First, of course, Easter blessings for anyone who still haunts this ghost blog! As so many matters of state, matters of the polis, matters even ecclesiastical and sporting (shame, Australia!) seem to go from ugly to rotten and worse, Easter is a sign that in a fractured world, accelerating entropy does not have the last word —
And our love is like Jesus, but worse
Though you seal the cave up where you’ve lain its body
It rises
It rises
That’s John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, performing ‘Going to Marrakesh’ with his pal Franklin Bruno as The Extra Glenns. ‘I wish our love could go the way of all flesh / But it’s not right, and it’s not nice / To try and kill the same thing twice’: no matter how hard you try, love keeps rising. Bless you all!
On a less weighty note, on this morning’s ‘run’ I tried breathing differently. That sounds weird, and it felt a little weird, but hey mindfulness and breath and so on, and by breathing deliberately in a different way, I didn’t begin gasping and panting nearly as fast. As a result, I attained my first mini-goal of the whole ‘running’ enterprise, that being that I made the first half-mile (from home to the corner of the Iffley Road and Magdalen Road) without breaking stride, woohoo! Likewise, as you may have anticipated, the time of the whole mile was slashed from 11:32 last Wednesday to 11:07 today, by far the fastest I’ve ‘run’ this distance.
And I have a new pair of trainers arriving before Wednesday, so….