5.25 miles
ford loop
38 degrees
38 degrees! Sun and hardly any wind and less layers. The snow is almost all melted and all the paths were clear. I repeated yesterday’s experiment: run a mile; stop to walk, pull out my phone, and recite an ED poem into it; start running again (repeat, 5 times total). Today I recited: We Grow Accustomed to the Dark; A Murmur in the Trees — to note; I Felt a Funeral in my Brain; I heard a Fly buzz when I died; and A lane of yellow led the Eye. Like yesterday, it helped me to stay steady with my pace. The lines that stuck with me the most are at the end of A Murmur in the Trees — to note:
But then I promised n’ere to tell
How could I break my word
So go your way and I’ll go mine
No fear you’ll miss the road
I thought about this road in relation to the road in We Grow Accustomed:
A Moment — We uncertain step
For newness of the Night
Then fit our vision to the Dark
And meet the road erect
You adjust and get back on the road, where life steps almost straight (the ending line of “We Grow”), and I’ll stay here in the Dark with the little men in their little houses and the robins in their trundle bed and this whimsical, strange world (images from A Murmur).
10 Things
- my shadow, far below in the ravine near Shadow Falls
- the bells of St. Thomas ringing
- running on the east side, across the river from one of the schools, I could hear the kids on the playground all the way over here
- my shadow, on the railings of the ford bridge — I kept looking down to the iced river, searching for more of my shadow on the shadow of the bridge’s railing
- the river, near the ford bridge was all white, but further north, it was gray with white splotches
- the port a potty at the Monument was covered in black graffiti and the door didn
- t look like it could fully shut
- close to where I heard the kids across the gorge, I noticed how steep the slope was — don’t get too close to this edge!
- a man below on the Winchell trail talking to little kid (or a dog?) — momma’s coming — as a woman approached them
- a kid on the playground: it’s soooo warm!
memory
Memory can edit reality in some such way and then the edited version is too good to let go. Memory makes what it needs to make.
A Lecture on Corners/ Anne Carson
I picked up Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia at Moon Palace last night!
Now, in my sixties, the Velcro of memory has lost its grip, glutted with lint. This makes learning braille–all its letters, punctuation, symbols, contractions, and their rules for use–puzzling. The mind’s memory fail. What takes over? Muscle memory, body memory, skin memory. My fingertip remembers more braille than my hippocampus.
The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn
So many different types of memory to think about!
An alternative to vision.
The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn
I rely on memory a lot to help me see.