2024: Today’s on this days have given me a great list of things to do!
april 25, 2017 / 5 miles / 57 degrees
To do: Do something with these almost hypnotic lines — a new poem? a chant?
This draft of a poem is way too long and needs to be sharpened, but I like the hypnotic quality of it. I wonder if I could take some of the lines and insert them in a poem about noticing by the gorge?
Running Form
Keep it slow
don’t start fast
Keep it steady
find your rhythm
Breathe i n
Breathe o u t
Check your pulse
Lift, lift, lift the knees
squeeze the glutes, squeeze the glutes
breathe in, 2, 3
out, 2, 3
drop your shoulders
lead with your chest
relax your arms
loosen your hands
roll an imaginary pencil between your thumb and fingers
l e a n forward
lift, lift, lift, lift, lift, lift the knees
raise your eyes, stare blankly at the top of the bridge
check your pulse
keep it steady
don’t lose your rhythm
breathe in, 2, 3
out, 2, 3
lift, lift, lift, lift the knees
slow it down
squeeze the glutes, squeeze the glutes
relax your arms
drop your shoulders
breathe in, 2, 3
out 2, 3
check your pulse
lift
lift
swing
swing
pump
breathe in out in out
pump
pump
lift
lift
breathe in out in out
in out in out
in out in out in out
FLY
l e a n
lift
breathe i n
breathe o u t
relax your arms
slow your pace
stop.
april 25, 2019 / 5.45 miles / 60 degrees
To do: Spend a few weeks with this series of articles about listening to birds. Try out the suggestions in the articles, add to your list of birds you can recognize.
Here is part one in an eight part series about learning to listen for/to/with birds:
How to Identify Birds by Sounds
april 25, 2021 / 4.75 mile walk / 65 degrees
To do: Using the black-capped chickadee’s fee bee song, make a list of 2 syllable pairs. They could be opposites or partners in crime or whatever you want.
A recording on the fee bee song and some pair examples from 2020:
Subway/Eat fresh
Be nice/Fuck you
Hey there!/What’s up?
Mustard/Ketchup
Doughnut/Ice cream
Mad Men/Ozark
Mustache/Goatee
Pizza/Nachos
Dumb luck/Hard work
Winter/Summer
april 25, 2022 / 6.1 miles / 32 degrees
To do: Take the lines I wrote in this 2022 entry and add to them, using the passages in this entry for guidance. Maybe also consider grass, from Victoria Chang’s poem and A. R. Ammons’ “Grassy Sound.” Or, maybe I should do a month on grass itself? Or on green, with grass being a day or a week?
The idea I have right now for a poem involves playing off of these lines from Mary Oliver:
Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise
in gauze and halos.
Maybe as grass, and slowly.
Maybe as the long leaved, beautiful grass
And this bit from Arthur Sze in an interview with David Naiman:
I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.
Something like this?
Maybe like mushrooms, we rise
or not rise, flare
brief burst from below
then a return
to swim in the dirt…
I want to think more about what fungi do and how mushrooms grow, and how to think about that in relation to human subjectivity/agency and a self that is connected/joined but not subsumed by this connection.
The other thing I’d like to think about more is this line from Tsing:
In this time of diminished expectations, I look for disturbance-based ecologies in which many species live together without either harmony or conquest (5).
These disturbance-based ecologies involves ecosystems that develop in the wake of a disturbance, like matsutake mushrooms that grow on pine in forests that have been clearcut. They aren’t part of what Tsing calls the cycle of promise and ruin, or deplete then move on, but something else, the something that comes in after a place has been abandoned by Progress.
april 25, 2023 / 3.75 miles / 42 degrees
Scrolling to the end of last year’s entry I discovered that I added a to-do list inspired by 2022’s entry. I completely forgot I had done it. Wow, past Sara and I (present Sara) really get each other. Thanks past Sara for putting this together!
First, this:
While I ran, I wanted to try and think about fungi as hidden, always in motion/doing (a verb, not a noun), and below. Had flashes of thought about what’s beneath us, and how I’m often looking down through my peripheral, even as I look ahead with my central vision.
an experiment to try: While moving outside, give special attention to what’s beneath you, what you see, feel, hear at your feet. Make a list in your log entry.
variation: while trying don’t give attention to anything in particular. Just move. Then, in your log entry, try to remember 10 things you noticed below you.
Second:
I heard the creaking, squeaking branches and thought about old, rusty, long hidden/forgotten doors being opening — a trap door in the forest floor. I didn’t imagine past the open door or the idea that it led to the river basement (using basement here like ED in “I started Early — Took my Dog”). Still, I enjoyed thinking that I could access this door and something in my moving outside was opening a long shut door.
a question to consider: what doors await me in the gorge? where do they lead? how can I open them?
This morning, I was refreshing my memory of a Carl Sandburg poem I memorized a few years ago called “Doors.” If a door is open and you want it open, why shut it? If a door is shut and you want it shut, why open it?
An idea I have right now (25 april 2022, that is) for a poem involves playing off of these lines from Mary Oliver:
Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise
in gauze and halos.
Maybe as grass, and slowly.
Maybe as the long leaved, beautiful grass
And this bit from Arthur Sze in an interview with David Naiman:
I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.
Something like this?
Maybe like mushrooms, we rise
or not rise, flare
brief burst from below
then a return
to swim in the dirt…
I (sara in 2023) would like to do something with this fragment, maybe tie it together with some of my thoughts about Ammons and garbage?
grass
Mary Oliver’s mention of grass reminded me of a poem I like by Victoria Chang, which led me to a log entry from Jan 11, 2022:
Left Open / Victoria Chang
We can’t see beyond
the crest of the wooden gate.
We are carriers
of grass yet to be grown. We
aren’t made of cells, but of fields.
I like this idea of being a carrier of grass yet to be grown. My first thought was of grass on graves — Whitman’s “uncut hair of graves” or Dickinson’s “The color of the grave is green”. Then I thought of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “To the Young Who Want to Die”:
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.
Reading back through my entries about A. R. Ammons as I prepare to post my monthly challenge for April, I encountered these lines from Ammons’ pome “Grassy Sound.” How could I have already forgotten them?!
The wind came as grassy sound
and between its
grassy teeth
spoke words said with grass
april 25, 2024 / 4 miles / 52 degrees
Since I’m finishing this On This Day post after my run, I can add today’s run here too. Inspired by Ted Kooser’s birthday, I thought of a monthly project — maybe May 2024?
Oh, I love so much about this poem — everything?! You can listen to him read it at poetry foundation (poem title is link). I want to spend more time with his writing.
To do: Spend a month reading poems, books by Ted Kooser. Make sure to include his craft book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual.