First light to last light | Ammi Midstokke

I agree to early morning runs in moments of great optimism, when I imagine starting my day with vigor will mean it continues in the same fashion. In reality, I struggle out of bed questioning my decision making skills, like someone who drank too much the night before.

It gets worse when I look at the weather. Like an engine that needs to stay choked for a while, I don’t properly warm up until mid-morning. Padding out my front door in 17 degrees before sunup is asking for a stall. Were it not for the knowledge that a friend awaits me at the bottom of the hill, I’d turn around and go back to bed, assuming I’d even left in the first place.

My dog, on the other hand, becomes a puppy. She leaps and bounds and tosses chunks of ice for herself and always, always, finds something really gross to eat. Typically something that came out of another animal. I am horrified at the grossness of what dogs will consume, but I read in a dog book that this is an anthropomorphizing of our furry friends, and we should not shame them for their love of carrion and cat dung.

I’m glad it is so cold that my face is rigid with the frost of my breath, that my fingers need constant shaking, that I will freeze to death if I stop. If I was not preoccupied with mere survival, I might think about what has been in the news this week. I might think about a world in which the value of human life is depreciating faster than a new car being driven off a lot, and into a lake.

I wonder what it’s like to die by gunshot, and if one knows they are mortally wounded. Do they have time for regret, or is it Kundera’s litost they experience? Do they make plans to haunt? Do they magnanimously wish humanity farewell and good luck? Do they have peaceful knowledge about our inevitable outcome? Could they whisper that hope to us, just once, before they go?

As I crest the hilltop, the world opens up before me in streaks of lavender and blue. The distant lake is a silver snake nestled against the dark shorelines of the mountains. They cradle a morning sky being drawn up by the setting night behind me. Rose and champagne clouds spray across the horizon, like mother nature dropped her eyeshadow palette and it exploded across the atmosphere in all its glitter and glory.

I don’t know how to balance the privilege and pain. Ignore the news, plan my garden, debate whether I have it in me to go to a vigil and community-cry. We are not only grieving humans, but the loss of truths and understandings we held as immutable. A distorted reality blares at us. A tormented psychology wonders in which way we ought to martyr ourselves: by the demise of our collective mental health, or by being in the right place at the wrong time.

I rendezvous with my friend and we choke out an acknowledgement, then change topics because we are allowed to cry-run only once a week. It messes up our cadence, and I already used up my turn on another matter on Wednesday. Soon, we’ll have to change the rules or switch to hiking.

On my solo return home, the sun is pouring golden light over the landscape, and I can almost hear the trees sigh with relief. As I’m chugging up the final hill to my house, thinking about meditating, I realize my checklist of self-care obligations now consumes my life. I don’t have time to attend another vigil, because I need to count my breaths, gratitude journal, and reflect on some Thich Nhat Hanh, so I can function as a full-grown adult for at least part of the day. Which is to say: Make a dinner consisting of more than corn chips and salsa.

The sunset that night is equally humbling. I will myself to be grateful, but all I can think about is whether or not they knew when they were watching their last sunset, that it would be just that.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com