self in the first place, you would just run, and leave it at that. Not me. For as long as I've been a runner, I've wanted to be better.
But the taper is a respite from all that. In order to be in peak condition for a race effort, you take time to absorb the strain and stress you've been under. You cut your volume for a week, and then cut it further for a second week. It's not unusual to feel jittery, suddenly brimming with energy, during a taper.
I tapered by cutting volume, as I mentioned, but also reducing intensity. For the first week, I just ran the speed my legs wanted to go. It wasn't fast. Eleven-plus-minute miles, on flat terrain. A former coach once described tapering as "turning the lights on in the basement that is your body." You see all the nasty shit that's been lurking in the dark. The aches and pains which your system, in a constant state of inflammation, had been masking, are now allowed to make their presence known. They came yelping to the surface, and my pace ground to a crawl.
Crawling felt good. One spring day—windy, raw, cold, bright—I was slogging along when a phrase came into my head: "not a thought in the sky." I liked it. It captured how I felt on that run, pleasantly out of it, and how I aspire to feel in my mental life, as well. Spacious, that is. Uncrowded, untroubled. Of course, the phrase was a play on "not a cloud in the sky." And it makes use of the Buddhist image of the mind as a sky, vast and empty, through which all of the contents of consciousness are merely passing clouds, vaporous. The body-mind, our waking life, a seamless canvas, through which perceptions, events, faces pass, but are not held.
Two more connections that the phrase calls to mind for me. First, that line, made famous in the final season of The Sopranos, which someone posts on the wall of the hospital room where Tony is lying in the depths of a coma: "sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky." It doesn't get any better than that, does it? Note that there is no condemnation in that phrase. We go about in pity for ourselves, oblivious to the great majestic dance of existence. We don’t have to, but we do. I want to say that phrases which contain authentic wisdom always manage to capture and embody the quality of trust. Trusting delusion just as much as insight. Trusting even myopic self-pity, since it is a thing that exists.
The second connection is something I heard on a podcast once. Robert Thurman, father of Uma and prominent scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, says to Dan Harris that the correct translation of "nirvana" is to be blown away. A constant state of being blown away. Which touches the words we chant in Zen to conclude the Heart Sutra: "gate! gate! paragate! parasamgate!" or, "Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond!" (Or again, as Patrick Bateman says in American Psycho, peeling off his translucent facemask: "I simply am not there.")
So. Not a Thought in the Sky. There was a solid simplicity to the phrase. As a matter of style, I like writing that is clean, condensed, vivid—the sort of phrases which you read and feel, there's nothing extra. If one were to remove any word, the sentence would crumble. Something glowing, lapidary, at the heart. This one seemed to have a whiff of that. Six single syllables. Not a Thought. In the Sky.
Not A. Thought In. The Sky.
Later I googled it, just to make sure it wasn't a line I'd read before which my subconscious had passed off as my own. As it turns out, someone else had thought of it first. Grace Gardiner wrote a poem called "Beautiful Butterfly," which goes like this:
Peaceful as can be
Beautiful butterfly.
That's cool. I like that poem. Something Buddhist, a double-haiku, in these lines. But I do not think I ever came across it—that is, I do not think I took the line from Grace Gardiner. That happens, sometimes, with the imagination. Co-inspiration. Why shouldn’t it?
Often enough, you have a thought you like, and then, upon further revisitings, the luster dims. Probably that is the most common outcome. But this time, the crispness of the six words remained when I reread them, over the following days and weeks. It still evokes, for me, the condition of mind which I prize. So I decided to use the phrase as the title of this website.
There are other resonances. For example, Maureen McLane has a poem I love called "Every Day a Shiny Bright New Day," which goes like this:
the clarion ring
A song about booze, obviously. But look, too, at the neat and clever moves that McLane makes "thinking" do. "What you thought / I think" she writes, as if thoughts are public, shared, like the same cloud, which two people standing in a field can both behold. But no, the clouds aren't thoughts: "the clouds are whiskey / sours passing by." Everything is shifting, everything is vaporous, the way that a cloud looks like a castle, then looks like a duck.
Last summer, that coach who said the thing about basements and tapering, said something interesting about clouds. According to him, if you concentrate, and do not look away, and sustain your attention to a sufficient degree, you can make the clouds obey your mental commands.
What is the upshot of McLane's poem? It is cheeky; there is a venom to it. The speaker is fed up with somebody. One wonders if it is themself. In that case, the speaker is talking to themself; that is, thinking. And thinking is what they are sick of: "it's good not to piss / in the sink & it's good / not to think"—it seems to me that thinking and drinking are both vices, which we indulge to distract ourselves from the truth. Perhaps the truth is not something we think, but something we know. If you are merely thinking something, it is not the truth. There are strong "wastin' away again in Margaritaville" vibes to the poem. Reader and speaker end up sitting in the sand together, a Sunday morning, eyes crusted, red, and bleary, sunburnt, staring up at an empty sky, imagining a drink up there. I wonder what is the equivalent of a hangover for thinking?
I sometimes enjoy hangovers. As you get older, of course, they get worse, and for me they stretch out, lingering all day, into the evening, wrapping themselves around the building you are in like the yellow, cat-like fog in "Prufrock." And the ghost of it still with you the next morning. But after the worst is over, and you've gotten some food in you and a nap and some water; by, say, six p.m., there can be a cheering, pleasant blankness. Watching the sunset, listening to the birds chirp, you dimly forget who you are. Not a thought in the sky.