3.5 miles
under ford bridge and back
7 degrees
50% snow-covered
A run outside! Cold, but not even close to some of my coldest runs in past years (I’ve run in a feels like temp of -20). I haven’t run outside much this month, so I forgot how to dress for it. Today, too many layer. Hand warmers and foot warmers and 3 shirts under my jacket.
Hardly anyone else on the river road path. A few walkers, a few bikers, any other runners? I can’t remember, but I don’t think so. Heard some cars honking in the distance. ICE must be nearby.
The river was white and looked cold. The parts of the path that weren’t covered in snow were stained white from salt — was it salt or something else? I know Minneapolis Parks is committed to not putting down salt because it ends up in the river. Most of the walking trail was buried in snow. Only one stretch, just north of 38th had some bare asphalt. I walked on it, then got stuck when it was covered in snow again. The snow looked brittle and made a sharp crack as I stepped on it. Mostly it wasn’t deep, but when it was, it was uneven and awkward to walk through. Empty benches, sharp shadows, blue sky. A strange feeling all around: unsettled.
Alice Oswald Interview, part 3
[on the idea of a Homeric formula] That seemed entirely wrong to me, this habit of draining the meaning out of the poems, of seeing orality as a machinelike way of composing. I was enraged by bein ggiven statistics about how many times a certain word or simile is used. To me, it felt clear that it was a more entranced way of composing, thta the poets would get into a kind of intoxicated state where they could incredibly, almost magically, find exactly the right adjective, the right meaning for the right place in the right melody.
an interview with Alice Oswald
Get Out Ice
1
a fragment from Facebook: Not deescalate but:
abolish
withdraw
prosecute
witness2
Love #9: After
We are still here.
We are still loving our neighbors,
still supporting our community,
still caring about the constitution.
We are staying warm,
staying strong,
staying impossible to ignore.
Read this poem this morning and remembered when my mom died, how a colleague took me out for coffee and told me that grief is a continued connection to the person you lost. I’ve often thought about her words, and I use them to embrace my grief.
Sisyphus / Sharon Lessley
As if weightlessness were aspirational―
what nonsense―
your death,
a stone
I can only hope to shoulder forever. Imagine
it gets better―
what nothing
am I left with
then? Even despair carries a particular
charge: that fantastic
last whiff of lavender
detergent
imprinted on the collar of a holiday sweater―
mama,
the mourners are assembling. March me
up that hill …
Your death a stone I can only hope to shoulder forever.