5.45 miles
ford loop
51 degrees
Fall! Such a beautiful morning — sun, cool-ish air, less wind. Ran north through the neighborhood, then over the lake street bridge. Early this morning, my IT band ached, but on the run it was fine. In fact, it seemed to help to run. I ran 4 minutes, walked 1 12 times.
10 Things
- running through the neighborhood on the sidewalk, passing the garage of a house, suddenly hearing a robotic voice call out, you are being recorded
- a bright reddish orange tree near a public mailbox
- the river — scaled and sparkling white in the middle, smooth and pale blue near shore
- stopping briefly to listen to water seeping through the limestone below me, near St. Thomas
- a pleasant encounter with a biker — you have runner’s calves, they look good
- a person walking through the grass to a bench near the edge of the bluff with a clear view of brightly colored leaves on the other shore
- running past a break in the trees, seeing sky and the other side of the river, feeling wide openness
- a runner who was just slightly slower than me with a big white dog, up ahead on the trail
- the desire path I’m writing a poem about: a cluster of three trees, 2 dirt trails, 2 street lamps
- the dirt trail on the grassy boulevard used to be wider — in some spots, there’s barely room for one foot
I thought about putting on a playlist, but decided it was too fiddly, so l listened to seeping water, a whining leaf blower, and my foot strikes as I ran. Did I hear any birds? I don’t remember.
to behold / not look away / not take, but give
As part of a submission for a chapbook contest, I need to submit a statement about interests/investments/inspirations in relation to craft. I suddenly thought of a discussion between David Naiman and Ross Gay on the podcast, Between the Covers. I was sure I had posted it on this log before but I couldn’t find it. Here’s a key part from David Naiman:
DN: I’m glad we’re fully in this second meaning of behold, so behold as witness, being beholden, being indebted to. In my conversation with Natalie Diaz, she would often use the word is something extractive or is it reciprocal. Are the stories being told being taken out of the community, and told to others, not for the benefit of the people in the community? Similarly with resources, are we perpetuating systems of domination and exploitation or are we harvesting something truly based on the need? All of the questions of entanglement and extraction feel connected to this second notion that you mentioned with the Fred Moten notion of debt but beholden also to the Earth and just to other people, like we couldn’t even breathe one breath without plants. I was thinking about that when I was thinking about this conversation like, “What parts of my day, in relationship to the Earth, aren’t extractive on a species level versus relational and giving back?” It feels 99 to 1, I don’t know, I don’t want to overstate the power of poetry or the power of looking in this regard versus tangible, ecological, remediation, reciprocity, and actually placing humans back within a system where everything’s not on our terms but I think about how you say “the more you look at something, the more it grows,” I wonder if looking better and looking longer is the beginning of it all? Then not looking away when we see something during that type of looking that we might not want to see because I think we’re partially not looking because of what we might see. If beholding is what will get us beholden again, I mean I wonder about spiritual technologies that we used to use, like in its best form, the Sabbath where you’re not supposed to do anything that moves you forward in the world, you don’t exchange money, you don’t get in a car, you spend time with people you love, you attend to the moment with no sense of the future. It’s supposed to be this recreation of the Garden of Eden once a week but also, along with that, in the Bible, you were supposed to let the land rest every seven years, I don’t know if this is even a question but I guess I wanted to hear more about the beholdeness and debt that we have as humans.
Ross Gay and David Naiman
What parts of my day, in relationship to the Earth, aren’t extractive on a species level versus relational and giving back?
funnel and sheet webs
For the past month, a sizable spider has been weaving webs on our garage. First, on the garage door, and when that didn’t work, on the side door. I’ve noticed it but not really thought about it until yesterday. I said to Scott, that’s not a classic orb web, it’s some other kind. But what kind? I looked it up and I think it’s a funnel web. Unlike orb webs which are sticky and vertical, a funnel web is a horizontal sheet of web with a funnel. It’s not sticky; the spider hides on the edge of the funnel and waits for its prey to wander in, then it swoops out and bites it. I took a few pictures, but I can’t see the web that well in them. Here’s the best (?) one:
