4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
63 degrees / humidity: 86%
Felt cooler at the beginning, then the sun came out. Warm! A good run. There was a nice spray coming off of the falls and lots of people taking selfies. I felt strong and able to run 2.25 miles without stopping for a walk break. A slow, steady progression towards more endurance. By winter will I be able to run 10 miles without stopping? I hope so.
Listened to cars and one runner’s slapping feet and rushing water on the first half of my run, then my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist on the second half. I was hoping that listening to songs about shadows would make more of them appear! Did it? I don’t think so.
10 Things
- a speedy runner sprinting past me, his feet striking the ground with a loud slap — Slap! Slap! Slap!
- crunch crunch — discarded acorn shells on the trail
- the steady whooshing of car wheels
- 2 walkers, or maybe runners who were taking a walk break, walking towards me, one of them saying, let’s turn around, the other, let me get some water up ahead first
- empty benches, including the one above the edge of the world
- crash! crash! some critter rooting around in the bushes in the park
- kids laughing and yelling at the park playground
- a runner with a white shirt wrapped around her waist, running on the bike path, then on the edge closest to the bike path, forcing runners and bikers to more around her
- a roller skier on the walking trail doing a strangely slow shuffling exercise with her poles and roller skis
- a coxswain down below — rowers!
quieting of the spirit (from 29 aug 2024)
stillness: Anne Carson and taming uncontrolled movement:
The other day I discovered an essay by Anne Carson about her experiences with Parkinson’s, especially with trying to navigate tremors and tame uncontrolled movement. My experiences with vision loss are very different, yet I recognize similarities in terms of focused attention as a way to combat constant motion.
Righting oneself against a current that never ceases to pull: the books tell me to pay conscious, continual attention to actions like walking, writing, brushing my teeth, if I want to inhibit or delay the failure of neurons in the brain. It is hard to live within constant striving.
Gloves on!/ Anne Carson
*
Since being diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease, I’m giving conscious, but maybe not constant, attention to how I see, to the complicated process of seeing. Some of this attention is out of curiosity and astonishment. And some of it is about helping neurons to fire in new ways and learning how to see differently.
The uncontrolled motion I experience is not tremors, but images that constantly shift and shimmer and buzz, usually in ways too subtle to see clearly. I feel them — soft notes of disorientation, dizziness, restlessness. Maybe you could call them tremors? The ground never ceasing to unsettle.
Recently, I’ve been writing about the different definitions of still. Is the constant motion I see never still? I’m not sure. I think I’m striving for new ways of defining that word and of accessing the feeling of being still, enough, calm.
still / enough / calm / quieter
Here are 2 more poems from Hartigan’s excellent collection, On Orchid O’clock that I want to put beside each other:
hour entry: Sorry, I am at the gym this instant/ Endi Bogue Hartigan
I am at the gym again this instant and of it, in its treadmills, its black tongues and beetle shines its oily handles in time and time and time intervals and people cupped and kept in beeps and measures, always. I’m nearly half done with my pre-programmed eliiptical slot, having spent 211 calories. This very instant a woman, having come in from the street, is staring at the smeared glass of the vending machine an instant too long, the change hot in her palm, a kind of calm as yet unspent. And I am bent away from God, running horizontally in place, & all instance protests movement, all instance must be thick with protest, coated with candle wax of sadness, walking upright like unlit wicks.
The treadmills black tongue / time and time and time intervals (intervals as verb?) / people cupped and kept in beeps and measures / 211 calories / I am bent away from God
hour entry: Orchids because orchids are impossibly mimicking / Endi Bogue Hartigan
Orchids because orchids are impossibly mimicking the milk fluid capture of being orchids, orchids because they are grown commercially in soldiering rows in hothouse tents, because they are given as gifts for merely being orchids, because they are inherently exceeding themselves and held as if rare, though they are not, their stems are second hands untimed and slightly skewed to binding. Orchids because they are wrist-colored, because they are eyelid textured, because they are partial light captured, because they are hard to keep living. And on the slope of a hillside of a rainforest of my childhood was an orchid nursery. I don’t know I ever entered it, but knew the plastic walls sweat.
I love the repetition in this poem — the orchids, because
orchids as partial light captured / eyes as orchid textured / the slope of a hillside of a rainforest of my childhood