I like to run with the foxes, when the city is dark and quiet, when the warmth of the day ebbs away and the coolth of the night approaches, when the path is empty and when the other people recede into bubbles of their own conscience.
I like to run in the old towns, where the route twists and turns; in the new places under construction, where the landscape changes by the month; and in the waste lands, where the places are soon not to be.
I like to run in the city, because I can run all of these.
The city is real, not a place - but a feeling. The freedom of one amongst many, the freedom to watch, to listen, to learn, to do, and where one participates solely by being.
The city is a mirror of the societies it contains, supporting, protecting, revealing and yet also inherently destroying. That is the beauty of the city, when one can look around the bricks and mortar to see the substance of the thing.
But there is more to the city, not only the reality lived and built. The city is complexity, disorder, change, and tradition; history known yet futures unknown.
I like to run in the country too, when the birds sing and when the seasons pass by, when the stars can be seen and when I leave footprints in the earth as I pass.
But the country is stability and order: where crops grow in neat monoculture lines, awaiting their own destruction, so too its human inhabitants in their neat cottages; where the old go to die. And after my footprints wash away in the rain, the grass will soon grow again.
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