5.4 miles
franklin loop
30 degrees
Wore my new Brooks for the first time today. I need to adjust the laces at the top, but otherwise, they’re great. Hooray for past Sara for buying these shoes, and hooray for new shoes! Sunny and cooler today. Wind. I felt strong and relaxed, occasionally my back was tight.
10 Things
- a flash of silver in the sky — a plane
- a blue sky — cerulean — no clouds or birds
- the river, 1: from the trestle on the west side: blue
- the river, 2: from the franklin bridge: small waves, textured
- the river, 3: from the lake street bridge: sparks of light moving fast, making my head buzz in disorientation and delight
- the deep bellow of a train horn on the east side
- the soft knocking of a woodpecker
- a turkey on the trail — as I neared them, they flared their feathers then moved over
- another turkey in the brush on the edge of the trail
- the bridge railing casting a thick grid of shadows on the path
Listened to voices in the gorge below — high-pitched, a laughing kid or a startled animal? — and wind and water in the trees for most of the run. Put in my color playlist on the bridge. Went deep inside the beat as I listened to “Mr. Blue Sky.”
Tried to think about my orange poem — I’m a little stuck — but got distracted by my effort and the wind and the turkeys. Now, after the run, here’s some inspiration:
excerpt from Notes on Orange/ Jennifer Huang
In case you’re wondering, the fruit came first, the color
name second. They called it red-yellow for some time, and
for some time it was just that. Red brought nearer to
humanity by yellow, as Kandinsky described it. I am just
that: a human who wants to be closer to god. What is the
true opposite of human? Maybe orange. A piece of sun, its
properties have been known to help us recall the feeling of
cool-blue grass under toes, the chime of a baby robin, the
holy scent of ripe mud. What is it that makes us want to get
close? To the gods, to summer, to sweetness, before we
retreat again . . .
One section — right now, it’s the beginning — of my orange poem is this:
Before word fruit and before fruit color
not as concept but movement, a certain
length of light finding its way to the back
of an eye, to a brain, through a body.
More than sight, sensation, the feeling
of heat* bursting out of the blue**
*or flame?
**blue as orange’s contrast color and blue as the lake water surface an orange buoy sits upon
hmm . . . I’ll play around with this some more. I need to connect this section with my experiences with seeing and not seeing orange buoys.