5.3 miles
bottom franklin hill
16 degrees
10% snow and ice covered trail
Less wind today. Cold, but not as cold as yesterday and still. Ran north on the bike trail. My lower back was still a bit tight and sore, my neck too, at least for the first mile. Then things loosened up. Mostly I felt relaxed and strong and glad to be outside on a clear path. I tried running on the snow-covered walking trail for a minute, but it was too uneven. Greeted Dave the Daily Walker, although it took me a little too long to say Hi Dave because I didn’t quite recognize him. Has his arm swing become less pronounced, or has my vision become worse? Chanted triples, first berries, then the world around me: big old tree/big pine tree/red stop sign/motorbike/rumblin’ truck/passing car
10 Things
- a strong smell of weed when I stopped at a bench above franklin
- orange — or was it pink or red? — bubble lettered graffiti under the 1-94 bridge
- the river was mostly covered, but the surface ice was uneven — some thick, some thin, some white, some gray — I thought I saw a few footprints on it — is that what they were?
- chickadeedeedee
- empty benches
- the faint jangle of a dog collar somewhere below me
- for a few stretches, the trail had strips of snow or ice or both — none of it slick or wet or a problem
- thought about how long the hill was from the bottom of lake street to the top — is it as long as franklin? how much less steep is it?
- mostly solitary male runners, one trio of women
- the air was cold and crisp and felt clean as I inhaled it through my nose, exhaled it through my mouth
purple hour
Before writing about last night’s purple hour, a thought: At some point early in the run I realized I was wearing a purple jacket. Of course I know it’s purple and I’ve noted that on this log lots of times, but today it clicked that it was purple. I started imagining my time by the gorge in the winter as another purple hour. Then a George Sheehan passage echoed in my head:
I must listen and discover forgotten knowledge. Must respond to everything around me and inside me as well….The best most of us can do is to be a poet an hour a day. Take the hour when we run or tennis or golf or garden; take that hour away from being a serious adult and become serious beginners.
Running / George Sheehan, 1978
There’s something cool about how I (unintentionally) wear purple during these purple hours — a purple jacket during winter running, a purple robe during winter nights. It’s also interesting to me that I didn’t choose this color, both of them were chosen by my mother-in-law. When she died, I inherited her purple jacket; the purple robe was a christmas present from her years ago.
I like this idea of multiple meanings of the purple hour and how I can call these purple hours just because they involve me wearing purple — my purple habit (get what I did there? habit = a regular practice and clothing worn, like a nun’s habit).
Later in my run, I thought about dark purple and how closely it resembles, at least to me, dark brown tree trunks or dark water. Purple as another name for dark.
And now onto last night’s purple hours: two of the times I woke up in the middle of the night (how many times did I wake up and get out of bed?), I wrote about purple. Once on the ball in my bedroom (1:49 am), one at the dining room table (3:06).
1:49 am
- Dark purple door (open closet)
- Rustling dog
- Droning fan layers of noise
3:08 am
- midnights (tswift) lavender haze
- violet purple lilac lavender
- tints/shades of purple = mauve, orchid, eggplant, heather, iris
- purple noise inside my ear — when the heat turns off
- the house settling, unsettling
- the other room, not illuminated by the light of my computer screen: deep ,dark purple
- rhw (note: what is rhw? what word was trying to write?) hum, buzz from inside me stirring up the air
- purple robe/comfy
Reviewing this list this morning, a thought: does anything rhyme with purple? Looked it up: hirple, to walk with a limp. I can envision purple as the color of limping. Now I’m thinking of having a hitch in your step which reminds me of un-hitching and Mary Ruefle and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
unhitching: to crudely paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, unhitching happens in brief moments when we can step outside of or beside or just beyond — below the threshold of thought, over and above society — to contemplate/experience/behold the this, the what it is, the essence of everything, Mary Oliver’s eternity. In your run above the gorge, near the river, below the trees, can you unhitch? (from log entry on 31 may 2023)
unhitching
The possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists … in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society; in the contemplating of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.
Lévi-Strauss quoted MRH page 52
Purple/ Margaret Steele Anderson
A pigeon walking dainty in the street;
The morning mist where backyard fences meet;
An old Victoria—and in it, proud,
An old, old woman, ready for her shroud:
These are the purple sights for me,
Not palaces nor pageantry.
purple prose
I just learned about purple prose: excessive, overly verbose, wordy, too many metaphors, similes, adverbs, adjectives, language that calls attention to itself and lacks substance, a drama bomb. Just realized that Lumpy Space Princess, who coined “drama bomb” is lavender. Also, remembering Lumpy Space Princess inspired me to find and order a Drama Bomb t-shirt.
According to wikipedia, purple prose originates with the Roman poet Horace in his “Ars Poetica”:
Weighty openings and grand declarations often
Have one or two purple patches tacked on, that gleam
Far and wide, when Diana’s grove and her altar,
The winding stream hastening through lovely fields,
Or the river Rhine, or the rainbow’s being described.
There’s no place for them here. Perhaps you know how
To draw a cypress tree: so what, if you’ve been given
Money to paint a sailor plunging from a shipwreck
In despair?