3.25 miles
trestle turn around
79 degrees
Afternoon run, in bright sun. Too hot. I’m ready for fall and cooler air! My legs felt a bit strange and tired — how much of it was the effects of the 18 mile run on Sunday and how much was the hot sun? On the way to the trestle, I noticed someone sitting on the sliding bench. By the time I returned, they had left. I heard voices below the trestle, then a flash of movement off to the side. No view of the river. Still too much green. I don’t remember thinking about anything except that I was hot and this run was difficult.
image of the day: a butterfly and their shadow
Even though it was hot and the run was hard, I’m still glad I got outside and ran above the gorge. If I hadn’t gone, I would have missed beholding the monarch butterfly that fluttered beside me. At first, I only saw the actual butterfly rising and falling and bouncing all around. Then, I noticed their shadow. A ball of dark gray on the sunlit trail. It almost looked like a little ball and it felt more solid — in its dark circular form — than the actual butterfly and its slight feather form. So cool!
Looking through my notes from an oct 2025 Girl Ghost Gorge document, and I found these lines:
her concern
was the edge
and the making
of a form
out of the
edgelessness
that dwells be-
yond that edge
These lines, written by me, reminded me of some lines from AR Ammons in garbage that I found in another GGG document:
one thinks, slapping down the lines, making time
with eternity, one will thrive beyond the brink but
beyond the brink is no recollection but a wide
giving way into silver that filters farther away
into nothing
I took these lines and put them into my breathing
beyond the
brink, a
wide giving
way in
to silver
filtered
farther a
way into
nothing
The edge I am referring to is not the edge of life (death), but the edge of the bluff. And, beyond that edge is not a silvery nothing, but a river, floodplain forests, another edge: a gorge. And, the gorge, I thought as I read the lines, is not a formless nothing, but a container, a bowl. I remembered that Jane Hirshfield wrote a poem about a bowl.
The Bowl/ Jane Hirshfield
If meat is put into the bowl, meat is eaten.
If rice is put into the bowl, it may be cooked.
If a shoe is put into the bowl,
the leather is chewed and chewed over,
a sentence that cannot be taken in or forgotten.
A day, if a day could feel, must feel like a bowl.
Wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness,
it eats them.
Then the next day comes, spotless and hungry.
The bowl cannot be thrown away.
It cannot be broken.
It is calm, uneclipsable, rindless,
and, big though it seems, fits exactly in two human hands.
Hands with ten fingers,
fifty-four bones,
capacities strange to us almost past measure.
Scented—as the curve of the bowl is—
with cardamom, star anise, long pepper, cinnamon, hyssop.
—2014