The only elephants I have ever met have been in Spirit Form.
They have entered the landscapes of my dreams and imagination as guides, appearing at unexpected moments to illuminate a path forward or reveal a next step. Their visits have been fleeting, but their presence has never felt insignificant.
In my mid-twenties, as I was finishing graduate school, I had one such dream.
A tanned, surfer-looking dude wearing chanclas stood beside what appeared to be a miniature elephant. He explained to me that elephants are necessary for “the spiritual healing of humanity.”
Those words remain in quotation marks because they are the exact words I remember from the dream, even all these years later.
The image stayed with me. Curiosity led me to begin researching elephants, and eventually I discovered the Borneo pygmy elephant, a small subspecies of Asian elephant living in the forests of Borneo. I learned about the pressures their habitat faced as forests gave way to development and palm oil plantations. My searching eventually led me to information about the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy, or SCORE, and from there, I followed more strange pathways the universe sometimes seems to place before us.
Through my online wandering, I connected with a man named Dr. Ben Topen, who was pursuing international funding to establish a medicinal plant seed library and archive intended to help preserve Indigenous knowledge in Borneo. He needed a native English speaker to copy edit his funding request. I happily offered my support, polishing the language and helping clarify the proposal.
Soon afterward, life moved forward. This was a time before I even had internet connectivity in my living space, and I never learned what ultimately became of the initiative. But I have always remembered how it began: with an elephant in a dream.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons I have never needed to meet an elephant in person to feel connected to them. I have never touched an elephant, ridden an elephant, bathed an elephant, or known an elephant by name. My relationship with them has instead existed somewhere between imagination, reverence, science, and Spirit.
It is from that place that my 600 Mile Run for Elephants emerged.
Elephants occupy a remarkable place in the community of life. Science continues to reveal the complexity of their intelligence, emotional lives, social bonds, memory, and self-awareness. The famous mirror recognition experiment offered one glimpse into an awareness that those who have spent their lives around elephants have long recognized: there is someone looking back.
As our understanding of elephants deepens, so too does our responsibility toward them.
Elephants who have spent decades in captivity cannot simply be returned to a life they have never known. Aging elephants require specialized care, space, companionship, patience, and people who understand not only their physical needs but the complex emotional lives of non-human beings who may have spent years performing, traveling, living in confined environments, or existing far outside their natural social order.
This is where The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee enters the story.
The Sanctuary provides what it beautifully describes as “home, herd, rest, refuge, and care for life” for retired Asian and African elephants. Some have survived abuse. Others have retired from circuses or zoos in the United States and abroad. At the Sanctuary, they are given the opportunity to become themselves on their own terms. They can move into their new social worlds at their own pace. They can wander, form relationships, and rest.
They can simply be Elephants.
And so, The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee became the beneficiary of the money raised through my 600 Mile Run for Elephants.
As I approach the halfway point of this journey and prepare to cross the 300-mile threshold, I find myself thinking less about the number ahead of me and more about what these miles have already taught me.
I have been a runner since I was eleven years old. Running is woven into the rhythm of my life. Until now, it has largely been something I have done at my leisure. I could run when the weather was pleasant, when my schedule cooperated, when my body felt energetic, or when my mind was willing.
Six hundred miles undertaken with a purpose is different.
This run has required commitment, planning, discipline, and a willingness to show up when I would ordinarily choose not to. I have run beneath a suffocating dome of summer heat and through air thickened by Canadian wildfire smoke. I have slogged across muddy trails in downpours. I have gone out when my legs were tired and when my mind could produce a convincing list of reasons why tomorrow, or Saturday, might be better.
However, the miles are not about only running. They are a practice of devotion.
On long runs, the mind starts to negotiate with the body. The enthusiasm disappears. The destination feels unnecessarily far away. In those moments, I return to the Spirit of Elephant. I think about endurance. Memory. Community. The intelligence of a species that has traveled this Earth for millions of years.
I think about the elephants wandering through the fields and forests of the Sanctuary, living out the remainder of their lives with greater freedom, companionship, and peace.
And then my feet find the trail again.
One step.
Then another.
Then another.
Running has always connected me to the Earth, but this journey has made that connection feel less individual. The ground beneath my feet is not my trail. The breath moving through my lungs is not separate from the forests producing oxygen, the rain feeding the soil, the animals moving beyond my sight, or the vast network of lives unfolding alongside mine.
Perhaps this is part of what the elephant in my dream was trying to tell me all those years ago. The spiritual healing of humanity may not come from transcending the natural world. Perhaps it comes from remembering that we belong to it.
Perhaps healing begins when another being’s life matters to us even when that being can offer us nothing in return. When reverence becomes responsibility. When inspiration becomes action. When something glimpsed only for a moment in a dream becomes a seed that waits patiently for years before finally finding the soil in which it can grow.
I do not know where every one of these 600 miles will lead me. But I know why I am running them. For the elephants. For the mysterious intelligence moving through the living world. For the possibility that our relationships with other beings can awaken something more compassionate within ourselves.
Following the Nomad Star 