3.2 miles
river road trail, south/edmund, north/32nd st, west
64 degrees
Very gray this morning, which didn’t bother me. Everything looked solemn, calm, expectant. Rain coming in a few hours then a big drop in the temperature. Maybe a few inches of snow tomorrow. Goodbye unusually mild fall weather, hello winter. Yes! Wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and was still warm. I could feel that my face was bright red. Heading south straight into the wind at the beginning of my run, I admired the river. Such a nice blueish gray. Saw something flying in the air–was it a small bird or a leaf? I couldn’t tell. Too many cars on the river road but not too many people.
[added in several hours later] I almost forgot. I saw a dead animal on the road, right on the edge. No blood, no mangled body. It looked like it was sleeping. Running, I noticed something unusual in the road. I turned to look back at it, almost veering into the fence on the edge of the gorge. I think it was raccoon.
[added in even later] Forgot this too: Scott and I watching all the seasons of Community (again). This morning I had this song in my head:
“Come on I’m Dean/and my hands are so clean/at this moment/I am stapling”
I chanted it several times as I ran until I forgot about it.
Thinking about bewilderment as I work on a mood ring poem. Really appreciate this passage from Fanny Howe:
There is a muslim prayer that says, “Lord, increase my bewilderment,” and this prayer is also mine and the strange Whoever who goes under the name of “I” in my poems–and under multiple names in my fiction–where error, errancy and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story.
error, errancy, and bewilderment
I also like this passage:
In the Dictionary, to bewilder is “to cause to lose one’s sense of where one is.”
The wilderness as metaphor is in this case not evocative enough because causing a complete failure in the magnet, the compass, the scale, the stars and the movement of the rivers is more than getting lost in the woods.
Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.
It cracks open the dialectic and sees myriads all at once.