5 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
68 degrees
A relaxed run. Warm, windy. Thought about wild as the (not quite) opposite of still. At the beginning of my walk, an idea: wild is not only a place, but a feeling — movement, untamed, uncontrolled, frantic frenzied jittery non-stop, restless. Stillness is controlled, steady, a nothing that is something, the core, a straight spine. Then I started thinking about my diseased eyes as wild — uncontrollable — which led to the idea that my eyes aren’t wild but undergoing a re-wilding. The aftermath of a catastrophe — a forest fire — where new (and different) growth occurs. Here I’m thinking about fungi and how they grow in places that have been destroyed, especially how Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes them in Mushrooms at the End of the World: On the Possibility of LIfe in Capitalist Ruins.
For the last mile and a half of my run, I put in my headphones and synched up my steps to a metronome set at 175 bpm. It took a minute to settle into the stillness at the center of the beat. At first, I was on the edge, my foot striking slightly before or just after the beat. Then I locked in and it felt like my feet were making the clicking noise. click click click click. No effort, no thinking, no doubting, just moving and being and breathing and singing a steady song.
10 Things
- screaming bluejays
- chirping crickets
- a tweeting bird, repeating tweet tweet tweet tweet
- buzzing cicadas
- 2 shirtless runners — runner 1: I need to stop at the porta potty
- chalked on the trail, honor the river
- goldenrod on the edge
- water, seen but not studied — did it sparkle? was it blue? empty? moving? I didn’t notice
- a few slashes of red and orange in the bushes
- voices below — rowers? hikers?
I was inspired to think about the wild because of a recent book I just finished reading, Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds. So good! Here are a few passages I marked to remember. I checked this ebook out from the library, but I’m wondering if I want to buy it — so many good passages.
what seems to be scattered by nature was not
She wondered why she could see the beautiful rise of old trees all the way up and down the hills, and why there was no bramble or brush to grab at her and tear holes in her clothing. But she could not find an answer.
For nothing in her ken would allow her to imagine that it was the piscataway, the people of these parts, who so carefully burned the small brush away, and the saplings, too, to better see their game through the trees. She did not know that many of the trees around her were hickory and chestnut and hazelnut and walnut, and that, should she dig below the leaf litter, she would find ample nuts to sustain her even in these hungry times after the winter and before the full bursting-forth of spring. And that these trees, too, had been planted by the gardeners of this place. For here understanding of gardeners was limited to the ones of the city, and the ones of the city loved a straight line and a neat border, and looking out upon the trees seeming scattered there by the hand of nature itself, she did not recognize the human genius and planning in the wild abundance.
The Vaster Wilds/ Lauren Groff
the slow movement of stones
And the stones, with their lives so slow that to all impatient moving creatures of animated life they did appear unmoving, but even the stones she understood now did meet and mate, did erupt and splinter, did rub to powder stone upon stone and stone upon water and stone upon air, so that in the long scale of their lives the stones saw within themselves incredible vitality.
The Vaster Wilds/ Lauren Groff
Back to stillness, especially as nothing. Yesterday the poem of the day on poets.org was by a friend and amazing poet, Carolina Ebeid. Here’s a fitting excerpt from it:
No, nothing, no thing, no where—
Assume the Role of Cassandra, Wearing a Mask, Speaking into the Camera/ Carolina Ebeid
the o of no blinks open
The o of no blinks open. The openness of no — not a closing off but an opening into. Into what? This line was in my head at the end of my run and I thought, the gorge. No rock, just open air space a place filled with birds and bugs and possibilities and that shapes my stories of running outside and noticing.
Here’s another line that I love:
Can you hear the low pulse tree-growth consuming the fence?
Assume the Role of Cassandra, Wearing a Mask, Speaking into the Camera/ Carolina Ebeid
More than leaves or vines, I imagine this tree-growth as the trunk, rings thickening, growing through the chain-link fence on the Winchell Trail. I love the idea of becoming still enough to hear the pulse of this growth, to dwell in a time scale impossible for us restless humans. What is the rate of a tree’s heartbeat? Not in beats per minute, but beats per day or month or year?
This line also reminds me of a favorite poem that I memorized a few years ago, Push the button, hear the sound/ HELEN MORT:
Can you hear the call of the mynah bird?
excerpt from Push the Button/ Helen Mort
Can you hear the flamingos in the water?
Can you hear your small heart next to mine
and the house breathing as it holds us?
Can you hear the chainsaw start, the bones
of our neighbor’s eucalyptus breaking?