5.65 miles
ford loop
47 degrees
Wow, another beautiful morning. With the sun and the still air it felt warmer than 47. I was over-dressed in my running tights. I’m still doing the run 4 minutes/walk 1 minute. I like it. Every so often a thought creeps in: shouldn’t I be trying to run without stopping? Then I remind myself that it is fine to walk and that I like the rhythm of 4/1.
10 Things
- kids in front of Dowling Elementary raking up leaves, every so often a kid yelling out, Bucket! I need a bucket!, which at first sounded like, fuck it!, to me
- soft and sharp shadows, crossing over each other: my sharp shadow crossing over the soft shadows of branches
- a railing’s shadow on the bridge
- even though I couldn’t feel the wind, I saw it on the surface of the water
- shadow falls softly falling — not seen, heard
- my shadow, far down in the ravine
- the sloping path on the east side, leaning towards the edge
- a small group of bikers –6 or 7 — all in BRIGHT yellow jackets, entering the trail at 42nd
- kids voices drifting over the fence of the daycare at the church
- a quick flash of somethings small and dark passing overheard — the shadows of a trio of birds in flight?
Before the run, I was thinking about the idea of intimacy and connection. As I ran, I thought about the intimacy of shadows, tangled up on the path, crossing over each other, some still, some in motion. Can/should I add this to the vision lost poem I’m working on?
intimate / intimacy
I decided to search my posts for the word, “intimacy.” I found some great stuff:
1 — 6 may 2025:
This morning, I’m reading another chapter of RWK’s Gathering Moss: The Advantages of Being Small: Life in the Boundary Layer. I was excited/please/inspired to encounter this passage:
Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. This meeting ground between air and land is known as the boundary layer. Lying cheek to cheek with rocks and logs, mosses are intimate with the contours and textures of their substrate.
Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
surfaces / where earth and atmosphere meet / boundary layer / intimate / contours / textures
I’m interested in surfaces, both ground surfaces by the gorge and water surfaces at the lake. I’ve gathered poems and thought about them before. And there is a line from my Haunts project that I’m still trying to write around/beside/through: It begins here: from the ground up, feet first, following. Today, I want to think about surfaces and boundary layers and textures and the intimacy that is created when air and land, foot and ground, meet.
note: there is some great stuff in this entry about small “enough” spaces and being still vs. being restless that I think could be useful for another poem I want to write, Exhaust, a place!
Near the end of the entry, I wrote this helpful bit: “Intimacy and Forrest Gander and Anne Pringles’ conversation about intimacy as an encounter that transforms you and Scott describing two trees growing out of the same spot and intertwining as intimate.”
see 28 april 2025, for the Gander/Pringles conversation.
2 — 12 may 2025
After discussion Susan Tichy, and the immersiveness of her wonderful collection, North | Rock | Edge, I mention this:
wrote in Plague Notebook, no. 25: To be with the gorge, to witness/behold it, demands participation not observation. It is intimate — contact, meeting, interfacing — and transforms you. You transform it (the gorge world), too.
intimacy / touch / entanglement / bodies next to each other, intertwined
felt, not seen — deep in, you can’t rely on eyes — in the muck of making, not floating, untethred, above it