Runner

Can you imagine if stars only happened only once every fifty years? We would all probably just stand outside, staying up all night to watch them. We would soak them up with awe.

When I run they are always there though, so instead of peering curiously at them, I let them peer down at me. I focus on my ragged breathing - in through my nose, out through my mouth. I focus on the rhythm of the music pounding in my ears and try to keep my feet in tempo, even when my legs are aching.

I adore running on the snow, where my feet are the first feet to ever fall. It makes me feel like an explorer of a new fantastic world. I feel like an astronaut on the moon - "one small step for man..."

I think that if I could run to the moon, I would. If I could run all the way to the stars up in sky then I would. And once I was there, in distance space on my star, I would turn around to look at the earth. Imagine seeing earth for the first time in your life like that like a cut out circle from black construction paper. I think I would just stand and stare at it. I would soak up that picture of earth in awe.

wo fangt dein himmel an? where does your heaven begin?

My heaven stretches tight around the world. It presses in stretched as thin a saran wrap around the sky.

It is the same heaven above India and my India, which exists in my grandfather's cooking, in the Bollywood films played in my brother's basement. My India exists my niece dances with her chandi and in the middle name of my new nephew, Elijah Akal Goldberg. Akal meaning in Punjabi not yesterday nor tomorrow; it is timeless.



My Heaven connects together my life like little threads running across and around my experiences. A thread is running from my kitchen in Ohio where my mother made crepes for breakfast, because my brother was learning French. It runs all the way to my brother and I standing in his girlfriend's kitchen in Boston where he taught me how to swirl the pan so the dough thins out across the pan. About a year later, Stephen married that girl. It connects to this moment now in another kitchen across the U.S. of another brother and his wife where I make crepes with my sister and niece in the early hours of morning.

Sometimes my heaven folds over it itself and gathers together. A lot of it has this weekend in Utah as all of my family gathers together to see the new baby.It's a groggy winter morning, but I am surrounded right now with that peace.