june 1/RUN

3.15 miles
trestle turn around
56 degrees

Excellent weather this morning for a run. I decided to run without stopping to walk, instead of doing the 9/1, just to see if I could do it. I could. At the end of the run, a thought: I should do a 3 mile run like this on the first of each month and compare times and effort. Maybe I should do this test twice a month?

The thing I remember most about the run was the orange light. It’s from wildfires up in Canada. I didn’t see an orange sun, or orange light in the sky. I saw orange light on the paved trail. Strange. I wondered if it really looked orange, or it just felt orange. And, was anyone else seeing the light on the trail and thinking, orange?

The thing I remember second most was the cottonwood fuzz, everywhere. Lining the trail, turning the grass pale green. I think I inhaled some; it got caught in my throat and made it hard to breathe.

There were chatty bikers and small packs of runners and walkers, a few dogs. I think I might have heard the rowers briefly. I didn’t look for the river or hear any geese. I did witness a car ignore a stop sign. And I admired another runner’s bright orange compression socks. I noticed that the grass near the trail had been trimmed and wondered how short the parks had trimmed it. No more rubbery dandelion stalks.

To keep a steady pace, I chanted in triple berries: strawberry / blueberry / raspberry

Picked up Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses from the library. I’m particularly inspired by the sections/pieces/poems? that combine his hiking notes with descriptions and references to other thinkers.

from Tall Flatsedge Notebook/ Brian Teare

A mile’s hike outside the fence-enclosed vista point
we sat hillside so inside experience I wrote the wrong date
down–March twenty second–noticing no thought
but things : “when I think they animate my interior speech,
they haunt it as the little phrase.” Oceans tilted, the whole thing
leaning green, coastal prairie poised pre-Spring
a prosody for seeing landscape as aural, ambient trick
to hear the ear’s eye : far bass, near treble, I saw

I heard
low drone wind
cut by distant cliffs’ sheer fall

Above it below the hill

surf’s purr
& nearer

wind-shirred grass
bright brown birdsong

in back of one bee far
barking seals–

*

I wanted a hello sort of like I know you as if
to call a grass a subject like I can’t back home :
urbanity : a class-based lack of grasses shared
people, fog, sidewalks, architecture, money,
the smells of jasmine & feces, & five sounds :

suck of tread in water

window clicking against frame

recycling knicked from bins

footsteps above

heater’s hiss

A few pages later, he offers this quote:

at the edge
of what is bearable
in an image.

In the margins he provides a source: The Object Stares Back/ James Elkins. I looked this source up and got very excited. It’s all about how we see and our myths about what we think we’re seeing and doing when we see. Very cool. I requested the book from the libary; it should be ready in a few days.