It started slowly. Like the turn of the tide, or a winter’s dusk. The edges of my world were being rubbed out, my peripheral vision eroded. Less like a fog rolling in, and more like a mist rising. When the threshold of perception was reached, it was already too late.

Sometimes the strangest things happen, unexplained by science, a mystery underneath the medical jargon and tests. Sometimes a long dark tunnel is actually a chrysalis; the means of transformation that is not possible in a day-lit, open-skied life.

That buried, underground experience, the scratching and stripping back, the breaking down of the body’s balances, can lead to a reimagining of what life could be.

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I always hated running. At school, high up in the hills of Kenya, compulsory early-morning cross-country training took us through a long eucalyptus forest, the dirt red on our gym socks. 

The trees were beautiful. Lined up far off as we started out, bleary and grumbling, they were wispy and tall, wafting the air high above. But as we got close, touching their smooth legs, we could feel the breadth of their stance and knew their strength. We caught their leaves as they fell, thick and waxy. We slowed for a moment to rub them between our fingers, folding their crisp shapes in half, their scent warm and tangy. If I had stopped to listen to those trees I may have heard them hushing, pause... sit with us…

The trees I loved. The running I hated. The mornings at altitude were cold and sometimes frosty, the air like glass. Running before breakfast I protested with cramps and cold, nose running, stomach blazing. Now I wish I had stopped to make more of it. Now I remember it as beautiful.