I started running when I was 12-years old, after being assigned “anchor,” or the last runner in a phys-ed relay. I had taken the baton from the last boy to reach the waiting lines of runners, and charged-off with nothing to lose. But I had the self-discipline to endure, and I ran my quarter-mile with a commitment that none of the others could match. However, I wouldn’t hear my classmates’ cheers after collapsing just past the finish-line, briefly passed out from the exertion.

The weekend after my unexpected triumph, I ran several laps with my father around the lawn at a local park. He ran nearly every day after coming home from his work. A physician, it was his meditation, his transition from worrying about others’ lives to worrying about his own. I would hear his voice in the evening, “Tadaima!” (I’m home!), and a few minutes later, “Mata ne!” (See you later!). He must have run terribly slowly for me. I recall struggling to keep up with him for a mile, a long way for an awkward 12-year old. Afterward, I sat on a bench and watched him go on for what seemed to me an endless series of recurring loops, traveling into the distance, but always returning. “Mata ne.” I wanted to run like that.

Over time, I learned to pace myself to my father’s long stride. I would follow for as long as I could, imagining myself being pulled along by some invisible thread. Then, in middle school, I joined the girls’ cross-country team. Two-miles became a nearly every day ritual, lapping the school field each afternoon.

At school one afternoon, Mr. Hisatomi, the heavy-set, Japanese-American boys’ coach pointed at me as I walked past. “You guys could be pretty good if you ran your best every day — like her.” For the rest of the year, the boys out front watched me like an approaching barracuda. Through middle-school, and then into high school, the commitment never resulted in anything more than a “third” in meets. But for me, that was never the point.

Any serious runner will tell you that it’s an addiction. Some medical experts attempt to explain it by suggesting that the exertion causes a release of “endorphins,” the brain’s natural opiate and a literal explanation for a “runner’s high.” For runners, however, it becomes many things. For some, it’s simply a pleasant routine to start or end a day, while for others it’s a discipline. And then there are those for whom it becomes a competition, although the opponent might not be so clear as in other sports. Regardless, running is a lifestyle, and it changes a person.

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About two miles into the run, we had already spread thin across the desert trail. The mutant mountain-runners who seemed to have been born with an extra lung had disappeared after the first few minutes, and most of the more competitive group followed not long after. The trail was smooth, slightly sandy, and easy to negotiate between the walls of sage and rabbit brush that lined its boundaries. Following in the footprints of those who had preceded, it was an easy task to settle into a steady pace and meditate on a place within the landscape.

The trail split at a marker, and I went left. It was the shortest route to the finish, a mere eleven miles. I knew that for some, the route wouldn’t even have justified a change of shoes. Those were the ultra-marathon runners, among them several who had completed the Badwater’s original 146-miles from Death Valley to the summit of Mount Whitney. They would already be far ahead, somewhere along the 50-mile route. A couple of nearby mid-distance runners also veered right, and gradually moved into the distance until I was alone.

The desert’s fierceness seemed to increase as the first of two water-bottles emptied, and the soil became rockier and less welcoming. Footprints disappeared. Searching across a seemingly endless expanse of wilderness between route-markers, I felt a slight color of doubt. Could I be on a wrong trail, pushing irretrievably deeper into a vast nothingness? Sweat rolled into my eyes, and the desert folded into the memory of following my father on a green field fresh with the smell of cut grass. Pulled on forward by the image, I continued in a reassuring rhythm.

It wasn’t much later that a shadow crossed the trail just in front of me — and another a little farther ahead. I glanced up as a red-tail hawk, one of three, passed low about fifty feet to my right. A pair of adults and an adolescent, they seemed to be escorting me through the desert, sometimes descending to only a few feet above the brush at my sides. Occasionally, the younger of the three would pass close in front of me, perhaps curious about the interloper. It took awhile to realize that they were using me to flush out prey, watching for any small animals that I might frighten from the underbrush.

Wings spiraled upward in the hot, rising air, and crossed the sun casting shadows across the trail, then slid downward on an invisible boundary to within feet of the earth. I sank deeper into a rhythm with the trail and my companions as we seemed to dance together through the desert to the slow beat of some unheard music.

The trail curved slowly around the base of a rocky hill, rising slightly onto the floodplain that extended from its lower reaches. The incline and the heat demanded more physical and mental effort to maintain a pace, and my thoughts began to drift inward, focusing on the pattern of each breath, each movement, each push, each impact. Somewhere along the way, my escorts departed unnoticed while the desert itself disappeared. There was only each motion — each step and everything in the cycle of making it happen. Entirely focused on an unfeeling rhythm of movement and breath — it became the sum of a consciousness.

The hill crested and the trail leveled, but there was no one there to notice. And then, with no further need for such focus, there was nothingness. The ground moved reflexively beneath feet, and a body moved over it. It was all the same, the same matter that made up the entire universe, the same energy that gave it life. Everything was perfect, as it should be, nothing out-of-place. Identity was a vibration on a ripple on a wave on a tide on a sea in an endless ocean. It all danced together in a perfect rhythm, for just one moment wholly unfettered by purpose or desire or ambition or ego — until I noticed. But the knowledge of that moment would remain.

That night at the desert campsite, I would move silently away from the crowded bonfire, its embers disappearing into a star-filled sky. From the edge of the darkness, lightning flashed in the distance. A thunderstorm was touching the desert, and each dancing spark seemed add its energy to my own. There was nothing to fear. In that moment, I would decide to wander into the distance.  And nothing would ever be the same.