1.5 miles* (2 loops)
lake nokomis open swim
69 degrees / light rain
*not quite sure of the distance, but I’m basing it on my strokes (which are very consistent) and comparing them to strokes per mile in the pool
Hooray for another open swim! Had to miss 2 this week because of moving Scott’s dad, so I’m very glad I was able to get to the lake this morning. I LOVE lake swimming. It’s hard, but is so satisfying and freeing. I love the gentle burn I feel in my shoulders for a few hours after I’m done. It was cold(er) and the water was a little choppy. I had to breathe on my right side most of the time. The few times I turned to breathe on my left side, water rushed over my head. I couldn’t really see the buoys but it didn’t matter. I was able to keep swimming and stay on course.
It was 10 years ago that I first swam across the lake for open swim. I was nervous and almost didn’t do it. I loved it instantly. I love it even more now.
10 Things
- a slight drizzle that I couldn’t feel in the water
- brightest color: the pink safety buoy tethered to a torso
- second brightest color: the orange buoy that was rarely visible
- dimmest color: the green buoys
- opaque water — no visibility underwater
- a single swan boat
- something flying in the air above me that could have been a plane, a bird, or a bug. I couldn’t tell
- a few green-capped heads bobbing near the far orange buoy
- the faintest white form of a vertical buoy just off the big beach — as I swam towards it, I could see the form hovering underwater
- my fingers going slightly numb, my right shoulder burning near the end of the second loop
wordle challenge
5 tries: wrest / cribs / spank / souls / SHYLY
WREST
For the wrest of the day I will put a w first in words that begin with r.
I didn’t have to wrest the answer from her; she told me willingly.
from Lucky Day Still/ David Rivard
Lucky day still spent wrestling the private problems
and obsessions encountered first in your youth
but played out now within the spectacle of public aging
(tho, strangely, as you age you feel less & less seen
by the young, a citizen active in frequencies of light waves
increasingly invisible—not even boring to 15-year-olds).
CRIBS
MTV Cribs — this is where the magic happens….
crib sheet
cribbage wars
scribble
caribous
(verb) to confine
SPANK
spanking new
- from Knot Work / Not Work / Knot Hole / Not Whole: A Mapping / Jishin-no-ben
- trans. Lee Ann Roripaugh
1.
Knot is a tangle, a problem that needs
unraveling. Not is the thing that isn’t / doesn’t /
wouldn’t. Knot a securing, a way of holding on.
Not security’s antithesis—a refusal to hold
or to be held. Lover’s knot / not lovers / all
for naught. Knotty pine paint paddles broken
in a splintered rage when spanking the non-compliant
child. Not I, said the spy. (Knot eye.) Not the eye
skimming smoothly up the trunk into blue sky,
but a knot eye, a visual paradox, a trompe l’oeil.
2.
Formed in trunks where branches used to be,
or where the trunk’s growth has choked off
the smaller, lower branches in a tree. Each knot
the mark of a tightening tourniquet surrounding
a phantom limb. Each knot a scar, a toughening
over to cauterize loss, seal the body shut so it doesn’t
bleed out in the snow. In a concentration camp
in Minidoka, Idaho, wood artist George Nakashima
learned to burnish the souls of trees through their scars:
their knots, their holes, their cracks, their broken histories
SOULS
All Souls Day
eyes are (not) the window to our Souls
souless
from When Great Trees Fall/ Maya Angelou
Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.
And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
SHYLY
Slowly
shyly
the way into the words
appears —
the problem of finitude (wrestling with death)
constrained in the awareness of impending non-existence (cribbed)
the sharp shock of what used to be (spank)
but is no more (when great souls die)