5 loops
lake nokomis open swim
80 degrees
Another great swim! When I checked the water temperature on the parks water quality site it was 73 degrees, but I’m skeptical. This water felt much warmer than that. Swam for 90 minutes without stopping. So far, I’ve been in the water 11 hours in August. Will I make it to 24? I told Scott that my “swimming, one day in august” might be approximate, which is fitting for me.
10 Things
- a dragonfly
- at least 4 swan boats crossing the course
- scratchy vines — ouch!
- bubbles, looking like the ones in Scooby-Doo, illuminated by the sun
- backlit green buoy, unseen until right next to them, and then only as dark forms
- the never-nearing, Poltergeist hallway orange buoy
- ducks being tormented by an annoying kid
- 6 seagulls, perched on the light high above, pooping
- 2 far off swans, glowing a bright white
- leaving at 8, the lake was lively, full of music and people and a joyful, relaxed energy
Thought about the geometry of water as I swam: lines connecting the course, sharp angled turns around buoys, equilateral orange (buoy), isosceles sail.
Here are some passages that I heard in June on the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast that I’d like to remember:
fields of stability through which matter passes
. . . all life forms are processes. Like you, like me, like the cells, the matter that makes up my body today, it’s different matter from the matter that made up my body a few years ago.
So we’re kind of fields of stability through which matter is passing. And all life forms are like that.
Poetry Off the Shelf: A Stone Worth Addressing / Jun 18, 2024
more like a stable whirlpool than a rock
. . . you can’t step in the same river twice, and so that’s one of the founding maxims of modern process thought. So we ourselves are like rivers, the matter is flowing through us, but we remain in our shape. So we’re more like, from this perspective, we’re more like a kind of whirlpool, like a stable whirlpool in a river than we are like a rock in that river.
Poetry Off the Shelf: A Stone Worth Addressing / Jun 18, 2024
balance between habits and flux
And we need both forces in our lives. And sometimes we get trapped in the flux, trapped and dizzy with flux. And then it helps to come back to find some kind of regular habit, some routine, something that can ground you and hold you stable.
Sometimes we get trapped in valleys of habits and calcified modes of thought, and then helpful to play a wrong note, do something completely different, throw yourself out of that, catapult yourself into novelty to get out of that. And certainly, I find that my health, my state of being, depends on these forces being in some kind of balance.”