2.2 miles
2 trails
68 degrees
dew point: 64
Humid. It rained last night — everything is wet — but there must been wind, too, because small branches and leaves were scattered over parts of the path. No big trees.
10 Sounds
- Bird
- the coxswains speaking through their bullhorns
- a faint radio with someone singing, some vibrato
- the steady trickle out of the sewer pipe near 42nd
- good morning, excuse me / morning! no, excuse me (passing a walker)
- morning! a greeting from Mr. Morning!
- good morning / good morning (greeted by an older runner)
- the whirr of a motor on an e-bike zooming by
- another runner’s music coming from her phone as she ran by — some poppy upbeat song that I can’t remember
- who run the world? girls! Beyoncé from my headphones and my mood: Energy playlist
Listened to the poem I wrote yesterday before I headed out for my run. This is my tentative ending:
tethers us to each
other — swimmer and
vision, buoy and
body, to sight
and to rarely see
swim: 3 loops (6 cedar loops)
60 minutes
cedar lake open swim
81 degrees
Choppy today. Sometimes hard to stay high on the water. Lots of vines. Saw some planes and birds above, no fish below. The surface looked silvery. Sometimes the sun was out, sometimes it was behind a cloud. Once a big, hulking cloud, looking like something other than a cloud from my perspective half-submerged in the water — a monster, like godzilla?
Forgot to recite Mary Oliver or think about the deepening and quieting of the spirit, but I felt it. Relaxed, happy, strong. Swimming for an hour wasn’t difficult.
Found this description of how we are both part of and separate from water saved on my reading list:
Nature—the non-built environment, creatures—is a realm of supreme “otherness” with which we are already always in strange relation. We plead for communion with this nature; it cannot answer us; so we project that onto it, that feeling of harmony and oneness at a shore or a vista. We are both a part of that natural sphere and stand distinctly apart within it, in our creaturely and industrial/technological dominance over it. You are both part of that sphere, and stand painfully apart, with your consciousness, language, cumbersome car and computer.
Moheb Soliman on “On the water”
Now I’m thinking about Anne Carson and her definition of anthropology (as in, “Anthropology of Water”). I wrote about it on 13 july:
encounter with that which you cannot contain, control, that is not You — the not-I.
added on 8 aug 2025: I forgot to mention a delightful thing that happened on the way over to cedar lake: a vee of geese — 20? — flying low over Bde Maka Ska then just above us — and, lucky me, I had the moon roof open to watch! — then heading towards Lake Harriet.