5.1 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
28 degrees / feels like 11
wind: 31 mph gusts
Windy and colder today. For mental strength required when I was running up the hill and into the wind. Did my reciting a poem per mile experiment: We grow accustomed; A Murmur; A lane of yellow led the eye; Tell all the truth; and It’s all I have to bring today. I struggled with the last one and the line, Be sure you count –should I forget/Some one the sum could tell. Not as easy today. I think it was the wind that made it hard.
10 Things
- Hi Dave!
- birds flying out of the trees, almost like leaves being scattered by the wind
- a leaf swirling near the ground, looking like a darting bird
- loud rustling on the edge of the trail — a squirrel? a bird? the wind?
- beep beep beep the alarm on the trestle going off — not a train but some other moving thing — people walking or biking?
- the stacked limestones under the franklin bridge are looking even more like a person — I bet someone has stacked them to look this way
- 2 e-bikes zooming past me, I watched the red lights on their saddles flashing as they disappeared
- a panel of the fence is missing on the double bridge near 33rd. I’ve seen it before but only today did I wonder what happened. Did a car hit it? On the other side of the fence there’s only air and river far below
- the river is just barely iced over and looking cold
- overheard: I don’t know Gene’s kid
Like a lot of people, I’m trying to avoid much of the news about executive orders and project 2025. It’s a delicate balance: stay informed enough but not too much. Today the balanced was tipped to too much when I read an article about stripping women of their rights in the name of “personhood” someone shared on Facebook. It might be time to eliminate Facebook from my morning practice.
It’s a new month and time for a new challenge. After revisiting an article this morning — In Search of Distraction — I’m thinking that might be it, distraction. Or wandering or dreaming or reverie.
Here’s a line from the essay, to get me started:
Distraction is a time between times, a time in which we become momentarily subject to the non-thought inside thought. And this is the time — or one of the times — of poetry. Attention can be helpful later on as part of the process of revision, but for vision itself poets stand in need of distraction.