On the Run

Edmund Smith

The first important event that started me off on the right path was when my mother, in her bedroom at home, passed away from a long bout with cancer. I was nine and did not know she was dying. My little brother, sister, and I were only allowed to visit her in her room in the afternoon when we came home from school. She passed in the middle of a December night and was borne away unseen. We came home from school the next day, unknowing, to find her room empty. When my father came home, he told us the news. At her funeral, a closed casket affair, the minister said God had taken her away as part of his plan. This was the moment I began to question religion and God. I think that this was my mother’s parting gift to me.

My father was a deacon in our Congregational church. I went to Sunday school. It was pure boredom to attend the dry sermons. The woods, fields, and swamps around our home held far greater wonders. At age fifteen, I began volunteering at a nature center and was soon leading school groups. The naturalists there with the Connecticut Botanical Society became my refuge.

But my most memorable pivotal moment was in my early twenties when I was running a six-mile route from my father’s home to the ocean campus of the University of Connecticut branch at Groton, Avery Point. For several months, I had been heavily reading several books by Carl Sagan, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, and Montaigne’s Essays, along with books about Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein. Much of my reading was conducted behind the lanes of a bowling alley where I was a part-time pin chaser, sitting and reading until the intercom speaker called out a machine malfunction. With earplugs in, I was swept into a world distant from my pedestrian life and one rich with wonder. I felt that the masters of the world were all speaking to me, and I was the only one listening. During that run, I was feeling especially energetic and was daydreaming of some of the masters’ thoughts that had intrigued me, whereupon a sudden wave of emotion and awe came upon me—or over me. For a moment I felt completely connected to the universe, one with it all. It was at that moment that I tasted immortality and eternal infinity.

Since then, I have come to believe that this was akin to those “born again” moments that religious seekers claim to experience. But unlike those who are conquered by immersion in congregational sermons, ritual, recital, chanting, and myths, I sought truth alone by embracing logic and writers who had decoded chunks of unerring nature. I am thankful to this day that in my own search for truth I went with the masters who sit ready to guide any who come to them.

Edmund Smith teaches Exploratory Science at Two Rivers Magnet Middle School. Partnering with UConn mentors, he is a National Science Bowl coordinator and was Jr. Scientist Camp coordinator for the world record 2016 CT BioBlitz. He also assists with the CT Envirothon and co-teaches a weekend Master Naturalist course.