april 25/WALK

52 minutes
winchell / ravine / steps / longfellow / river trail
55 degrees

A great afternoon walk with Delia the dog. Sometimes there was sun, but mostly it was cloudy and overcast. Some wind. Bright green everywhere, even on the felled trees in the floodplain forest. Heard lots of singing birds, people talking, a sharp clanging noise. When it was sunny, I admired the soft shadows of tree limbs and Delia’s stubby legs and long body.

10 Things

  1. creeeaakkk — the tall trees in the floodplain forest were swaying in the wind and some branches were rubbing together to make a soft (and sinister) creaking noise
  2. the top step of the stone steps had a big puddle of water — watch out!
  3. stopping to wait for a trail runner to pass before heading back up the steps. They looked too warm and had a sweatshirt wrapped around their waist
  4. the soft lapping of the water against a log on the edge of the shore
  5. someone in a bright orange jacket following behind, talking to someone on a phone
  6. the sky above the forest was more open than usual, the ground more cluttered with tree trunks
  7. the gentle curve of a tree trunk, almost like an arched back
  8. a loud splash in the water, then a flash of movement — a fish jumping out of the water?
  9. a retaining wall in the oak savanna, across the ravine, was painted bright colors — blue, yellow, red
  10. someone on a scooter, someone else on a bike, both masked and on the walking trail

before the walk

Woke up stiff and sore, which I’ve been doing for the past month. Most of me is okay, only my lower glutes and hips and hamstrings hurt, especially when I leaned down to throw something away in the organics. Ouch! After a few minutes, it should get better. Is it worse this morning because of yesterday’s biking? I don’t think so.

Other things I woke up to:

  • a thought: I have to wheel the recycling bin down before the truck comes!
  • a rejection: “After careful consideration, we decided this submission is not the right fit for us”
  • green green green grass from all the rain yesterday and early this morning

Rejections are not fun. Even though I know how difficult it is to get something published — less than 5% acceptance rate + your poem needs to fit with the others already selected — it still stings. But only for a few minutes. Now I’m thinking about grass and spring and noisy birds outside my window — the torpedoed call of a cardinal. I wish I would have counted their repeated chirps — 10 or 12 or more in a row!

A video came up on YouTube about piriformis syndrome, which I may or may not have, but probably don’t because it’s very rare — 6% chance: Piriformis Syndrome — STOP Stretching. I checked it out, and I’m willing to try the 2 exercises it suggests for contracting/strengthening my piriformis muscle instead of stretching/lengthening it. Will it work? I’m not sure, but I don’t think it will hurt to do them as I wait for my far off doctor appointment.

I’ve come a long way in my reactions to injury over the years. I’m not freaking out or in despair, even though I haven’t been able to run for 10 days. The pain isn’t making me anxious, like it did last year with my calf. I’m sure my more relaxed attitude is partly due to more experience with injury, less fear over tight glutes than knots in calves, and the lexapro. Whatever it is, I’m grateful to not be in constant panic mode.

So, is it piriformis syndrome? Who knows. What else could it be? Time to get out the scrabble tiles and make some anagrams!

P I R I F O R M I S S Y N D R O M E is tough one —

  • In moss drip form (not used: I R E Y)
  • Permission from Id (not used: Y R)
  • Osprey mind forms (not used: R I I)
  • Spry of mind, I rise (M O R)

after the walk

I’m continuing to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry Bush. I think I might need to buy it. The part I’m currently reading is about ecological economics.

We’ve created a system such that we self-identify as consumers first before understanding ourselves as ecosystem citizens. In ecological economics, the focus is on creating an economy that provides for a just and sustaianable future in which both human life and nonhuman life can flourish.

The Service Berry Bush/ RWK

competition is not the primary force regulating evolutionary success

competition only makes sense when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus shifts to the level of a group. cooperation is a better modle not only for surviving but for thriving.

since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this avoidance is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggestion “If there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.”

april 24/BIKE

30 minutes
basement
outside: 52 degrees

A little cooler today, but not cold. Overcast, with rain coming. I could have brought my bike up and gone for a ride outside, but I wanted to watch more of The Residence, and my hip was hurting a little so I thought it would be hard to carry my bike up the stairs. I had a good ride. Hardly any pain — only the regular kind for less than a minute in my left knee. I finished episode 2 and started episode 3. Realized halfway through that the titles of the episodes (I had hardly noticed them before) mean something. Episode 3 Knives Out. Does it go deeper than the fact that this episode is about the pastry chef and the bloody knife? I need to watch the rest of the episode. And I need to convince Scott to watch this show. He will like it.

I pushed a little harder on the bike and got my heart rate up in the 130s for at least some time. I worked hard enough to sweat. Hooray! This is my first time sweating from exercise in over a week — last Tuesday. I’ve missed it. If my body feels okay tonight, I’ll have to do more biking tomorrow. Maybe it would help me recover to get a little more exercise? Future Sara, let me know.

Before I biked, I archived some things I read this morning:

1

Entanglements, connections, understandings of self in relation to others — it keeps coming up. Today, I found it in the poem of the day on Poetry Foundation, Speakers/ Dimitri Reyes

About this Poem

This poem finds me in my early twenties, being mentored by an owner of a thrift store in Newark, New Jersey, who became a father figure to my wife and me. Pete was the first Puerto Rican elder I knew who showed me that you can be connected to Ricanness while shuffling setlists between Metallica, Ozomatli, John Coltrane, and Joe Bataan; who showed me that it was cool to enjoy art and philosophize for the sake of dreaming. He is no longer here with us, but I am still philosophizing and dreaming. Currently, I am intrigued by how character sketches teach us how to live, to survive, to love. If life and time are indeed our teachers, the interactions we have among one another are the ever-changing curriculum.

Speakers/ Dimitri Reyes

The interactions we have among one another are the ever-changing curriculum. This idea of curriculum makes me think of a favorite poem, What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade/ Brad Aaron Modlin.

I have been playing around with the idea of creating a curriculum for my experiences with poetry. I guess that is what my How to Be project is. It might be fun to work on it a little more, to fit in the form of a curriculum with syllabi, learning outcomes, etc.

2

I’m in the process of memorizing Emily Dickinson’s wonderful poem, “The Mushroom is the Elf of the Plants.” I’m looking at it on Poetry Foundation. At the bottom of the page, I read this:

Notes: 

The Poetry Foundation often receives questions about Emily Dickinson’s poems. Read a note from the digital archive editor about Dickinson’s “errors.”

I laughed out loud when I read this part:

Dickinson technically misuses the apostrophe in the poem “A Route of Evanescence, (1489)” and makes similar errors in other poems. Some of these can be explained as unintentional errors and some scholars have made this case. Other scholars, however, contend that Dickinson often intentionally played with typos and other errors as a sort of linguistic mischief-making in her poems and in her considerable correspondence.

The error ED makes is using it’s when she should have used its. This is a huge pet peeve of Scott’s. Just as I was reading this passage, he came downstairs, so I explained the note and paraphrased the key part for him: she’s fucking with you! Ha Ha. I love Emily Dickinson.

3

I was disappointed to check and find that I hadn’t written about mushrooms and entanglement on april 24, 2022. But then I was grateful to find that I had posted a beautiful Mary Oliver poem on april 24, 2021. Thanks past Sara and Mary Oliver! That ending!

Listen, everyone has a chance. 
Is it spring, is it morning?
Are there trees near you, 
and does your own soul need comforting?
Quick, then—open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song
may already be drifting away.

And here’s a moment of connection and community:

first, I stood still
and thought of nothing. 
Then I began to listen. 
Then I was filled with gladness—
and that’s when it happened, 
when I seemed to float, 
to be myself, a wing or a tree—
and I began to understand
what the bird was saying, 
and the sands in the glass
stopped
for a pure white moment
while gravity sprinkled upward
like rain, rising, 
and in fact
became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing—
not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers, 
and also the trees around them, 
as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds
in the perfectly blue sky—all, all of them
were singing. 
And, of course, so it seemed, 
so was I.

4

Yesterday I started reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry Bush. Today I encountered her offering of a definition of economics outside of the scarcity model and within an understanding of gifts and abundance:

Economics is “the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.” (the American Economic Association)

With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.

Economics is “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It’s a way of considering how we provide for ourselves” (from the U.S. Society for ecological Economics).

The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.

april 23/WALKBIKE

60 minutes
winchell trail / dowling community garden / neighborhood
61 degrees

Even better than yesterday! What a wonderful late morning. Delia and I walked to the Winchell trail, then up to the mesa in the oak savanna. More winchell until the folwell bench, then across the road through the 1960s neighborhood and into the community garden. So many birds! Lots of green and white flowers too, blooming all over the hillside in the oak savanna. I found out what these white blossoms were called a few years ago, but I can’t remember — maybe it’s one of these?

10 Things

  1. a steady dripping down in the ravine
  2. 2 dark holes — caves in the rock
  3. more of the chainlink fence is ripped away from the posts
  4. yesterday I noticed ugly red graffiti on the 38th street steps. Was it still there today? I forgot to check, but surely I would have noticed, right?
  5. less mud, more dirt
  6. sometimes sunny, sometimes overcast / sometimes blue, sometimes light brown
  7. in a wood near the community garden: 2 (or more?) birds making a racket up in a tree, sounding like the drum at the beginning of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” — nice!
  8. the river: patches of smooth water, patches of rougher water — not from wind, but from sandbars?
  9. calm, still, the water was barely moving — only after staring at it for a moment could I see a slight shimmer out of the corner of my eye
  10. a woman in bright pink, sitting near the 38th street steps, silent except for the repeated clearing of her throat

before the run

Reading through my entires from april of 2022, I’m returning to thoughts of entanglement and mushrooms and precarity and ruins. Here is today’s inspiration from 23 april 2022:

  • a different sort of We, not a me or an I, but a we, an us
  • a different way of looking/sensing/becoming aware: not seeing straight on, but feeling, looking across and to the side, down, beneath and below
  • stop looking up to the heavens, start feeling/sensing what’s below
  • a hope that is not predicated on evidence, when evidence = seeing and Knowing and fully understanding (seeing things as parts or discrete categories or individual things)
  • entangled is not separate or pure but messy and enmeshed

this is why we are all here — from my haibun and what I heard coming out of the little old lady’s phone

this 
why 
we 
all
here

why = curiosity, wonder

The why is not an explanation — this is why/this is THE reason — but an invitation to imagine differently, expansively, wildly.

we all = ecosystems, organisms, networks, asemblages

Organisms are ecosystems. 
I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs (Tsing, 4) .

here = a place, located in history, a specific place, not transferable or easily translatable, can’t be scaled up or turned into assets

I picked up Mushrooms at the End of the World, and found this in the preface:

The time has come for new ways of telling stories beyond . . . Man and Nature . . , such stories might be simultaneously true and fabulous. How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?

The Mushrooms at the End of the World/ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (viii)

fabulous = resembling or suggesting a fable : of an incredible, astonishing, or exaggerated nature

invented and true

[about this book] what follows a riot of short chapters. I wanted them to be like the flashes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore; an always too many.

explosion / too much, too many / after the rain eruptions of excess

This explosion bit reminded me of Arthur Sze in an interview with David Naiman:

I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.

during the run

I thought about something else I read in the entry with this Sze passage. It’s a fragment of a poem I wrote in response to Sze and a few Mary Oliver lines:

Maybe like mushrooms, we rise
or not rise, flare
brief burst from below
then return 
to swim in the dirt…

I was thinking about not wanting to swim in the dirt, but be out in the air, exposed, vulnerable to erosion and rust/ing.

after the run

In The Mushrooms at the End of the World, Tsing discusses how matsutake mushrooms develop their fungi networks in locations of ruin — edges of volcanos, forest destroyed by logging and lumber companies. So, there’s a relationship between the flare/the fruit (the mushroom) and decay/ruin/erosion. Now I’m thinking about my version of what the moment of ruin can produce, where the moment of ruin = ruined eyes. What poetry might burst forth as I reckon with my dying/dead cone cells?

Mushrooms came up in the fiction book I’m reading, too: The Bog Wife.

But when he returned to the bog, he found a row of trespassers sprouting where the swale met the hinged door to the Cranberry River. These trespassers retained their heads, and Percy knew as soon as he saw them that his suspicions were correct; they were mushrooms. His heart sank. He sometimes saw mushrooms in the sparse forest on the west end of the property, modest white-headed clumps strewn across the soil or fringed gray dishes sticking out like frills from the trunks of trees. But he had never seen any of their ilk here, where the soil was not mushroom soil because it was bog soil, a dense wet batter that supported only the shallow-rooted and perpetually thirsty.

They would never tolerate any of the mushrooms, Percy thought. The mushrooms had all been trespassers. He tore out the orange mushrooms and gathered up the torn stems for burning, but he knew it wouldn’t make a difference. Mushrooms could not be dug up. They could not be evicted.

The Bog Wife/ Kay Chronister

I’m reading Emily Dickinson’s “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” and refreshing my memorizing of Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms.” Nobody sees us, stops us — SP envisions mushrooms as trespassers.

And here are a few more passages from Mushrooms at the End of the World, that I want to archive:

a network of (mostly) invisible influences

Below the forest floor, fungal bodies extend themselves in nets and skein, binding roots and mineral soils, long before producing mushrooms. All books emerge from similarly hidden collaborations.

The Mushrooms at the End of the World/ ALT

a gift and a guide

The uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift — and a guide — when the uncontrolled world we thought we had fails.

promise and ruin, promise and ruin

This is a story we need to know. Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope—or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin.

bike: 20 minutes
basement

It was definitely nice enough to bike outside today, but I wanted to test out how riding a bike would feel on my back/hips/glutes for taking my bike off the stand and carrying upstairs. Plus I wanted to watch more of The Residence. Great show!

Almost 2 hours later, my back feels okay. We’ll see how it is when I want to go to sleep. If it’s okay, I might try biking outside tomorrow!

april 22/WALK

45 minutes
winchell trail south / folwell bench
58 degrees

Wow wow wow! Spring. Little explosions of bright green everywhere — out of sidewalk cracks, under fences, on slender branches. I think explosion is the right word — not pops or flashes, well maybe flares. Almost overnight, green! Not yet annoying or oppressive; I still have my view of the gorge and the other side. I could see fuzzy details, branches, rippling water, houses, but what I felt was the horizons of gray (river), brown (shore/trees), and blue (sky). 3 distinct lines dividing my view into 3 colors.

Delia and I walked to the river then down the uneven wooden steps to the trail. We walked even slower than usual to let two walkers move past. One of them was talking about a friend (or a partner?): we’re both from the same town, and we went to the same school! I smiled and greeted a friendly runner, called out Hi Dave! to Dave. Delia jumped up and walked all of the walls on the trail. We ended at the folwell/the WWDD bench (see below) and sat for a moment, taking in the view.

10 Things

  1. the air was hazed with humidity, making everything look even fuzzier, more distant
  2. minneapolis park workers have cleared out old trees in the savanna, turned them into mulch that they put on the trail
  3. the small rise up to the paved trail is more visible now — all dirt and dead leaves and stubs of tree trunks
  4. the cave below the limestone ledge in the ravine seems to be expanding — how long is this process? how long before the ledge collapses?
  5. mud on the part of winchell on the hill between the savanna and the 38th street steps
  6. the repeated honk from a lone goose, below us. It always seemed the same distance from us. Was it following us, or taking a walk with us?
  7. a loud, rhythmic clanging above us that I couldn’t quite place. A thought: was it someone banging on a fire hydrant to open it up? Near the end of my walk, I saw one open and gushing water
  8. sitting at the folwell bench, overheard — an older walker to a younger one: we haven’t even gone 20 minutes yet
  9. someone pushing a walker through the grass on the boulevard between edmund and the river road, stopping to check out each tree
  10. the husk of some big trees leaning at awkward angles in the oak savanna

A wonderful walk! I felt relaxed and calm and grateful to be outside and moving (without pain) this morning.

before the run

Reading through my “on this day” entries from past april 22nd entries, I was inspired by Mary Oliver and a little old lady walking and listening to a radio and a bench dedicated to a woman who fell through the ice one winter and a fragment overheard on the little old lady’s radio — this is why we are all here — especially the this, which is echoed in Marie Howe’s poem, The Gate. Instead of trying to explain these connections–entanglements?– I’ll gather them here:

1 — the little old lady

For the third time, encountered the little old lady walking with her hiking poles listening to a radio show or an audio book or something. Today I heard, “which reminds us of why we are all here.” Decided that I should create a poem or some piece of writing around this phrase. This phrase could be the title or the ending line of the whole poem or a sentence or a refrain (5 aug 2019).

…the little old lady slowly shuffling by, swinging her hiking poles, a voice TED-talking out of her phone’s speaker reminding you that this is why we are all here. Do not bother the bench resting on the rim of the gorge to ask what this is (22 april 2022 — a draft of my poem).

note: reviewing these entries, I’m noticing how I changed what I heard from “reminds us why” to “this”. I’m almost prefer the original — the reminder, that doesn’t have to be the answer, just a pointing to it — a finger pointing! a definition of poetry!

2 — The Gate

from The Gate/ Marie Howe

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?

And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.

And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.

3 — This is why we are all here

which reminds us why we are all here…

We are here. Me and joints and muscles and bones and ligaments and lungs. Us. me
and blood and cells and electrolytes and sweat and saliva. we. me
and hands and feet, a heart, two diseased eyes, a knee that displaces. we. me
worn out running shoes, threadbare worries. we. me
and those oak trees, that wrought iron fence, this rutted, dirt path, that short, steep hill. we. me river. that we are here with the old woman who slowly shuffles in her straw hat with her hiking poles and a voice that calls out from her radio speakers, “which reminds us why we are all here.”
here. above the river and the gorge and the floodplain forest, below the bike path and the road, the cars and the boulevard.
here. in this heat and humidity and haze. here. on a monday morning. here.

We are all here.

(from 22 april 2022)

4 — Mary Oliver

Reading MO, I’ve noticed, and have been trying to articulate, a tension in her poems between the I, the World, Nature, God, Eternity, Work. This tension seems to take many forms and MO imagines it to be endlessly intriguing and part of the process of living. Never to be resolved but to be puzzled over. One element of this tension involves the plight of the human—born to doubt and argue and question what it all means, to be both brought closer to and further away from the world by language and the power and beauty of words, which are never as powerful or beautiful as the world itself. To want a name and a useful place, to claim a life, but also to belong to the world, to be “less yourself than part of everything.”

(from 22 april 2021)

From The Book of Time in The Leaf and the Cloud

5.
What is my name, 
o what is my name
that I may offer it back
to the beautiful world?

from “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud

6.
…
It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful

but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light, 

frenzied, 
wringing our hands, 

half-mad, saying over and over:

what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
what does it mean?

5 — the words/reminder

from “Work” in The Leaf and the Cloud

3.
Would it be better to sit in silence?
To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?

This is the way of the orange gourd.
This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which
the water pours all night and all day.
But the nature of man is not the nature of silence.
Words are the thunders of the mind.
Words are the refinement of the flesh.
Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments—
we just manage it—
sweet and electric, words flow from the brain
and out the gate of the mouth. 

We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar.
We are slow, and choosy. 
This is the world.

Words can help us to remember a beloved but long dead dog:

And now she’s nothing
except for mornings when I take a handful of words
and throw them into the air
so that she dashes up again out of the darkness,

5 — the bench

I have run by this bench hundreds of times, stopped and sat once or twice, even wrote about it, but I’ve never noticed this small plaque on it. How did I see it today? I love these little surprises, just waiting to be found! I had no idea what this plaque meant — WWDD? I looked it up and found a facebook page for the Rachel Dow Memorial. Wow. She was loved by so many. I read a little about her life — a passionate, social justice minded, free-spirit — and her death — she fell through the ice at the river and died of hypothermia. Maybe I’ll write a poem about her and the others I’ve found through their plaques. All of them share with me a deep love for this river. And maybe one day, I’ll have a plaque there too (from 8 sept 2022).

6 — Jane Hirshfield

Termites: An Assay/ Jane Hirshfield

So far the house still is standing.
So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster
still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life.
An almost readable language.
Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country—
You know that something important has happened, but not what.

What to do with all of this? I’m not quite sure yet.

during the run

Occasionally, I thought about these ideas as I walked, and when I sat on the folwell bench. What did I think? I hardly remember. Once, I thought about how words were not the most important part, that being out there by the gorge, feeling everything was.

april 21/WALK

45 minutes
minnehaha academy loop*
50 degrees

*43rd ave, north / 32nd street, east, past Minnehaha Academy / edmund, south / 34th street, west, past 7 oaks / home

Before taking a walk with Delia and Scott, I “watched” the Boston Marathon, where watching = tracking runners on the app, listening to the Citius Mag watching party, and watching the last 5 minutes of the women’s race on an unofficial YouTube feed. Wow, they were fast!

It looked warm and sunny, but it felt colder than 50. It was the wind, I think. For the first half we talked about kids and wanting to be empty-nesters and how to have hard conversations about the future and the series finale of The Americans — we finished it last night. In the second half, Scott pointed out a strange mash-up of a garage and I pointed out the Siberian Squill. I wondered if we were seeing it more now because we’ve named it, but we agreed that it has become more abundant in the past few years. There was a particularly impressive patch of it in the yard of the house on the south corner of edmund and 34th. Taking in the entire patch, it looked blue. Focusing on a flower, it looked purple.

10 Things

  1. siberian squill, everywhere, including at the edge of our yard
  2. a loud dog in a fenced-in backyard
  3. an empty parking lot at minnehaha, no school for Easter
  4. a metal sign at Cooper School, bent and leaning to the side
  5. a security guard car parked in front of the gate to the field at minnehaha academy
  6. the boulevard on the edge of the academy that used to have a small line of aspensmwith aspen eyes, now only has one aspen
  7. a woman stapling a poster to a pole
  8. mud on a boulevard — Delia, stay out of the mud! — a deep brown
  9. the wind chimes chiming at the house with an Easter Island head on the front stoop
  10. looking over at the river road and seeing/feeling the open space between the west and east banks

Back/hip/leg update: today it is a little uncomfortable to sit in the chair at my desk. Is that because I went down and up the old stone steps to the river?

april 20/WALK

40 minutes
longfellow flats (river)
48 degrees

Spring! Hello black capped chickadees! Hello drumming woodpeckers! Hello bikers and runners and walkers with dogs! Hello green shoots and damp earth and soft air! Water gently lapping the shore, echoing voices, ringing bells! Hips (hopefully) healing and backs growing stronger! A wonderful morning for a walk through the neighborhood and to the river.

I wasn’t willing to stop and stare, so I could be mistaken, but it looked like a woman was taking her dog on an easter egg hunt — with the dog searching for the eggs while the woman encouraged them. If that wasn’t what I saw, I will still believe it was. Is that a thing, people arranging egg hunts for their dogs? I hope so!

I’m continuing to work on crown of color sonnets. I’m on the final one, no. 7, blue. I want to link this sonnet back up with the first one, so I’m ending with green. I’m thinking of returning to the green poem I drew from a lot, Oread by H.D.. Something about the sky not being pure blue but a mix of blue and green, or sometimes just green — especially in the spring and summer when green takes over the gorge. I’m leaving these last few sentences in, but as I worked on it more, I decided to go in a different direction. I’m taking lines from a beautiful essay about a blue wall in Leadville and writing about my efforts to make blue meaningful even though I can’t always see it.

april 19/WALK

35 minutes
neighborhood
50 degrees

Walked with Scott and Delia the dog. My hips feel a little sore, but otherwise I’m okay. Not in pain, not stressed about taking a break from running. I know I need this break. Scott and I noticed more Siberian Squill, taking over. I admired the big turtle in someone’s front yard, Scott critiqued some out of place columns holding up a trellis-like porch at the front of a house. He asked, how have I never noticed these columns before? My response: Really? These columns are the defining characteristic of this block for me. Scott wondered if a robin, standing still in a yard, was dead. Nope, we saw it move its head. I pointed out a house that was very big. The wind was coming at us from almost every direction — not quite stiff, but irritating. Even with the chilled air, it felt like spring was here to stay. Hooray!

La Guerre (II)/ e.e. cumming

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

               fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

       beauty     how

often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

             thou answerest

them only with

                             spring)

april 18/WALK

30 minutes
neighborhood
50 degrees

Went on a walk with Delia and FWA. He’s home for Easter weekend. We talked about the show Russian Doll and the 4th dimension and the limits of language and how it shifts meanings and experiences of the world. FWA wondered what it might feel like to experience the world outside of language and I talked about my work on this log and with poetry, particularly soft attention and my 10 things practice. I mentioned Mary Oliver’s poem “The Real Prayers Are Not the Words but the Attention that Comes First.” I pointed out the small stone embedded in a tree that reads, = > ÷.

Years ago, I remember feeling disconnected from FWA, not knowing how to talk with him, wondering why he was so distant. A deep sadness. I couldn’t have imagined (or hoped for) our wonderful, wandering conversation this afternoon. Not the same, but an echo of the ones I used to have with my mom.

It was not raining. Things felt open and possible, not closed and finished. Everything almost opposite of Bert Meyers’ poem, “Rainy Day.” Even so, I’ll post it here for later:

Rainy Day/ Bert Meyers

Outside, nothing moves: only the rain
nailing the house up like a coffin.

Remember, in childhood, when it rained?
Then, the whole world sailed down the alley:

leaves, paper, old shoes, the buildings,
everything like a circus going to sea.

Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys
is closing all the doors . . .

and I think we’re all dead. See how the sky
sits like a tombstone on the roofs.

april 17/WALK

30 minutes
neighbohood
55 degrees

note: I’m writing this on the 19th.

Walked with Delia through the neighborhood. Since I’m writing this a few days later, I don’t remember much, only the broad swatch of Siberian Squill in a front yard at the northwest corner of 46th avenue and 34th street. Bunches of little flowers peeking out from a big boulder, covering a small swell of grass, hiding behind a fir tree. When I glanced at one flower, it looked light purple, but when I took them all in at once, they were blue. A strange sight to see the color switch from purple to blue, purple to blue, as I shifted my gaze.

april 16/WALK

40 minutes
neighborhood
50 degrees

Woke up this morning unable to bend down to put on socks. I’ve been having a mild version of this problem for a few weeks, but today it was worse. Time to shut it down for a while. I scheduled an appointment with the doctor. First available: June 12th. Oh well, I’m on the wait list, and I feel like there’s a good chance this problem will get better on its own — iff (if and only if), I take a proper break. No running for at least a week. No biking either. The problem has been in my upper glutes/lower back, today I felt pain all down my leg to my calf. It’s worse in the morning, after not moving for most of the night. I can stand and walk but bending down in a certain way hurts too much. I am not bothered by this injury. Of course, I’d like to be running and biking, but it’s okay. The uncertainty is gone — am I injured or not? I know I am and that I need to take a break.

Thankfully, I can still walk! Went with Delia and Scott. Beautiful — blue sky, birds, and the feeling that spring is here. Oh — and little purple flowers. Scott looked them up: siberian squill. According to the Minnesota Wildflower site, they’re not purple, but blue, and invasive. Originally from Russia, these colorful flowers are hearty and take over gardens. Not even critters want to touch them. Unfortunately, some gardeners continue to plant them. At the bottom of the entry, in bold, is:

Please, all you gardeners out there: stop planting this.

The site recommends planting native species, like phlox or bluebells. Before Scott identified them with his app, I had guessed that they might be phlox.

Wow, I just read the comments and discovered a fight — on a wildflower site? I’m not sure I agree with Sandy, but I enjoyed her spirited comment.

Petyr:  It is as bad if not worse than garlic mustard – you can’t even pull this crap.

Which gardeners are now willing to stand up and take responsibility, or is this just another “so sorry”? Gardeners, this is stupid… mindless… enough!

Sandy: Finally, after 40 years of living in the same house, I have identified the little blue flowers that blossom with the snow on the ground. Early Siberian Squill. They grow wild along the front of my house. I find them to be quite beautiful. I find nothing offensive about them. A whole lot prettier than dandilions, which I wish were gone, gone, gone. So all you gardeners out there, bite me. My Squill will be left in peace, while I continue to fight a war on the big ‘D’.

There is a poem here, I think, featuring Sandy.