Category: Running Log

aug 11/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
120.5 minutes
86 degrees

A beautiful night. The water had a few more pockets of cool water and was choppier, but was still wonderful. Before I started, I heard the lifeguard say something about the course being shorter due to limited lifeguards. And it was shortened, but not by that much. All I noticed was that the lifeguards were too close to the buoys and that green buoys 4 and 5 were a lot shorter.

10 Things

  1. more menacing swans
  2. the sun, sinking, its soft reflection on the water
  3. one plane, low in the sky, parallel to the water
  4. water color: pale blueish green
  5. every so often, a burst of birds — 6 or so of them flying together above the water
  6. almost running into a swimmer in front of me — I could see her orange buoy ahead of me and them, boom, it was right there — I didn’t run into her, which seems like a miracle
  7. at the start — a thick, overcast sky — no smoke or rain, just heavy and covering the sun
  8. no buoy in sight no buoy no buoy then BUOY
  9. the slimy bottom of the lake floor near shore — vines or leaves or some aquatic plant matter
  10. little swirls, almost like Ss with a flourish, just below me — little bubbles were my hands had been, pulling through the water

swimming one day in august

I’ve been working on filling up the different squares of my cork board with thoughts about key words or phrases from MO’s poem. I noticed that the most sparsely filled space is: my heart would break. Time to think more about the heart and how it breaks. What does it mean to break a heart/have a heart broken? And, in terms of those meanings, what is breaking my heart these days?

Heart break/broken: Something had pestered me so much/I thought my heart would break = being bothered, worried, upset, saddened, agitated overwhelm with grief, undone by a deep pain, beside yourself, out of your mind with worry? Not an actual break, but a feeling of, an almost

heart break = running too fast, swimming too hard, causing your heart to beat too fast and to stop working properly

heart break = a line break in a poem that shifts the meaning; the volta/turn of the poem?

a heart broken . . . open: MO discusses this at the end of her poem, “Lead,” and Maggie Smith does, too, in “Heart”:

And the dead inside you, don’t you
hear them breathing? You must have a hole
they can press their gray lips to. If you open–
when you open–will we find them folded inside?
In what shape? I mean what cut shape is made
whole by opening? I mean beside the heart.

Your heart could break in two, or scattered into a thousand pieces. Could it be that every time I swim my heart breaks open (here, a broken heart is an opened, and not closed (off) heart), then bursts into the little clear bubbles that trail me all over the lake . . . or, the heart is the surface of the water that I’m breaking open with my strokes.

You won’t be needing this …. This clip from The Simpsons isn’t exactly a heart being broken, but a heart being ripped out. Close enough for me:

“You won’t be needing This!”

Thinking about MO’s use of the word pester — something had pestered me so much — and bugs pop into my head — pestered by the mosquito, the gadfly. Searching through love poems I’d gathered, I found this:

When I see you, watching the violinist, his eyes shut, the Russian
composer’s concerto in his head, white horsehair fraying on the bow,
and your face is bright with tears, and there it is again, the word love,
not a fly or a mosquito, not a cricket or a bee, but the Luna moth
we saw one night, luminous green wings knocking at the screen
on the window as if to say I have a week to live, let me in, and I do.
(from Love is a Luminous Insect at the Window/ Martin Espada)

And this response to the poem by Ada Limón:

During my cynical years, I wrote drafts of poems about how love was rather dumb really. I distrusted anyone who asked me out and tried to spew some romantic crap my way. I was good at it, that being alone and being walled like a protected ancient city. I felt better being skeptical and side-eyed than I did when I was open and willing to believe any and all flirtatious banter tossed my way. I knew who I was. I was a house with a locked door. It was safe in there. My ribs made a nice cage for the beating heart that needed protection.

Then of course, love did happen. And it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t what I had known before. And on top of everything it wasn’t painful. It was easy and kind. I didn’t know that kind of love, the one that wasn’t mercurial and sometimes hurtful. And when that did happen it felt like realizing that the word “love” can’t do all the different kinds of love justice. It can’t cover all that ground and the muddy waters in between.

source

An open heart = an easy heart, a heart at ease, a heart eased

Next, I read “Love Letter” from Diane Seuss, which is on my list of additional love poems, and found these great lines:

Now when I think
of love it’s like focusing too hard
on the mechanisms of blinking or breathing.
You can be blinded or suffocated
by that degree of self-consciousness.

Mechanisms, mechanics, mechanical — thinking (too much) about how something works or doesn’t work. To break the mechanical part of a heart is to break apart your thinking about how that heart works. To break thinking altogether.

And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it.

(1=1/ Anne Carson)

So, what is breaking my heart? I could write about the terrible things closing my heart, but I’d rather give attention to what is opening it. Maybe I’ll try, while looping, to list them with each breath?!

update, after the swim: I thought about making a list a few times, but each time a bird would be in the sky or a swimmer would be right in front of me or a menacing swan would be lurking in the background and I became distracted. Oh well, I can always try again tomorrow.

update, the next day: I found a few more notes about my swim that I want to add in here. As I swam, I thought about bits of my heart being released from my body, like little bubbles which made me think, leaking and unraveling. A sudden image: Olivia Rodrigo in the music video for “The Cure,” her veins emerging through her skin like red threads unraveling. In the video, this image is intended to be terrible (and maybe terrifying), but as I swam, I thought about those red threads emerging as a body opening up and connecting with the world outside the rigid, closed-off self. In my version, unraveling = loosening the knots that tie us too closely to our Self/the I.

Another note: still lake water causes blue-green algae blooms. These toxic blooms thrive in still, warm lake water. As I thought about MO’s quieting, I thought about how still water, while often easier to swim through than moving and wavy water, is not good for the quality of the lake. Here stillness is not a good thing, and still water is not a quieting but a making stagnant and stuck — an excess of nutrients become trapped and turn into toxins.

aug 10/RUNSWIM

10k
ford loop + ford overlook
67 degrees / humidity: 86%

No sun this morning, so it felt cooler, less difficult. Because of the smoke, the heat, and my cold last month, I’m behind on my marathon training, but I’m not too worried. This week, I’m getting back on track.

For the first two miles, I didn’t have my headphones in. Other than traffic, I don’t remember hearing much. Oh — a sprinkler turning on, a biker laboring up the hill, the soft thud of my feet striking the ground, a kid running and jumping as they crossed the street, a fountain at my fancy house, bubbling. For miles 3-5, I listened to Olivia Rodrigo’s latest album. Mile 6, my “Doin’ Time” playlist.

The surface of the water, viewed from the lake street bridge was scaled and empty. No rowers this morning. The surface viewed from the lake street bridge was more of the same, with the addition of a thin trail in the center — the wake from a canoe or a small motorboat?

I passed a tall man who was walking with ski poles, twice and a regular, skirt with sandals (who no longer pairs her skirt with sandals but white socks and running shoes.

I don’t remember what I thought about. For my next run, I’d like to memorize a new poem to recite in my head, or return to one I’ve already memorized. Could that make the run easier? Or, maybe not memorize an entire poem, but fragments related to stillness (inspired by “the deepening and quieting of the spirit”). Maybe a fragment or two from this one:

Shore Acres/ Sarah Holland-Batt

August, driving from North Bend,
from Empire, we saw how the waves gut
the bluffs until they are pocked, whole
scoops of rock being pawed out by water.
But this year nothing moves at Shore Acres,
the water is static as land, and stripes
of foam bone its slate like a corset.
We are here for the end of movement.
You stay to watch the ocean. I go back
to the Japanese garden. I only want to see
stillness where I expect it, the sombre willow,
the colossal Monterey pine; I sit,
making myself limestone and basalt,
on the grounds of what was once the summer
house of a pioneer shipbuilder. Now it is nobody’s
private estate, but the home of a gardener
who pulls yellow roses through the mist
in hedged circles. I think I am stone
as the arrowheads of pines vanish
into the understory of cloud.
I have stopped
longing for whatever it was I desired
and have given in to the body’s basic need
for rest. Bare feet, bare face, I wait
at what I imagine to be a shrine’s gate
gathering the kind of force required
to stop loving, as only stone can.

I sit,/making myself limestone and basalt, and I think I am stone — I want to remember and reflect on these lines and put them into conversation with what A Oswald wrote in an interview for the Paris Review:

“They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, ‘I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,’ and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up.

Two more additions to this conversation:

1

The ones who leave
come back with stories: an excitement
in their eyes. But the ones who stay

witness little changes: dust, weather, breath.
What happens to them happens so slowly
it seems not to be happening at all.
(the ones who stay :: faith shearin

2

The
girl wants to be too
big to lift, too much
trouble to move, a
boulder beholding
small changes: dust, breath,
weather, rocks and cone
cells eroding — what
happens so slowly
it seems not to be
happening at all.
(Platteville Limestone / Sara Lynne Puotinen)

swim: 4 loops
lake nokomis open swim*
90 minutes
85 degrees

*It is a Monday and open swim is usually at Cedar Lake on Mondays, but the parks department closed Cedar’s beaches because of blue-green algae so open swim moved to Nokomis

I think this is the first time I’ve ever swum across the lake on a monday evening. As Scott drove me over, I wondered how different it would be. It wasn’t that different, but it was trivia night at Painted Turtle, so it was extremely crowded for Scott, who has a beer and works on his laptop while i swim. During lap 3 or 4, when I paused in the middle of the lake to admire the sun, much lower in the sky than in July, I could hear the noise from the restaurant. Wow! So many LOUD voices — a proper din. Also — I overheard one swimmer say, as we waited an extra 10 minutes for them to set up the course, the lifeguards are from Cedar and they’ve never set the buoys up here before. A group of 5 or 6 swimmers had a lot to say about how the buoys were being placed in the water as we waited. Another difference: many more menacing swans, a few of them getting way too close to the course. Near the beginning, I swam right next to them; I kept looking to make sure they weren’t going to turn into me.

The water was a wonderful temperature; not too warm or too cold. It was mostly calm and buoyant and easy to swim through. With the bright sun that was lower in the sky, it has almost impossible for me to sight on the way back to the big beach. It didn’t matter, I still knew where to go, it was just a little less fun always (as opposed to only some of the time) swimming into a void.

There were several swimmers faster than me, which was a nice change. A few of them passed me quickly, others I could swim behind to see where I needed to go. Here seeing = the flash of a bright pink buoy, tethered to one swimmer’s waist, or some white foam from another swimmer’s stroking arm or kicking feet.

For several stretches, I recited Mary Oliver’s “Swimming, One Day in August.” I was trying to think about the stanza:

Something has pestered me so much
I though my heart would break.
I mean, the mechanical part.

I particularly wanted to think about the word mechanical, but I don’t think I did. All I remember now (I’m writing this next morning because I didn’t have time or energy last night after a late dinner) is reciting all of the lines over and over. Oh — and I remember that I was struck by the first stanza’s time now and the last stanza’s time again. In my head I repeated, time now / time again / time now / time again.

Anything else? Bubble, but no sparkle friends; a few planes above me; water sloshing over me; 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left 1 2 3 4 5 6 / 1 2 3 4 5 6 7; always the swan boats lurking in the background; the surface of the water beside the buoy, bright orange; seagulls in the sky; a whistle being blown on shore — 7 pm; the occasional strand of floating milfoil wrapping around my head or my shoulder; some other vines of milfoil reaching up from the bottom; the patch of milfoil just off of the swimming area thickening again; a canoe or two crossing the course; the surface of the water on the way to the big beach glowing from the sinking sun.

The course seemed longer than it usually is, with the buoys placed farther from each other. How does it compare to other 4 loop swims this summer?

10 aug: 4 loops = 4, 690 yards / 2,487 strokes
6 aug: 4 loops = 3, 969 yards / 2, 234 strokes
2 july: 4 loops = 4,639 yards / 2, 454 strokes
17 aug 2025: 4474 yards / 2, 526 strokes*

*Looking at the data from today’s swim vs. 17 aug, I know what the strokes don’t seem to add up with the corresponding distance. It’s because I started my workout early, then had to wait in the water until they let us go. The watch recorded 35 or so yards of distance while I stood there. Also, I read through the entry and realized last year’s 4 loop swim was at Cedar and not Nokomis.

aug 8/HIKE

140 minutes
hidden falls
78 degrees

One of my roommates and dear friends from college was in town and we went for a hike near Hidden Falls. We started above, walking on the trail that I had run on earlier in the week. We stopped at the bench that I had wanted to sit on, but was occupied on Wednesday. We noticed the new yellow signs cautioning bikers to notice and alert walkers as they passed. Then we descended the steep hill at the far end of the park and walked on a road beside some meadows, clusters of trees, and the Mississippi River. When we reached the big parking lots in the heart of the park, I suggested we take the trail that leads directly to the falls and some stone steps up to the parking lot instead of hiking up the steep road. I warned that the trail was hard to find. We tried to find it, and failed. We took one path but I quickly realized it was going the wrong way. Then we took another: a wide dirt path lined with some noxious plants that I didn’t recognize but KJW did because she had recently had a terrible encounter with them. About 20 minutes later, I suddenly realized that we had gone too far. KJR checked the map on her phone and we were way past the falls; we were almost to the ford power plant.

We encountered a choice: one path stayed closer to the river, and farther from any way up to the road and the car. The other passed through a big hole in a chainlink fence where an entire panel had been cut out and seemed to lead closer to the bluff. I was skeptical that there would be an opening up above, but we went for it. The trail led to the abandoned plant, which was covered in graffiti. After wandering around for a few minutes, wondering where to go, we hiked up a very steep road. I’ve passed by this road up above while running my hidden falls / confluence routes. Halfway up, we passed by an abandoned parking lot, which had no cars, but lots of weeds. We also passed by a small structure sticking out of the steep bluff. I know that building too! I said to KJW — I think it’s too steep to get up there. / Definitely, KJW replied.

At the top of the road, a closed gate. There was barbed wire on the top of the fence. We could see the trail just on the other side of the gate. Luckily there was a narrow gap between the post of the gate and the post of the fence, and luckily we were both small enough to fit through it. Whew.

I wonder if I’ll think about the abandoned plant when I run past this gate in the future? I looked it up on Reddit and read about how unstable the structure is. Someone mentioned pits of asbestos. Yikes.

10 Things

  1. grasshoppers leaping out of the meadow grass — dozens of them, making it look like the grass was moving
  2. a roller blader skating up a hill on the river road
  3. on the steep road down to hidden falls at the far end, passing under the highway five bridge, hearing the traffic rushing by above
  4. a lime scooter, on its side in the grass-hoppered meadow
  5. a motorized white boat on the river far below us, later another white boat beside us
  6. a wide dirt trail, lined with green leaves
  7. a rock face — st. peter sandstone with faces etched in it
  8. the trail suddenly turned soft — sand right by the river — we stopped so KJW could fling some of it out of her shoe
  9. a stand of towering cottonwoods — so wide! so tall! so much welcomed shade
  10. on the ford power plant structure: brightly colored graffiti everywhere

aug 7/RUN

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls and back
77 degrees / dew point: 72

I was supposed to swim this morning, but it was raining and windy with a chance of thunderstorms, I was tired from last night’s swim, and it was the queen stage of the Tour de France Femme avec Zwift, so I decided to skip open swim today. Scott and I watched the stage instead and it was awesome. The women’s tour has been way more exciting than the men’s. Kassia Niewiadomma Phinney destroyed the field on an HC climb.

After the stage finished, the rain had stopped, so I went out for a run. Right after I returned, a clap of thunder. Nice timing! It was hot and humid and I sweat a lot. I ran 90/30 for almost all of the run. Because of the humidity, my heart rate was still high, but my pace was steady. I’d like to try this 90/30 again on a longer run, and when it’s a little cooler.

For the first mile, I ran without headphones. Do I remember anything I heard? I think I heard some construction noises and at least one car? Oh — just remembered: I heard the bells of St. Thomas! After that, I put on the latest “Off the Rails” podcast. They were talking about the new women’s pro baseball league and the terrible version of the National Anthem that opened the season at a stadium in Illinois.

10 Things

  1. there were a lot of people near the falls and waiting to pay for parking in the parking lot
  2. the bells of st thomas! I heard at least one chime (this is when I remembered that I had heard the bells, or a bell, then I added it in the previous paragraph)
  3. the sky was dark — thick, heavy, holding a storm waiting to happen
  4. small puddles all over the trail
  5. sometimes windy, sometimes still
  6. the trail that dips below the road south of the double bridge was especially dark and mysterious-looking
  7. a tiny kid — maybe 2? — running away from an adult and another kid near the parking lot
  8. as the run went on, the sky got darker and heavier
  9. someone has painted the tops of two wooden railings on the path bright colors: one is orange, one yellow
  10. another runner emerged near 42ndas the winchell trail climbed out of the gorge, then they immediately turned and followed the trail back below

aug 6/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
120 minutes
81 degrees

Another choppy night of swimming. I don’t recall seeing a corrugated surface, but I could tell the minute I started swimming that the water was going to be rough. It didn’t unsettle me; just made it harder and more draining to swim. Saw my sparkle friends and lots of bubbles. Noticed a silver flash below — a fish?! During one loop, heading back to the big beach, I noticed some birds flying over the water. Geese? Seagulls? Not sure. Also saw a few planes.

I’m not sure if there were any whitecaps but the waves were a couple feet tall and they rocked me from side to side. Swimming from buoy 2 to buoy 3, they kept wanting to drag me under. Swimming from buoy 5 to buoy 1, they were behind me and pushed me along. When I got the angle just right, I could swim fast.

10 Things

  1. one non-open swim club member with an orange buoy, swimming beside the white buoys
  2. so many sailbots, moving along the edge of the course — mostly white sails
  3. some menacing swan boats on the edges
  4. 1 or 2 canoes paddling across the course
  5. the milfoil is thickening again, just off the white buoy closest to the beginning of the course — as I stroked into shore, vines grabbed my wrist and my watch
  6. fogged-up goggles
  7. water color: deep green
  8. the first buoy was far out into the middle of the lake
  9. during one loop, a hissing sound beneath me, almost like air was leaking out of a tire
  10. a clear sky with no clouds

Swimming One Day in August

before the swim: Reviewing old entries tagged, 1 day of swimming, I found some great stuff from 2 sept 2025:

“The song I remember the most was Peter Gabriel’s “Playing for Time.”*

Oh, there’s a hill that we must climb
Climb through all the mist of time
It’s all in here what we’ve been through

Not a fan of the phrase, mist of time, but these lyrics reminded me of a few lines from Mary Oliver that I read right before heading out for my run: 

Slowly
up the hill, 
like a thicket of white flowers, 
forever. 
(The Leaf and the Cloud/ Mary Oliver)

The lines just preceding these were a series of good-byes to the world: the swaying trees, the black triangles of the winter sea, oranges, the fox sparrow, blue-winged teal, lettuce, turnip, rice fields, the morning light, and the goldfinches. 

Down, I’m getting it down
Sorting it out
So everything I care about
Is held in here
All of those I love, inside

Listening to these lines, I thought about Oliver’s deepening of the spirit. I thought about the interior and moving inside of yourself and of burying memories and ideas not as a way to avoid them, but to protect them. I also thought about someone growing older and having memory-loss and trying to hold onto faces and names and experiences. I weighed the possibilities and limitations of going deep inside as compared to opening up to the outside. All of these thoughts came at once — not in a linear progression — in a burst which lasted until I heard these lines less than a minute later:

There goes the sun
Back from where it came
The young move to the center
The mom and dad, the frame

I just remembered: at the start of my run, I was thinking about the difference between ordinary and extraordinary time, which was a continuation of thoughts that began earlier this morning. Habits, routines, activities/events experienced again and again — the mundane — versus the scattered, sporadic occasions that break up the routine. While meaning and memories are often found in the singular moments** I’m drawn to the rituals and repetitions and daily events as where important meaning dwells.”

*I told Scott about the song as we drove over to the lake and then we listened to it.

**are memories created from singular moments, or from the repetition of moments? conversely, do we remember something that happened only once as happening frequently, like a part of our character instead of just one instance or aberration?

during and after the swim: Mary Oliver’s one day = 24 hours / morning, afternoon, evening, night / dawn to dusk / a longing for a future time (in winter, thinking about swimming in the summer — one day I’ll swim again!) / a snapshot, one instant or instance / the start of an adventure in a fairy tale (one day the little girl wandered into the woods)

aug 5/RUN

10.1 miles
confluence and back
62 degrees
AQI: 36!

10 miles. That was not easy. Much cooler today, better air quality, but still warm. I sweat a lot. By mile 5, my pony tail was dripping. I could feel it on my shoulder, hear the wet strands of my hair swishing as I moved. I decided not to bring my handheld water bottle, which was a big mistake. Two thirds of the way through, I ran out of gas.

3 things that worked well:

  1. managed my unfinished business — even before I finished mile 1, I felt like I needed a port-a-potty, but taking walk breaks and not thinking about it, helped the need to poop go away
  2. just kept moving (mostly running, some walking) — I wasn’t sure how much I could run today and when I realized that the route to the confluence and back was almost 2 miles short, I could have stopped sooner, but I decided I need to keep going, so I did
  3. nice route — even though this route was too short, I liked it — the stretch of the east river road between hidden falls and the confluence is beautiful — such amazing views!

3 things to work on:

  1. don’t forget the water bottle
  2. don’t forget snacks
  3. work on being more consistent with the run/walk method — on the next run, try 90/30 again

As I ran under the road at Hidden Falls, I thought about the small stretch of hidden falls that was daylighted when they redid this area a few years ago. I listened as it rushed to the edge then fell over it and smelled its fishy smell.

10 Things

  1. running over the ford bridge, admiring the river, 1: the brownish water was calm, still, flat, not even a ripple
  2. running over the ford bridge, admiring the river, 2: because the surface was still, I could see below it — the faint outline of several sandbars
  3. a short (under 5 ft) older woman i, stretching next to the hidden falls park sign, at the top of the hill, later I encountered her again; she was walking, I was running
  4. a strange pair of sounds on either side of the road, call and response. Bird song I had never heard before, sounding almost like machines or alarms — was it 2 birds, or 2 people with some kind of device making the noise?
  5. what a view! — 1/2 mile from the confluence overlook, the trail and a bench are high above a bend in the river where you can see the mississippi and the minnesota rivers — I would have stopped but someone had brought a chair and was sitting in front of the bench
  6. near the far entrance to hidden falls — a roller skier perched at the top — were they about to bomb down the steep hill?
  7. at the confluence — a lime green bike, wedged in the corner of the overlook — too many leaves below to see anything — a warm water water fountain
  8. a bird crying out, sounding like they were in distress — a woman came to the edge where I was standing and said the sound came from an eagle on the other shore
  9. 2 men running on the ford bridge, one of them was turned around and running backwards
  10. 2 older men, carrying signs to place along the bike path that said something like, bikers, use caution! alert walkers with an “on your left” or a bell — Yes!

Just before I heard the eagle (mentioned in #8), I took a picture of a view of the river:

east river road, heading to downtown St. Paul

Running near where this picture was taken, I suddenly remembered a conversation I had with FWA at the dog park earlier this year. We were deep in the gorge, looking up at this bluff I was running on this morning. I said, this summer, when I’m training for the marathon, I want to run up there. And I am!

1 Day in August

Bummer! As I write this, I received an email from Open Swim. It’s cancelled tonight because there are blue-green algae blooms at one of the Cedar Lake beaches. Must be serious if they’re cancelling the swim; usually they just post an advisory and caution club memebers to “swim at your own risk.”

Reading the first verse of Mary Oliver’s poem again, my eyes stopped on among the flux of happenings” and I thought about the floating particles I encounter while swimming in Lake Nokomis. Often I call them my sparkle friends. They are the little bits of sediment or muck or aquatic plant that float in the water in front of me. They sparkle because of shafts of light in the water, and they seem to be in a constant motion of floating at me. I imagine some people might think my friends are gross, but I don’t, and I love the strange, trippy effect they create as I swim through them. I wrote one of my inklings about them:

Particles
before buoy 1

Lit by thin shafts of
light, they put on a
show. Their frenzied disco
of shimmer sparkle
shake stirs us up.

I like MO’s use of among here — among the flux of happenings. The deepening and quieting of my spirit comes among this flux, these little happenings.

I know I’ve written about “among” before; found it! On 16 may 2025, past Sara wrote a lot of things that are very helpful to present Sara as I think about MO’s use of among!

side note: the more I follow my muse here — and, maybe, my muse is a fish or floating milfoil or a sparkle friend? — the more clear it becomes: this year’s Swimming One Day in August is about engaging in a deeper reading of MO’s words — expanding on meanings, connecting them to her other work, reading them beside my experiences in the lake.

But, back to among. Here’s what I wrote in my 16 may 2025 entry:

among / between

When I read and posted Lorine Niedecker’s poem about standing among the birch last week —

For best work
you ought to put forth
some effort
to stand
in north woods
among birch.

I was struck by the word among and wondered how it was different from between. I looked it up this afternoon and, after wading through discussions about how between is used with 2 items, among with more than 2, I came across a helpful distinction in Merriam Webster: 

We use between when we want to express a relation to things and have them considered as individual and usually equal entities. 

Among, on the other hand is the best word to use when referring to things collectively and imprecisely. 

5 aug 2026 Sara, interjecting here: using among to refer to things collectively reminds me of a favorite (and very popular line) from MO in “Wild Geese”:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

among: your place in the family of things — so, the deepening and quieting of the spirit could be finding one’s place in the world? Where you belong? when you’re in your element? Of course this reading is different from the predominant one in which quieting your spirit among the flux of happenings means being present and calm, not worrying about all the noise around you.

I like among in LN’s poem, although I wonder about the effect of using between (or beside or with) instead. to stand/in north woods/between birch. Among indicates a kinship — among all of us trees, but between suggests an actual place — stand between this birch and that birch and an exchange — between us. I like both meanings. I like imaging my best work as trying to become a tree. But I also like the idea of my best work happening when I stand between birch — giving and receiving air. 

I was reminded of among and between while reading this passage from Marie Howe:

That was really a big deal. I was given this place to be without any expectations really. And everything changed so that the particulars of life—this white dish, the shadow of the bottle on it—everything mattered so much more to me. And I saw what happened in these spaces. You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs AMONG the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in BETWEEN all that.

You can name/describe the collection of things (among), but you can’t find words to describe how their meaning has changed in that moment. Often when I think about the slight shifts in meaning between small words, like among or between, I’m reminded of an essay I read about Mary Oliver and her mousier words. I love mousy words! Meanwhiles and in-betweens and yous and wes and usses (is that the plural of us?). 


…it’s tempting to be blinded by the more immediately visible parts of speech: the monolithic nouns, the dynamic verbs, the charismatic adjectives. Mousier ones—pronouns, prepositions, particles—go ignored.

Mary Oliver and the Nature-esque

—

Reading through this past entry, and thinking about MO’s next verse —

Something had pestered me so much
I thought my heart would break.
I mean, the mechanical part —

I remembered MO’s words in another of her poems:

I Go Down To The Shore/ Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out, 
and I say, oh, I am miserable, 
what shall–
what should I do? And the seas says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Here the sea doesn’t hold her until she grows easy or tell her what she should do, but they (the sea is they, because the sea is not an it) offer a suggestion, find your place in the family of things, do the work you were meant to do.

And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe–that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life. 

Upstream/ Mary Oliver

I use this passage in the introduction to my “How to Be” project on my Undisciplined site.

an idea: Perhaps I should revisit Upstream and Long Life. I own both of them. Also, how about another read through of The Leaf and the Cloud?

aug 4/SWIM

3 long loops
lake nokomis open swim
65 minutes
76 degrees

A wonderful night at the lake! The buoys were placed wide, making the course bigger. More strokes, more distance, more time in the lake. It was choppy and challenging, especially nearing buoy 3 (water pulling me down) and between buoys 4 and 5 (waves battering me on my right). I could tell the water was unsettled when I entered it. Before beginning, I watched the small undulations on the surface and they disoriented me.

The water was green and opaque. I admired the bubbles my fingers shed. Below the surface, it was noisy — the same strange whooshing sound that I heard last week. Is it because of construction somewhere nearby? Above the surface, it was noisy too: big military planes flying by — National Guard training. I noticed some menacing swans on the edge of the course, but not sailboats or paddle boarders. Sometimes I felt like my spirit was deepening and quieting. A few times, I felt some twinges of anxiety — would my shoulder start hurting? my foot or my calf cramp? Almost all of the time, it felt easy and natural.

I rarely saw the buoys, but when I did, they were less than flashes or dots, just the idea that a buoy was ahead of me. I marveled out how I’ve learned to trust myself so much, just believing that the brief glimpse of the idea of a shape ahead of me was a buoy.

Before heading over to the lake, I had studied Mary Oliver’s poem. I was struck by these fragments: it is TIME NOW and it will be TIME AGAIN. I thought about the now of time as being in the moment, present — MO’s now and now and now. I thought about the again of time as the loops and repetitions, the habits I repeat, the returning again and again to the lake to swim around and around the course. I also thought about the again as the inevitable restoration of the now when I deepen and quiet. No matter my anxious thoughts, I will come back to the now, when I am not thinking or worrying, but being here, now, in my element, doing what I am meant to do.

1 day of swimming, august 2025

1 — from 5 aug 2025:

I recited Mary Oliver’s, “Swimming, One Day in August” and felt the deepening and quieting of my spirit. Peaceful, calm, relaxed, in my element.

This last line, in my element, reminded me of the Adventure Time clip I posted years ago on this log1:

quieting of the spirit = being satisfied, in your element

This clip also has another thing that I often reference: the demon cat with approximate knowledge. That’s me! Speaking of that cat, as I watched this clip again I realized something: this cat is a twisted reference to the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Nice! One more thing about this clip: I want a t-shirt with Finn on it, yelling out, “I’m in my Element!”

2 — from 6 aug, referencing 13 july 2025

I go to/the lake // to be held. Thought about the verb, to behold, then beheld, which reminded me of a line in a poem that I love and had pondered on 19 june: Unsee the beheld! / Altitude/ Airea D. Matthews

Unsee the beheld where to unsee is to observe/witness with a sense other than sight, or to unravel, come undone or redone, transformed. Who/what is the beheld? Me, held by the water. So, to unsee me, to let go of me/I and have an encounter/exchange with that which is not-I: the water. I haven’t written about this bit yet, but yesterday I was thinking about Anne Carson and her anthropology of water and I wrote in my Plague Notebook, encounter with that which you cannot contain, control, that is not You — the not-I. In the lake, I am held by the water — rocked, enveloped, lifted — but in the process of being held I dissolve, or the small part of Sara the ecosystem that is I is saturated submerged, soaked, waterlogged.

MO lines: “the sea/which held me, until I grew easy”

3 — the thinker’s the sinker

Just two days ago, I mentioned a line from a Maxine Kumin poem about the thinker being the sinker. I decided to look up the poem and my original post about it. So glad I did! Kumin didn’t write the line; that was my condensing of it in order to remember it. Here’s what she wrote, and a few other lines too, from “Swimming and Believing”:

Each time I tear this seam to enter, 
all that I carry is taken from me,
shucked in the dive. 
Lovers, children, even words go under.
Matters of dogma spin off in the freestyle
earning that mid-pool spurt, like faith.
Where have I come from? Where am I going?
What do I translate, gliding back and forth
erasing my own stitch marks in this lane?
Christ on the lake was not thinking
where the next heel-toe went. 
God did him a dangerous favor
whereas Peter, the thinker, sank. 
The secret is in the relenting, 
the partnership. I let my body work
accepting the dangerous favor
from the king-size pool of waters.

Later in my log entry about this poem, from 22 july 2021, I posted this:

things I like–tearing the seam and erasing the stitch marks; he who thinks sinks; the value of belief and relenting to that which is greater than you; a shucking off of the need to know where you’re from and where you’re going; the connection of all of this to the act of swimming. I like the line about thinking and sinking–maybe not he who thinks sinks, but the thinker’s the sinker? Hmm…anyway, I’m not opposed to thinking–I love doing it all the time and it is very necessary and important–but lately I’ve been very interested in ideas/understandings/poems/new ways of being that come to be or occur to us through methods other than concentration and directing our minds on objects or problems, which is how thinking is often defined. What can come to us when we’re not studying it directly? When we don’t have a specific objective, or need to be in control? Is this a different way of thinking about thinking?

In tomorrow’s entry, I should add to this idea of not thinking with Alice Oswald and her ideas about swimming and the mind and body.

  1. I spent more than 1/2 hour searching for the entry I posted it in, but couldn’t find it. Then I remembered that I had also posted it on Undicisplined, so I found it there. ↩︎

aug 3/RUNSWIM

4.2 miles
veterans home
69 degrees
humidity: 87%

Warm again this morning. Humid, too. Not easy to run, but still nice to be outside and breathing air that wasn’t that smoky. I was planning to run through the grounds of the veterans home and over the tall bridge then to the falls, but the bridge was closed, so I had to adjust my route. No bridge, no John Stevens’ house, no Big Feet statue or falls. Instead, I ran through Wabun, over to the edge of Minnehaha park, then back north on the river road.

Mostly I ran for 2 minutes then walked for 45 seconds. I listened to the audio book, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I saw a regular, Skirt with Sandals. Like I mentioned the last time I wrote about her, she no longer wears sandals, but running shoes. Should I rename here? Anything else? I don’t recall seeing the river or hearing any rowers. No turkey sightings. I did see one roller skier and heard their poles clicking the paved path. And I ran, carefully, over some acorns scattered across the sidewalk.

a word I’ve learned before but forgot: mondegreen

Returning to my poem-of-the-day practice, which I haven’t done for some time, I encountered a word that looked familiar but that I couldn’t remember the meaning of: mondegreen. It’s the title of Poetry Daily’s poem for today.

Mondegreen: “a word or phrase that results from a mishearing especially of something recited or sung” (Merriam Webster).

origins: from the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen”

example: Up until a few years ago, I always the heard the line, what are we doing here?, from “Grease” as what do we do in PE?

I mentioned mondegreens to Scott and he offered up his favorite:

From “The Heart of Rock and Roll” from Huey Lewis and the News: Scott heard the old boy may be barely breathing as the oboe may be barely breathing.

Mondegreen/Bobby Elliott

I mistake the sound of a recycling cart
hitting the curb
for the latch of our gate
and picture him instantly:
my father stumbling
into the light of the backyard
to shoot himself.
I’d been looking at the fruit trees
and the fire pit,
the loose board of the old fence
in the wind.
I’d been thinking of how lost
you’d have to be
to believe you knew
everything there was to know
about yourself.
And now this sound
I mistake for my father
going through with it: one
awful letter in his coat pocket
to me, another
to my unborn son.

Reading an interview with the poet, I discovered that this book is autobiographical and about his father, but that father is “very much alive.” This fact offers an interesting shift in meaning for me, like something new clicking into place. But, more than the father, I’m interested in the idea of mishearing, mis-imagining, mis-seeing, mis-interpreting. It reminds me of something I’ve posted on here a few times (26 jan 2025 / 22 feb 2026):

The Ten Muses of Poetry

  1. Mishearing
  2. Misunderstanding
  3. Mistranslating
  4. Mismanaging
  5. Mislaying
  6. Misreading
  7. Misappropriating cliches
  8. Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers
  9. Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc.
  10. Mississippi (the river) 

And, here’s a line from a scientific study using mondegreens: “Expectations and prior knowledge can strongly influence our perception.” How does that impact what I see and what I hear?

Also, this passage from the same study:

An elegant method to examine top-down modulation of perception is to employ stimuli which can induce two concurring percepts which has been extensively employed in vision research using reversible figures, such as Rubin’s vase-face illusion [8]. So far, much less is known about how expectations can alter perception in the auditory modality. For speech content, such ambiguous stimuli that can be perceived in two different ways are called ‘slips of the ear’ which have been described as phenomena during which ‘a listener reports hearing, as clearly and distinctly as any correctly perceived stretch of speech, something that does not correspond to the speaker’s actual utterance’.

Slips of the ear reminds me of something else I read in the 22 feb 2026 entry about squinting with your ears:

A second key might be “eavesdropping.” As it happens I have deficient eyesight and hearing, not enough to impair my regular function but enough that I can, as my colleague Karla Kelsey puts it, “squint,” either with the eye or the ear, without difficulty. Some of my best lines—especially the generative lines, the bits of poetic grist from which poems develop—come from phrases I’ve misheard in conversation or (at least initially) misread as text. I guess you could say I “own” such material—I make a lyric and creative claim to it—by mishearing or misreading it.

An Inheritance Reassembled

swim: 2 loops (6 mini mini loops)
cedar lake open swim
86 degrees / wind: 16 mph

Windy, which made the water choppy. So choppy that the lifeguards couldn’t use the buoys and needed to shorten the course. Instead of swimming from beach to beach, we swam out into the middle of the lake and turn around near a lifeguard at a kayak. That might be some of the choppiest water I’ve ever swum in. I wonder how it compares to mild chop on Lake Superior or an ocean?

10 Things

  1. bobbing green caps
  2. bright yellow orange pink buoys
  3. the water’s surface was corrugated (a word Anne Carson used to describe a lake she swam in)
  4. a swimmer returning from the middle, doing a powerful backstroke — not looking or able to see where he was going — just swinging his arms, chopping the water — did he run into anyone?
  5. a strong spray from behind — waves crashing into me?
  6. so many scratchy vines floating in the water — one got stuck on my back and I had to stop to fling it off
  7. a pale blue sky, a few patches of bright blue
  8. a group of women in the shallow water in the swimming area — chanting and taking pictures — a party? a cult meeting? a religous ceremony?
  9. leaking goggles
  10. breathing mostly on my right side

A vigorous rocking as I swam. Between that delightful distraction and the constant need to look out for other swimmers and to find the turn around point, I didn’t think about Mary Oliver’s poem at all. Only after, did I realize I was living one of her verses:

I went down in the afternoon
to the sea, which held me
until I grew easy.

Yes, that lake water this late afternoon/early evening held me and rocked me, helping me to forget any worries or irritations I had. The water was rough, but not overwhelming. No waves rushing into my mouth when I breathed at the wrong time, just swells nudging me from side to side. Fun!

aug 2/SWIM

6 loops
lake nokomis open swim
69 degrees
AQI: 55

6 loops! In the 13 years I’ve been doing open swim, I think I’ve swum 6 loops once before. It took a little less than 2 hours. What a great way to start my swimming one day in August month! The conditions were great: calm water that wasn’t too cold or too warm, sun, a clear sky. As they announced the opening of the course, a lifeguard mentioned that it was slightly shorter because of a staffing shortage. In the past, a shorter course meant eliminating the green buoys and just swimming from beach to beach, but today’s “shortened” course had all 5 buoys and didn’t look that much shorter. Having swum it and checked my number of strokes and the distance, I don’t think it was short.

10 Things

  1. a dozen geese flying not too far above the water — not in a tight formation, but an approximate V
  2. the color of the water near the surface: a pale green
  3. the color of the water, deep below: dark green
  4. the color of the water on the surface: purple
  5. the sky: a pale blueish purple
  6. several planes in the air: most were parallel to the water, one nearly perpendicular, climbing straight up
  7. nearing the buoy #3 (green, closest to the little beach) the water surface was mostly flat, and calm, with flecks of golden light
  8. a tri clinic on the edge of the beach: women preparing for next Sunday’s sprint distance triathlon
  9. stopping in the middle of the lake: quiet, still
  10. the surface of the water glowing green or orange as I rounded a buoy

Today was the first day of my “swimming one day in August” project. A cumulative total of 24 hours spent in the water during August, partly inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name. As I stroked through the water, I recited the lines and thought about what Oliver means by, It is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit among the flux of happenings. I thought about the deepening and the bottom, about 18 feet below me that I couldn’t see. Then I remembered a line from the poet, Maxine Kumin: the thinker’s the sinker. Too much thinking, too much trying to go deeper into the murky depths, makes you lose your buoyancy. I thought about the quieting of the spirit and ways to understand it in the midst of moving. A strong, steady core? I recalled more lines from the poem, I went down in the afternoon to the sea, which held me until I grew easy. Even when the sea is calm — and how often does that happen? — the waves are not quiet or still, but relentless. A deepening and quieting is about settling into a rhythm. Then I started thinking that that deepening is not about sinking deeper into your own interior, but opening up to the world outside of yourself. The quieting, then, is about quieting the “I” and those things that make us believe we are separate from others and the world.

I think these thoughts, which came and went, probably comprised 10 or 15 percent of my swim. The rest of it was counting strokes between breaths (12345) or between buoys (buoys 3 to 4 = 200 strokes / buoys 5 to 1 = 100 strokes) or trying to sight the course or not running into some swimmers, racing others or noticing colors or listening to my nose squeak and water slosh over my ear or stopping myself from worrying about whether or not my feet were cramping.

When I finished, I was tired and a little sore, but my left shoulder didn’t ache and my calves or feet weren’t cramping. Hooray!

Here are today’s colors. Orange, green, yellow buoys. Water: purple surface, pale green just under, dark green deep below. Pale blueish purple sky with streaks of bright blue and a white cloud or two. Green trees lining the shore, light brown sand on the beach, too white swan boats.

buoys / water / sky / trees – sand – boat

aug 1/RUN

8 miles
ford + hidden falls loop
68 degrees / humidity: 87%

That was hard! I had wanted to run 10 miles, but the route I took was a lot shorter, my legs were tired, and the sun was hot, so I only did 8. Good enough for me today. I ran the first mile without stopping, then 2 min run / 45 seconds walk for most of the rest. After listening for Shadow Falls, 15 minutes in, I put in my headphones and listened to an audiobook I recently checked out, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It’s a great book to listen to while running: a good distraction.

10 Things

  1. running up the hill above the ravine, hearing the water falling at shadow falls
  2. another running passing me, then the sour smell of someone working hard
  3. a peloton on the road — a dozen riders
  4. a big group of shirtless runners: 20 or so? a college cross country team?
  5. encountering many runners (most) approaching me, running the other direction
  6. a sour, sharp smell near the overlook at hidden falls — from the creek water?
  7. so much sweat — my shoulders were soaked
  8. baby turkeys! near the 44th street parking lot, grazing in the grass
  9. a boisterous group of runners — 5 or 6 women laughing
  10. Patches of mud and some felled trees — because of yesterday’s rain and occasional strong wind?

No roller skiers, no geese, no bugs, no acorns underfoot — usually the acorns begin falling at the end of July. When will they fall this year? (update, a few hours later: Scott and I took Delia the dog on a short walk and, at the end of the block, acorns on the sidewalk!)

Before starting my run, the line from Mary Oliver’s “Swimming One Day in August” popped into my head — it is time now, I said, for the deepening and quieting of the spirit. I imagined this deepening and quieting as an inner stillness. I hoped to think about that as I ran, but I was too distracted my the heat, my legs, and the effort.

So far, I’ve heard 2 hours (out of almost 12) of the audio book, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It’s about two friends, Sadie and Max, who love playing and making video games. I’ve haven’t read the summary and don’t know that much about the book, but I’m assuming they make some big video game together. Do they fall in love, too? The first video game Sadie makes in her seminar at MIT is called EmilyBlaster and it involves pen-as-gun that shoots out the words of Emily Dickinson poems. Nice. I looked it up, and the game actually exists online, EmilyBlaster. I tried playing it. Admittedly, with my bad vision and limited gaming skills, I sucked, but it was pretty cool. The first poem was “I felt a Funeral in my Brain,” which I memorized a few years back. It felt strange to try and shoot these words as I recited them in my head. I can’t believe I’ve never heard about this video game before.

EmilyBlaster is one of Sadie Green’s earliest games, and one of the first games I invented for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow as well. It’s the simplest game in the book, and I needed it to be convincingly something a clever college student might be able to make on limited resources and time in the 1990s. The game was inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and by edutainment games of the 1980s, like Math Blaster! I liked the slight subversiveness of making a game where the object was to shoot poetry, and I thought that Emily Dickinson’s compact verse style and memorable phrasings would make for perfect targets. 

Play EmilyBlaster!

campanilismo

More on echolocation and bells and bioregionalism. I recalled something I’d heard about earlier in the year. Here’s what I wrote at the end of my entry for 9 jan 2026:

Working on a tiny (24 word) poem tentatively titled bio-regionalism, and I was thinking about something I recalled hearing from Stanley Tucci in his series on regions in Italy and their food: he said that a region/neighborhood was/is defined by anyone who was in earshot of that neighborhood’s church bells. I looked it up and found this helpful definition and video from Rick Steves. The term is campanilismo:

During Tuscany’s medieval and Renaissance prime, this region was a collection of feuding city-states dominated by rich families. To this day, Tuscans remain fiercely loyal to their home community, and are keenly aware of subtle differences between people from different cities, towns, and villages. (Italians have a wonderful word for this: campanilismo, meaning that a community consists of the people within earshot of its bell tower — campanile.)

source

I love this idea of defining a community, your home-place, by its bells. My bells are the bells of St. Thomas, just across the river.

And here’s the poem:

Defining a Neighborhood

It begins
from the ground
up with feet
following,
and ends when
ears listening
can no
longer hear
the bells. 

It needs some work! I’d like to include it in Echolocation — should it be a separate poem, or should I add in some lines in my opening poem, Listen, where I first introduce the bells?

july 30/RUNSWIM

4 miles
monument and back
78 degrees
AQI: 70

Hot, so hot! And hard, especially when I was running in the sun, which was a lot of the time. As I neared the monument, I could hear shadow falls — it hasn’t rained in several days, where is that falling water coming from? I also heard construction workers working on a huge house (the U of M President’s house that Gov. Walz was living in while they repaired the governor’s mansion) on the river road and a carolina wren calling, cheeseburger cheeseburger or tea kettle tea kettle. I decided on cheeseburger because I like cheeseburgers, but not tea. I passed by a small break in the trees and saw a flash of white — was it a plastic bag or a white cat? On my return trip I wondered what I’d see: nothing. A few options: either someone picked up the bag or I saw something that wasn’t there or it was an animal and that animal moved. Another thought: maybe it was a possum? I didn’t hear any rowers or roller skiers or fragments of conversation. On the bridge, I stopped at the overlook to study the surface of the water. Tiny scales or corrugation. No sparkle spots, but small waves moving upstream. I also looked at the texture of the green leaves; it was giving me broccoli vibes.

Before I started running again, I turned on my color playlist and heard the line from “Bein’ green”:

It’s not that easy bein’ green
Having to spend each day
The color of the leaves

*

It’s not easy bein’ green
It seems you blend in
With so many other ordinary things
And people tend to pass you over
‘Cause you’re not standing out
Like flashy sparkles in the water

As I walked the final blocks back to my house, a phrase appeared in my head, not moving through but moving in. Not passing through a place, but dwelling in it. Before my run, I had been thinking about echolocation and navigation and what it means to be located in/by a place. I started thinking about Lorine Niedecker and an article I read about her ecopoetics as dwelling with place. With — I had misremembered it as in, but now I want to add moving with a place to my thinking about being located in space and time. Hearing this phrase, moving with a place, makes me think of Juliana Spahr and breathing and the space around everyone with lungs.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
87 degrees

Choppy water! A storm is moving in, I think. It might rain all day tomorrow — I hope not. I want to do open swim tomorrow morning and/or run. The water was rough all the way through, from above to below. The feeling of an undertow, waves, getting rocked roughly. It was so choppy that one of the green buoys kept moving around. I’m not sure what was happening — was it the wind or lifeguard error — but as I swam towards buoy 2, I saw that buoy 4 was right next to it, and on the wrong side: close to the left instead of far to the right. I kept swimming towards the little beach and didn’t worry about it. A few minutes later, I neared the 4th buoy, now in place, or I thought it was in place, but as I kept swimming towards it, it wasn’t getting closer but farther away. Then I realized what was happening; the lifeguards were dragging it. I finally gave up on trying to swim around the far edge of it and just cut in towards the big beach. Chaos! It was fun to swim in the chaos and the choppy waves, but it was also tiring. And, my goggles were fogging up, which made it even more challenging to try and sight anything. I decided 2 loops was enough for me.

I did a lot of breathing every 5 and every 6 with some every 3 or every 4. I can’t remember what color the water was, but I do remember seeing bubbles around my hands. The milfoil seemed to be thickening again near the far white buoy. Bummer.

july 29/BIKEHIKESWIM

bike: 4.5 miles
the falls and back
82 degrees
AQI: 66

Two slow, short bike rides to the falls and back. Only 12 minutes, even with a delayed start after turning my workout on, from the falls to my garage. So close! I didn’t have any problems biking. I thought about the echolocation video I watched a few days ago and Molly’s (the blind YouTuber) words about wishing she could bike,

I had to stop riding bikes when I was eight, because I rode into a pole. And ever since then I’ve had to use a tandem bike.And that was frustrating for me, and that’s always one of the things, when people ask me what I miss about being sighted, I always say the things that I miss the most are the things give you freedom.

How Blind People See with Sound

Freedom. Yes! I like walking places, but biking is so much faster, and you can go farther.

hike: 40 minutes
from the falls to the river
85 degrees

Took the steps down to the dirt trail that winds beside the creek until it reaches the river. Stopped at a shaded bench for a few minutes to listen and be lulled by the water as it rushed over small rocks. A gentle, constant sound, occasionally interrupted by people passing by. I thought about sound and echoes and how the senses are entangled — particularly, how sound is textured and how it works (or seems to work, I don’t know that much about it yet) with touch when tapping a white cane.

When I met with my vision occupational therapist last month, she encouraged me to get white cane training sooner rather than later: it’s easier when you still have some sight left to learn it. Makes sense to me, so maybe at my next appointment, I’ll ask her how to sign up for it. I’m not scared of the white cane, but curious about how it works and how I’ll feel becoming so visibly disabled when I use it.

My cane tip tells me whether a dark line is thin shadow or a garden hose. I can test whether the ground’s dry, wet, or icy. Dry sounds like a scrape of plastic against pavement. Ice is a slippy hiss. Puddles gurgle.

*

My cane and I build a map of sounds and feelings. With each step, each tap or slide, I gain another data point. A sound, a vibration, a resistance or its absence. I think of Seurat building a picture of the world with repeated movement, the painter adding tiny dabs of paint to a canvas.

In Light of a White Cane / Naomi Cohn

After 15 minutes, I got up and took the metal slat walkway until it turned into dirt again. Dirt that was packed, then wet, then loose. I stopped beside the limestone wall where decades of passersby have scratched into the soft stone, including RJP and FWA over 10 years ago.

10 Things

  1. the bridge linking the 2 sides of the creek at the mouth of the river has several warper slats — I walked over it carefully
  2. across the river, on the east bank, a lone figure, walking on the beach
  3. the sound of a collar clanging — a dog and their human approaching on the trail
  4. someone from behind — footsteps getting louder, a cough — morning! a guy passed me then turned and climbed up and under the bridge
  5. constant noise of the creek going over the rocks
  6. a disembodied voice: a kid, whining
  7. such deep, dark, lush green, looking even more magical when the sun went the clouds covered the sun
  8. 2 women talking — one to the other, he didn’t even make it to the 3rd inning!
  9. rustling in the leaves — a bird? a mouse? a squirrel?
  10. taking the 100+ steps 2 at a time, hearing a guy say to his friend, will you drag me back up?

Oh that green! Usually this deep into summer, so much green is accompanied by lots of bugs. Yes, I heard the buzz of cicadas, but there weren’t any mosquitoes or gnats. Where are all the bugs? Returning to the green, these different plastics roughly represent the green, either as I saw it, or as I remember feeling it:

seltzer bottle / olive oil bottle / bread bag

swim: 2 loops (4 minis)
cedar lake open swim
air: 90 / water: 87
AQI: 75

The water was warm and opaque — low visibility. Yellowish green. A few bubbles, some scratchy vines, but no sparkle friends. The water was heavy and smooth on the way to hidden beach and choppy on the way back. Lots of swimmers were having difficulty navigating and ended up swimming on the wrong side. I almost ran into a pair of swimmers going the wrong way. I didn’t care.

On the back half of the final loop, I started racing another swimmer. We were going the same speed for much of the time, until I turbo-charged it by breathing every 6 strokes and pulled away. When I reached shore, they approached me — I think I was racing you; it was fun! thanks! It was fun.

Today’s water color:

yellowish green cedar lake

Is this too yellow? Possibly, but at the beginning of the swim, before I settled in, I remember the lake looking this yellow to me.

july 28/RUNSWIM

6 miles
hidden falls and back
69 degrees
AQI: 67

A little cooler this morning. The AQI wasn’t that high, but there must have been some smoke in the air because the spots of light on the path looked pinkish-orange. A steady run. Felt strong, sweat a lot.

10 Things

  1. rowers’ voices, down below
  2. click clack click clack — a roller skier’s poles hitting the sidewalk
  3. running parallel with another runner — I was on the paved path, they were on the dirt trail near folwell
  4. 2 women sitting on the curb at the top of the locks and dam hill — taking a break after doing a hill workout? waiting for someone? just sitting and talking?
  5. running under the east river road at hidden falls, listening to the creek water rushing down then over hidden falls — what creek is this again? looked it up: Hidden Falls Creek — but, actually, it’s not a creek but a stream of storm water*
  6. minneapolis park workers, mowing the grass beside the trail, stopping and waiting for me to pass
  7. the smell of freshly cut grass
  8. the river, below me on the ford bridge: flat and still and empty
  9. spots of sunlight on the trail, stained orangish-pink
  10. dust or smoke, stirred up by work they were doing at the old power plant near the locks and dam

*When I looked up the name of the creek at Hidden Falls, I found a Hidden Falls Resource Management Plan from 2004 and this description:

Today, Hidden Falls Regional Park encompasses 130 acres andn1.6 miles of shoreline and is an important natural area within the Mississippi River Corridor Critical Area and the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. It is an oasis of floodplain forest along the Mississippi River visited by local residents and visitors using the park’s trails throughout the year. Visitors utilizethe park for hiking, fishing, running, bicycling, dog walking, birdwatching, wildflower watching, picnics, and boating. The park is a significant stopover place for migrating songbirds and waterfowl traversing the Mississippi Flyway. The park also serves as an outflow for storm water from adjacent neighborhoods north and west of the park via storm sewers that end in the bluffs along the park’s eastern edge.

Hidden Falls Resource Management Plan, 2004

And here’s a description of where I ran as I followed the creek to an overlook of the falls:

For decades, Hidden Falls has been a nearly inaccessible trickle dripping out of a culvert behind the Ford Plant in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood. Bounded by a tight curve in the Mississippi River Boulevard (MRB), the falls offered visitors two options: a steep climb down crumbling limestone stairs or a rocky hike up from the Hidden Falls Park picnic pavilion.

This month, with the opening of a new tunnel and walkway under MRB, a new viewing platform and the partial daylighting of Hidden Falls Creek, the falls are ready to be discovered by many more visitors.

Originally, Hidden Falls Creek was fed by a natural spring located near Cleveland Avenue and Ford Parkway. The creek above the falls was buried into a culvert sometime in the past century during the development of Highland Park. Now, the falls are connected to a whole new source of water via the Highland Bridge development’s massive stormwater management system, creating a consistent flow of water over the falls.

Hidden Falls, Hidden No More

A creek, daylighted! Reading a little further in the article, I found a video from Dr. Greg Brick (I’ve read and enjoyed his great book, Subterranean Twin Cities) at the site as they were working on it a few years ago:

the video ends with a useful note: the only parts of the site that originated with the WPA are the fire pits. The steps came later.

It was cool to watch this video and think about it the history of where I ran this morning. It’s easy to not notice or reflect on the spaces you’re moving through. Now, five years later, the evidence of the planning and the labor done to create the path under the road, the overlook on the edge, and the daylighted creek are hidden to those not giving attention.

echoes

Thinking about the daylighted creek and the work done to restore/open up the area around Hidden Falls, I’m wondering about echoes beyond the definition of sound bouncing off an object and returning to a listener. Echo as trace, vestige, evidence of what came before. My collection of poems is filled with traces/evidence of what was/is there before me: countless other living things, human and non-human. I am not alone.

Echolocation is a practical tool for navigation; using echoes/changes in sound to gain a sense of the terrain — hearing where a tree or a car or a drop-off is. I use sound in this way to supplement (enhance?) my weak central vision. But echolocation, as in, locating the echoes-as-traces-as-evidence-as-proof that others are there or have been there, is also important to me.

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
87 degrees
AQI: 70

3 loops! No pain in my shoulder! No panicking in the middle of the lake! Only a near foot cramp at the end of loop 3 and misjudging where buoy 4 was on the first loop. A good swim. I felt strong and steady and mostly breathed every 5. There were a few patches of cold water but also patches of very warm, almost hot, water. It was 100 degrees yesterday, so that must have hotted up the lake. It was crowded — on the course, all around the beach, at Painted Turtle. I saw my sparkle friends, noticed that the water was a pale green, felt something touch my toe (a fish, I think). Heard sloshing water and other swimmers chatting near the final buoy; I was treading water to assess my cramped foot.

Overheard: one swimmer to another near the 5th buoy — I feel like I was all over that course!

Overhear: one swimmer to another, on the beach — what do you do if you can’t quite do another loop? I wish there was a half loop option!

The sky was a pale blue with a few clouds. There were kayaks and paddle boarders and a few menacing swans on the edge. No sail boat — probably because there was hardly any wind.

Swimming one day in August is coming and I think I’m ready for it!

july 27/BIKESWIMBIKE

bike: 8.7 miles
lake nokomis and back
84/88 degrees

As the European grand tour cycling announcers say, it’s hotting up out there. Scott said that the dew point was 81 at the airport this morning. The record (for all recorded weather here) is 82. Yikes. Instead of running, I decided to bike to the lake and swim. I haven’t biked over to the lake when it wasn’t an open swim this summer for several reasons: 1. the milfoil around the buoys made it too annoying (and dangerous) to swim; 2. I was swimming a lot already at open swims; 3. and because I was already swimming too much, I injured my shoulder. But, the milfoil has been removed, or at least thinned out (hooray!): I can’t do open swim at cedar tonight; and my shoulder is feeling better. Another reason to come over here on my bike besides the facts that it’s too hot to run and I haven’t driven a car in 5 years: my Apple watch activity challenge for July is 5 bike rides of 5 minutes or more. Even though that’s not a challenging challenge, I haven’t achieved it yet this month because it’s been too hot, too smoky, and I’ve been too sick.

The bike ride was easy. I didn’t have to try and pass anyone and I could see well enough to navigate. The paths were not crowded. No big groups of kids or silver riders. No packs of runners. Part of the trail was closed, but I could see and follow the detour signs.

10 Bike Things

  1. the parking lot at the falls was almost empty, one 1 or 2 cars
  2. a bird near the lake — cheer up cheer up — a robin
  3. thwack thwack — the pickleballers are at it again, playing on the court at the rec center, no shade anywhere
  4. a handful of single runners sprinkled throughout my ride
  5. the creek under the echo bridge was low and bright and still
  6. an adult with a kid in a seat sped past on an e-bike
  7. orange paint around the cracks on the trail near my favorite part of the path
  8. just past that: trail closed for road (or sewer?) work on nokomis
  9. biking over some bumps on the part of the path sandwiched between the light rail and the creek, my chain was jammed — I slowed down, preparing to stop and fix it, but it unjammed itself
  10. minneapolis park workers out doing some work — mowing? cutting down limbs? I’m no sure

swim: 1.5 loops
lake nokomis, main beach
86 degrees
AQI: 57

A wonderful swim! The water was calm and not too warm. Only one other person was swimming loops, and they were doing it much closer in. No boats or paddle boards to watch out for. Hardly any milfoil, or the usual (from past years) and manageable amount of ghost vines reaching up from the bottom. A few more vines floating free near the surface. I swam at a relaxed pace, stopping to notice the quiet lake at the end of every loop. I listened to a dad talking his little kid — kid: am I going to grow taller? Dad: yes, you just need to keep eating your growing up food. I exchanged something (not words, but a feeling, mutual acknowledgment/recognition?) with a seagull that was perched on the far white buoy for the entire time I swam. Hello friend — are you waiting to catch a fish? A brief thought: how many fish are beneath me right now?

As I stroked beside the white buoys, I thought about how swimming in this deep-ish water off the big beach is a different experience than swimming across the lake. Here, with the shorter loop and the buoys beside me, I hardly have to sight. I can just swim until I reach a far buoy, then loop around it, and swim until I reach the other far buoy. Here, I barely need vision. For that reason, and because I’m not swimming far out into the middle of the lake, you might think that swimming here would be less scary. But, I’m always a little more on edge during these swims than the ones from shore to shore. Will I get too tangled in the vines? Are there fish lurking under the buoys?

At the end of my loops, I swam in between the faded red buoys and floated, my head resting on my yellow buoy. Then I sunk under the water and swam with my face just above the lake floor, studying the brown, sandy bottom. Ah! What a way to start the day!

Today’s color palette: white cylindrical buoys, faded pinkish-reddish spherical buoys, pale green water, bright blue sky, the clear bubbles and underside of water’s surface, a light brown sandy bottom.

(l to r) blue sky, brown sand, white buoys, faded pink buoys, clear bubbles, green water

a return to echolocation

Even as I’m trying to think about water and swimming, I’ve also returned to my manuscript from last year, which has gone through a number of names: Haunts, then Girl Ghost Gorge then Echolocate || Echolocated and now Echolocation. I was compelled to return to this project 2 months early (usually I work on it in the fall) because I noticed a call for manuscripts at one of my favorite presses. And I’m writing about it here because I realized, as I searched for past thoughts and words about this project, that even as I remember thinking about some poem or essay or fact that I’ve come across, I can’t find it on this log1. Did I write about it in a pages document or in Plague Notebook entry? If I don’t post it here, it’s more likely to get lost. So, more posting here.

As I fine-tune my manuscript, I want to weave in more direct references to echolocation and what I mean by making it the title of my collection. It’s literal and figurative. I’m writing about the location of echoes (the gorge and the trail above it), where echoes = the bouncing back of sound in wide open spaces and traces of the past/ghosts. I’m also writing about the act of echolocation, which is used by blind and low vision people to navigate the world. I’ve read about passive echolocation (hearing sounds/echoes that already exist to navigate) and active (creating sound with tongue or cane clicks or footsteps to bounce off of objects. I’m also interested in a third version of this, which is both (or neither?) active and passive: being the object or the solid thing in the world that can be located by others’ sounds. Does that make sense? Here’s a video that I just found that I’d like to archive and use to think more about echolocation:

passive and active echolocation
  1. Not being able to find past essays/histories that I know I was reading and thought I was writing about has also come up with my “this isn’t the sea” project. I was almost positive I wrote about Dr. Christian Lambertsen and his SCUBA testing at Lake Nokomis but, after a long search, I couldn’t find anything. ↩︎

july 26/RUN

3 loops!
lake nokomis open swim
81 degrees
AQI: 69

3 loops! Finally, I’m feeling better — less anxiety and crud on my chest and no shoulder pain. I was planning to only do 2 loops today, but when I felt good at the end of loop 2, I decided to do one more. Who knows when the smoke might come back and make it impossible to swim?

The water was wonderful. A little cooler, more buoyant. Talking with a woman after swimming, we agreed that the water was much nicer than on Friday, when it was choppy.

I felt very relaxed and powerful. Strong shoulders and back. Sometimes I breathed every 5 strokes, more often every 3 or 4 or 3 then 4. I had no problem staying on course, a combination of seeing the buoys more frequently, and straight, even strokes.

note: I’m trying to write this as I watch the final stage of the tour, which is not easy because Pogachar is going for it. As one of the announcers remarked, “He’s racing like it’s the end of days out there!”

11 Things

  1. as I started, near shore, the water was a dark green, almost the color of my olive oil bottle shards
  2. clear bubbles bursting from my hands as I pierced the water
  3. my sparkle friends! sediment being illuminated by the light, coming towards me
  4. bright pink buoys bobbing in the water, tethered to torsos
  5. 200 strokes from buoy 4 to buoy 5
  6. a few planes high in the air above me
  7. a glitter path and sparkles on the water’s surface
  8. some floating vine fragments getting tangled in my fingers as I stroked through the water
  9. the view below me: a deep green nothingness
  10. the view above me, from underwater: the surface, green then clear then bubbles
  11. a church service was happening near Painted Turtle; as I paused in the middle of the lake to enjoy

Wow! What a finish to the Tour. The most exciting one I think I’ve ever seen — a showdown between Matthew van der Poel and Pogachar. Then van der Poel hung on to win, as the sprinters were closing in.

Today’s colors: yellow, orange, lime green, blue-ish green, olive green, bright pink, bright blue

green water blue water
white water orange buoy
big green buoy, 2 swimmer buoys: pink, yellow

july 25/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
77 degrees / dew point: 72
AQI: 52

Went out for my run at 10 so I could watch the queen stage of the Tour de France. It was hot, but worth it to watch all the drama of the final climb. Sepp Kuss crashing twice and barely saving himself from falling over the edge of the mountain. Yikes. Carapaz won the stage. Pogachar acted as a domestique for del Toro.

It was warm, but there was a cool breeze and no sun, which helped. I was able to greet Dave the Daily Walker at the beginning – Good morning Sara! / Hi Dave! I heard the rowers down below, encountered lots of runners, most of them running by themselves, like me. Was passed by many bikers and roller skiers. I ran down the franklin hill then stopped at the river to study its surface — a thin film of something was on it in streaks. Down in the flats, by the low retaining wall, I noticed a single shell and the white coxswain’s boat taking a break in the middle of the river.

Even though my chest has some crud, I feel much better today. My resting heart rate is lower and I’m less anxious. The effects on inhaling wildfire smoky air = 4 days of feeling like I had a bad cold.

10 Things

  1. white sky
  2. thick, moist air
  3. deep greens
  4. no bugs — where are the bugs?
  5. overheard: one guy walking down the franklin hill, meeting up with someone halfway down and turning around to walk with him, I‘m glad I don’t have to walk up the entire hill!
  6. the big crack north of the trestle is growing deeper and is still barricade off — is too deep and dangerous to patch?
  7. stopped at the sliding bench — a deep, dark green view below
  8. a woman crossing over the road ot the trail, carrying a coffee, not wearing any shoes
  9. no stones stacked on the ancient boulder
  10. a horn blasting from somewhere — a train horn? deep and loud

today’s colors in plastic

At different times, depending on the how bright the light behind the clouds was, the sky looked either 1, 2, or 3:

the “white” sky

Standing behind the sliding bench, looking down at the green gorge, I saw these 2 greens:

a green view

july 24/SWIM

2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
70 degrees
AQI: 33

2 loops today. Hooray! I’m still feeling weird, where weird = some trouble breathing, sore joints, a little brain fog?, fatigue, a sense of disconnection to the world because of brain fog or declining vision or increased anxiety due to adjusting to HRT, but less weird than yesterday. I’ll take it.

I felt strong and buoyant and fast. My breathing was better too. No wheezing and several stretches of breathing every 5. My bad (left) shoulder ached for the second lap. I think it’s an impingement that won’t go away with just rest and ice. Time to get serious about the shoulder exercises / shoulder yoga.

Today I was relaxed enough to notice the color of the water again: a light green with some feelings of blue. Above, it was pale blue due to the clouds: streaks covering the sun. One bright spot: rounding the buoy near the little beach, the top of the water reflected lime green. Below the surface: some clear bubbles and nothing else. Opaque — low visibility. No sparkle friends or shafts of light or silver flashes.

I listened to the water as it sloshed over me. I heard a goose before entering the water. Scott quipped, they’re flying south. Then I heard a seagull. My bird friends! I’ve missed them. Saw a plane high above the lake. Admired the wildflowers blooming in the grassy area near the beach house — lots of purple.

My goggles fogged up several times, which made it even harder to see. I didn’t mind not seeing the buoys (because I hardly ever do), but I did mind how isolated and removed from the world it made me feel — not disconnected, but like I was wrapped in a thick layer of fog, my view obscured, my body heavy with the weight of it. When this started to feel too unsettling, I focused on how the water gently rocked me, and I snapped out of it.

Ended the swim by meeting up with Scott and watching the last 5k of stage 19 of the tour. Pogachar powered up the HC climb to win the stage. Nice!

july 23/SWIM

1 loop
open swim lake nokomis
78 degrees
AQI: 47

Still not feeling the greatest from too much wildfire smoke last weekend, but I am feeling better than I was on Tuesday night, so I decided to swim a loop before going to Scott’s concert (the big band he’s in) at the falls. RJP drove me. It was great to spend time with her. I think we both made each other feel better.

The water was warm and choppy, which I didn’t mind. The buoys were set up in such way that made the course .25 miles shorter, which I also didn’t mind. My shoulder ached a little, but it was mostly okay. My back and legs and torso felt strong, my lungs a little weaker. It was difficult to breathe every 5 strokes; I switched between every 3 and every 4. For the last stretch of the loop, I think I heard myself wheezing. It was all the crud stuck in my throat. I’m glad I only swam one loop. Two loops would have been too much.

10 Things

  1. one swimmer talking to another before starting, 1: the water’s a little cooler; I like that
  2. one swimmer talking to another before starting, 2: the lifeguard is right in the way — I hate when they do that (me too)
  3. bubbles — clear, underwater
  4. the slimy, milfoil-y bottom of the lake near shore — felt by my foot as I adjusted my nose plug before starting
  5. 4 kids playing soccer in the sand, near the sidewalk
  6. blue sky with streaks of clouds
  7. the water was choppy but no waves were crashing into me as I breathed
  8. swimming wide on the course until suddenly I saw a quick flash of a buoy –I’ve had to train myself to believe in these flashes and follow them — it’s taken years to believe because they are so fleeting
  9. 123 breathe right 123 breathe left
  10. 4 sailboats out on the water — one of the sails was red

july 22/SMOKERUN

AQI (2:15pm): 36

a ramble for future Sara on the discomfort of not breathing well

The smoke is mostly gone from the air — but, for how long? — but not my lungs or sinuses. Mostly, I feel uncomfortable. I can breathe but it feels heavier, harder. Last night started terribly with lots of talking my self down: just one breath at a time, breathe, breathe, in 2 3 4 5 out 2 3 4 5. And lots of pacing. When I feel trapped (this time, in my body), it helps to move. At some point I fell asleep, then woke up, then fell asleep again. Woke up in the morning with crud on my chest and the inability to sit for more than a minute. Not being able to breathe is one of my big fears.

After we tested for Covid (and 2 strains of the flu + RSV) and it was negative, I accepted that my sore throat, closed-up nose, heavy chest, wooziness, was not anything other than inhaling too much bad air. It seems to have affected me much worse than Scott or FWA. Suddenly I realized why. I have a deviated septum. Lake and pool water has been bothering me for a decade; I don’t swim without a nose plug. And I often wear breathe right strips at night. I guess I will need to be more vigilant — more neti pots, masks, avoiding being outside when the AQI is high (how high?).

run: 2.5 miles
2 trails
74 degrees
AQI: 41

I started feeling a little better in the afternoon and thought that running and the deep breathing it requires might help break up some congestion, or at least make me feel better as I moved. I think it might have helped a little with congestion; it definitely made me feel better.

Steady flow of commuting cars. The far off pounding of construction work. Birds — so many birds chirping and tweeting in the trees. Drip drip drip drip: water dropping from the sewer pipe down the ravine at 42nd. Voices. A small something on my chest and throat — cough cough. A woman in white shorts, or was it a skirt? on the Winchell trail. A man holding a dog off the trail so I could run by — thank you!/ you’re welcome.

july 21/RUNSWIM

3.35 miles
wabun hill and back
68 degrees
wind: 15 mph / gusts: 26mph
AQI: 50

Woke up feeling bad. Sore throat, a little stuffed up, sore/achy, out of it. Both FWA and Scott have felt this way too. We could be sick — covid? — but most likely, it’s the smoke and bad air quality from the weekend. Mine could also be caused by HRT, at least the achiness. Hopefully I will fell better soon. Yes, I am whining a little because I dislike sore throats and feeling out of it, but mostly I’m writing about feeling sick for future Sara to read in a few months or years.

note: Future Sara here — one day later, that is — after a covid test, we’re pretty sure it’s just the wildfire smoke that is causing this. A rough night and a difficult morning. I write more about it in my 22 july 2026 entry.

It’s hard to feel too bad when it’s so nice outside. Cooler and fresher. A breeze, a lower AQI. I decided I couldn’t waste this weather, so I went out for a run. I also thought it might make me feel better, which it both did and didn’t. Ran south on the trail to the locks and dam, then up the wabun hill. Stopped at the top to look out at the river. All I can remember is thinking that it was higher than it had been. Ran down the hill, then back north on the trail. Listened to my “Plastic Fantastic” playlist but don’t remember much of what I heard, other than this line from Lady Gaga in “Plastic Doll,” I’m no toy for a real boy, and these from AQUA’s “Barbie Girl,” You’re my doll, rock’n’roll, feel the glamour in pink/ Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky. “Barbie Girl” is such a terrible song.

10 Things

  1. the bright purplish lights of a bike approaching
  2. a group of 5 or 6 bikers, chatting loudly, biking on the road and backing up cars
  3. Regular, 1: waving to Santa Claus!
  4. Regular, 2: passing Skirt with Sandals — she wasn’t wearing hiking sandals, but running shoes!
  5. a group of women, walking together down the locks and dam hill
  6. a man with a fancy camera on the walking side of the pedestrian bridge, taking pictures of the ravine
  7. a woman, looking down at her phone, standing in the middle of the path
  8. 3 people standing on the sidewalk, talking, completely blocking the entrance
  9. adjusting my cap so it wouldn’t blow off in the wind
  10. peering through the green on the way up the Wabun hill: before you pass under ford bridge, some rock face, deep in the shadows, then dirt, then grass

swim: 1 loop
lake nokomis open swim
78 degrees (air) / 82 (water)
AQI: 77

Was feeling crappy all day, but Scott really wanted to go over to the lake and I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to swim (who knows what the AQI will be tomorrow), so we went. I’m glad we did. A good swim, much better than the run. I felt strong and confident and happy to be in the water. It was choppy with little swells rolling in behind me as I neared the third buoy. And more waves in the back stretch.

overheard, swimmer 1: it’s not too bad out here. the wind has calmed down.
swimmer 1: don’t say that, you’ll jinx it!
*the wind picks up*
swimmer 2: see what you did — you ruined it for all the swimmers!
(laughter from both of them)

I was committed to only swimming one loop. Between the choppy water, me being a little out of it, and my still sore shoulder, I didn’t want to overdo it. Hopefully I can swim more at the end of the week and next week.

The water was more blue green tonight. I think I saw bubbles, but no silver flashes. now menacing swans or clueless kayaks or drifting sailboats. I don’t remember seeing any birds or planes or dragonflies. No squeaks or leaks from my new nose plug.

july 20/RUNSWIM

4.6 miles
locks and dam / wabun hill / veterans home / falls
76 degrees / dew point 72
AQI: 70

Hot! So much sweat! Sun. The air was thick but not smoky. I’ll take it. Yesterday, while I was swimming, Scott ran around the lake once, which is not quite 3 miles. The AQI was almost double at 137. Last night his throat started burning, like swallowing acid, he said, and his throat closed up a little. He thinks it’s because of the high AQI and that he breathes only through his mouth when he runs. I thought about what happened while I was running and noticed how I was breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. It’s all of my rhythmic breathing, I think: In 2 3 / Out 2.

I listened to my Plastic Fantastic playlist. I was particularly struck by The Sugercube’s “Dear Plastic,” so I looked up the lyrics:

p-p-p-plastic n-n-n-nylon
te-te-te-terylene 

made of atoms
by tender fingers
and determined heads
of inventors
tickling
perfection

p-p-p-plastic
r-r-r-rayon

I was born aeons ago
before anything human was known
my friends the alchemists
told me everything was natural
and always will be that way
and possible to make gold from dirt

p-p-p-plastic
n-n-n-nylon 

dear plastic
be proud
don’t imitate anything
you’re pure, pure, pure

p-p-p-plastic
n-n-n-nylon

I believed I was their dustbin for knowledge
took everything and digested
of course I became big, 
big and really really strong

today I’m old and withering away
my friends the alchemists
long disappeared into dust
I no longer get anything fruity
no longer gold made from dirt
the only thing I get is spacefood on a tray 

p-p-p-plastic 
p-p-p-plastic 
p-p-p-plastic…

As I was walking the last few blocks after I finished running, I thought about Elastigirl from Pixar’s The Incredibles and how her superpower is the ability to stretch and transform into (almost) any shape she wants or needs and then return to her original shape. Plastic can make new shapes without returning to the original shape. I looked up, “elasticity vs. plasticity” and found this:

Objects deform when pushed, pulled, and twisted. Elasticity is the measure of the amount that the object can return to its original shape after these external forces and pressures stop.

The opposite of elasticity is plasticity; when something is stretched, and it stays stretched, the material is said to be plastic (source).

AQI (1:00pm): 45
AQI (4:40pm): 61

swim: 1 loop (2 cedar loops)

cedar lake open swim
88 degrees
AQI (5:30pm): 61

I would have loved to swim more loops, but it was warm and windy and my shoulder started hurting near the end of the first loop. A bummer, but at least I was able to swim for almost 30 minutes in the lake. No terrible air quality. I am grateful for any chance to swim.

The vibe was very cedar lake, with the disgusting, almost totally filled porta potty with no toilet paper, randos swimming out the buoy and getting in the way of swimmers — watch out! — and open swim club members swimming as close to or as far from the buoy as they wanted, occasionally crossing the path of swimmers going the other way.

The water was green with notes of yellow and opaque. I was able to see a few of my bubble friends, but nothing else. No fish or milfoil or sparkle friends. I don’t think I ever see sparkle friend here — not the sediment sparkles under water or the glittery sparkles on the surface.

added the next day: I wanted to replicate the color of the water with my plastics, but didn’t have time last night. I’m not sure either of these quite capture the mix of (mostly) green with some yellow:

1
2
3

1: back of cukes plastic bag held close to the window
2: back of cukes plastic bag held far from the window
3: a square of a yogurt container covered with seltzer water shards

I think 2 is too yellow. I think there’s a section of 3, on the right side, that might best capture my memory of the water. I also like the overall color of 1.

july 19/SMOKESWIM

AQI (8:00am): 113

Will we have open swim in an hour and a half? They haven’t cancelled it yet. I went outside to water the tomatoes and peppers and I could feel the smoke, but it wasn’t too bad. 113 is “unhealthy for sensitive groups.”

In other health news for future Sara when she talks to her doctor at the end of the month: another night with restless legs and (almost) a calf cramp. I felt the same sort of wave of something strange pass through my lower calf as I did a few years ago. Back then, it made me very anxious, last night, not as much. Is it the wrong level of estrogen or progesterone, or my body getting used to the HRT, or something else? Whatever it was, I slept poorly: only 5 hours even though I went to bed at 10:30.

AQI (8:15am): 123

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
76 degrees
AQI: 137

Open swim happened! Hooray! I was disappointed that the air quality was bad, but it wasn’t that bad and it made for a cool effect on the water. So much smoke and haze, all of it white and dreamy. Harder to see for everyone, at least I imagine it was harder for normally sighted people too. It didn’t bother me because I already can’t see that well, and don’t really need sight to navigate.

Before the swim, my entire body was bubbling with anxiety — a combination of adjusting to the hormone flux, and strong physical reactions to any strange sensations in my calves. I think I was worried that I might have a calf cramp in the middle of the lake. As I started swimming everything felt strange, surreal. Smoke, warm water, a gentle rocking. I tried to distract myself by focusing on colors, but the anxiety kept bubbling up near the edge, like boiling pasta water on the stove. Just before it boiled over, I abruptly stopped swimming and listened to the silence in the middle of the lake. I saw a lifeguard silhouetted in the smoked-out sun and the bright pink buoy of another swimmer and I was able to calm down. I started stroking again — 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left — as I passed the second, then third buoy.

I was able to swim about 40 minutes without stopping and with only a few more anxiety flare-ups. The water was a pale blue-ish green below me. Looking up and just beneath the surface, it started as pale green, then turned into a clear band at the edge. Above, it was the hint of a purply blue.

10 Things

  1. a lot of the Eurasian milfoil is gone!
  2. some non-open swimmers were blasting a speaker at the lifeguard stand where open swimmers leave their stuff, the LOUD throbbing of the beat increased my anxiety
  3. overheard, 1 swimmer to another: I’m just going to swim to the second buoy and back
  4. overheard, 1 swimmer to another: I have no illusions about my swimming ability!
  5. overheard, 1 swimmer to another: Let’s put our ages on our (Women’s Tri race) caps! You don’t have to, but it’s fun to see everyone’s age when you’re running!
  6. arriving at the lake, the smoke on the water looked so thick — everything was white
  7. the occasional bent elbow of another swimmer, some foam, a bright pink or orange buoy tethered to a torso
  8. a few shredded clouds hanging in the sky
  9. a slight ache in my left shoulder by the start of loop 2
  10. rounding the fifth buoy and sighting the first one in the distance: a small, bright orange dot

AQI (12:30pm): 156

The water offered a gentle rocking for the first half of the first loop, then turned choppier. I could see my bubble friends and hear the sloshing of water over my head.

color in layers: underwater / underside of surface / surface from above / sky

water / under surface / above surface / sky | seltzer bottle / danish container / ziploc / milk jug

Playlist: Plastic Fantastic

Created this plastic playlist yesterday. I’m looking forward to listening to it on my next run.

  1. Plastic Hearts/ Miley Cyrus
  2. Midnight Sky/ Miley Cyrus
  3. PLASTIC/ sakehands (feat. Marty Valentine & Lo)
  4. Plastic/ Moses Sumney
  5. Fake Plastic Trees/ Radiohead
  6. Plastic/ New Order
  7. Plastic/ Portishead
  8. Plastic Doll/ Lady Gaga
  9. Barbie Girl/ Aqua
  10. Plastic Romance/ A Toys Orchestra
  11. Dear Plastic/ The Sugarcubes
  12. Plastic Jesus/ Jello Biagra & MoJo Nixon
  13. Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach/ Gorillaz (feat. Snoop Dogg and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)
  14. Plastic Beach/ Gorillaz (feat. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon
  15. Synthetic World/ Swamp Dogg
  16. Plastico/ Ruben Blades
  17. Plastic Girl/ CAPSULE (feat. EeL)
  18. The Bomb/ L7
  19. Plastic Factory (Mono)/ Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
  20. Polyethylene Pts 1 & 2/ Radiohead
  21. Toxic Garbage Island/ Gojira
  22. We Are Plastic/ Crash Tokio
  23. Living in the Plastic Age/ The Buggles
  24. Video Killed the Radio Star/ the Buggles

AQI (3:11pm): 117

july 17/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
82 degrees / dew point: 72
AQI: 62

Hooray, the smoke moved out! Boo: not in time to have open swim this morning. Oh well, went for a run instead. It was hot and humid, but the air wasn’t hazardous and I had (finally) tied my shoes properly so that my feet weren’t sliding around, so I was happy to get outside and move. Mostly running, with some walking. In my approximate fashion, I followed a plan of intentional run/walk segments — 4/1 | 4/1 | 2/1 | 90/30 | 2/1 | 2/2.

10 Things

  1. 2 porta potties at the park with a temporary hand sanitation kiosk beside them — what even is happening here today? update: an art fair
  2. a food truck — orange, yellow, and red — Cafe Cairo
  3. the white foam of the falls
  4. a shopping cart with a few things in it — some sort of electronics — in the middle of the narrow trail below the road
  5. big spots of light in the midst of the shadowed trail, near the cart
  6. a city truck blocking the path that leads down to the locks and dam — a crane in the air
  7. the water in the water fountain was hot — yuck!
  8. a person briskly crossing the parking lot, stopping in time to let me run by
  9. a biker weaving over to the walking trail to avoid the bright sun on the bike path
  10. the tangy — sweet and sour and rotting — smell left behind by the garbage truck

While I moved, I listened to the podcast about microplastics that I mentioned yesterday: Science Vs. Microplastics. I enjoyed it, even as I was a bit skeptical (thanks to another podcast, Maintenance Phase) when they started discussing a rise in/crisis of obesity without interrogating the term at all, like: how have designations for who is considered obese changed? Why is the term so morally and politically charged? But, I decided to let go of my criticisms and just listen. Here are two things I’d like to remember:

1 — we’re not consuming a credit cards worth of microplastics every week, but our endocrine system is being disrupted by chemicals in/on the plastic

The idea that we are consuming a large amount of microplastics (some people have suggested a credit cards worth a week!) doesn’t hold up, but concerns about the chemicals in/on the plastic getting into our bodies are warranted:

WZ … this idea that these chemicals on, in plastics are messing with our hormones. Take me through the science! Firstly what would these – how would they mess with our hormones?
RR They’re tricksters! So they like bust in and they take over this important role from our actual hormones. So – hormones are all about binding to receptors on cells in order to send messages throughout the body. And they’re involved in SO MUCH, they do a lot day to day but also they help these key developmental things happen over the course of our whole lives. So if these chemicals are messing with it – that could be pretty bad. Here’s what Pat Hunt told me – she’s our scientist from the top of the show …
PH I think of it kind of as radio static. You know, your hormones control everything. Your growth, your metabolism, your sleep, your reproduction. And it’s all by these finely tuned signals. And here’s this static in the system.
RR So these endocrine disruptors are the static. They interfere with the hormones by binding to the receptors that hormones are supposed to bind to, and that could mess up those signals.
WZ And we know these chemicals are in our environment, like, we know for sure? They’re in my body right now?
RR Yeahhhh probably, we know that just about everybody is exposed to them

Science Vs. Microplastics, transcript

2 — cut back on plastic consumption, including hair and skin products, but consider the benefits vs risks of using products that have plastic (like canned beans, which have plastic in the lining)

I don’t know, the thing is, like, the thing is with this topic that’s so frustrating, I still, even though I’ve been working on this for a couple months, and I’ve had these conversations with scientists who are like, Oh, I don’t I don’t buy canned food if I can help it. Every time I go to the grocery store, I stock up on my canned beans. I can’t quit it. And it’s like I think the problem is like without more specific information about how bad is it. What is my risk? I’m not able to weigh the risks of the plastics getting into my canned beans against the benefits of canned beans. I know the benefits: They’re cheap, healthy, easy. I like em. So for right now I’m kind of assuming the b

Science Vs. Microplastics, transcript

This episode has 84 footnotes — a great resource for more words and understandings about plastic. Here’s a disturbing passage:

The growth of plastics production in the past 65 years has substantially outpaced any other manufactured material. The same properties that make plastics so versatile in innumerable applications—durability and resistance to degradation—make these materials difficult or impossible for nature to assimilate. Thus, without a well-designed and tailor-made management strategy for end-of-life plastics, humans are conducting a singular uncontrolled experiment on a global scale, in which billions of metric tons of material will accumulate across all major terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on the planet. 

Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made

And this:

plastics’ largest market is packaging, an application whose growth was accelerated by a global shift from reusable to single-use containers. As a result, the share of plastics in municipal solid waste (by mass) increased from less than 1% in 1960 to more than 10% by 2005 in middle- and high-income countries

Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made

A lot to take in and think about — or try not to think about. Not as a way to be absolved or to deny accountability and responsibility, but as a way to endure. Sometimes thinking about the amount of waste that accumulates every year month week day second is too much. I imagine a door to a room where that information exists and I shut it. Don’t want to dwell in there, I might say to someone — the wind, a tree, Scott. update: I usually shut the door when I’m in a big store with too much plastic stuff, like IKEA.

do you ever feel like a plastic bag?

1 — American Beauty

1999

I don’t think I really liked this movie — Kevin Spacey was a terrible creep, but I often think of this scene where I see a plastic bag dancing in the wind.

2 — Firework/ Katy Perry

Do you ever feel/like a plastic bag/drifting through the wind/wanting to start again?

I can’t remember why I did it, but I put this song on one of my first playlists when I started running in 2011. Anytime I hear it, I think of that wonderful time when my life opened up and I became a runner.

3 — Tony Hoagland

There is No Word/ Tony Hoagland

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.

Ah, I love Tony Hoagland’s poetry. He often writes about swimming — I’ve memorized 2 of his water poems and recite themwhile I’m swimming around the lake, How sad it was that he died of cancer a few years ago!

4 — a plastic bag exhibit in Germany

A German exhibition documents the history of plastic bags, showcasing their evolution from a culture of convenience and design, opposed to the environmental nuisance they have become today.

The German Museum for Everyday Culture has dedicated a special exhibition to the history and design of plastic bags. ‘Adieu Plastiktüte!’ (Goodbye, Plastic Bag!) featuring a collection of more than 50,000 plastic bags from the last 50 years, looks back at the history and evolution of this innovation of convenience. Showcasing various designs, the exhibition illustrates how they were considered attractive advertising spaces, communicating the individuality of both brands and consumers. Though out of style these days, plastic bags were once a rocking cultural trend.

the humble plastic bag

AQI (3:35pm): 61

july 16/SMOKE

AQI (2:00am): 500
anything above 125 is hazardous

AQI (7:30am): 301

No running this morning. Too dangerous for my lungs to breathe in this smoke. I haven’t heard yet, but I can’t imagine that open swim will happen this afternoon. Even if it isn’t cancelled, if the AQI stays this high, I won’t be going.

the plastic art of finding the words

Returning to my “On this Day” practice, I found an intriguing quote from A Oswald:

She and her husband, playwright Peter Oswald, divide their day in two – walking their sons to and from school through fields. But she doesn’t take a notebook with her. She believes in the subconscious, in what is brewing on a ‘non-verbal level’. She thinks ‘a flavour or feeling builds up, almost a sculptural shape that could be a living creature, or a dance or a painting’. Only later comes the ‘plastic art of finding the words’.

into the woods

What does she mean by plastic here? Reading the quotation again, plastic seems to mean artificial, imitation, not the real or living thing but a replica. Also, plastic as moldable, easily shaped and reshaped, pliable. Molded, modeled, “capable of being deformed continuously and permanently in any direction without rupture.” Formative, creative; (source).

just announced: Open Swim is cancelled for today.

A rotted swan
is hurrying away from the plane-crash mess of her wings
     one here
        one there

getting panicky up out of her clothes and mid-splash
 looking down again at what a horrible plastic
mould of herself split-second
climbing out of her own cockpit

and lifting away again and bending back for another look thinking
     strange
        strange

from “The Swan” / Alice Oswlad cited in The New Yorker

AQI (11:15am): 295

And, the way I (mostly) think about plastic in relation to my vision and connection to the world: a film, a veil, an obstruction, the barrier between me and what is real. A distorted or approximate, not quite, reality.

I looked up “plastic” on Poetry Daily and found this fabulous poem (with an ecopoetry essay, too!):

I Want Biodegradable Sex/ Oliver Baez Bendorf

polypropylene, moss, human hair, pine needles, cardboard, sheepskin condoms, coffee grounds

This sculpture reveals the demand my transition has created for the plastics industry over time. By melting plastic syringes into a compressed form, I hope to create an anticlimax by showing all at once the slow accumulation of material. When you observe me and then the sculpture, is the volume of plastic more or less than what you would expect? Do you agree strongly, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, or strongly disagree that certain plastics should remain single-use? By incorporating an assortment of organic elements, I wanted to create a sense of grief out of the cognitive dissonance. Plastikos, to form or mold, an art long before plastics were invented. Trans is a way of arranging the world through change, but plastic is durable, meaning it never goes away. Very light, gets blown along in gentle winds. It gets washed by rain into sewers, streams, rivers, and finally oceans. It burns forever in landfills, a sickening campfire around which we tell scary stories. It is pleasurable at times when a container fulfills the functions for which it has been designed. I hope to return to earth a little bit more every day, until I’m finally you again.

Bendorf begins their essay with one of my favorite quotations from Lorine Niedecker in one of my favorite poems, “Lake Superior”:

“In every living thing is stuff that once was rock

    In blood the minerals
    of the rock.”

Reading these lines I wondered, how much have plastics transformed what is in every living thing? How much of us is plastic? Found a podcast to listen to: Science Vs. Microplastics — here’s the transcript.

Also in the essay, Bendorf mentions a term I don’t remembernencountering before: “we each have a “terroir”— a particular flavor made up of the unique places and vocabularies that we have absorbed. Those registers that, in a unique combination, make us distinct.” Terroir is a matter of style and substance.

Returning to our “age of plastics,” I’m wondering about its history — here’s a brief overview from the BBC.

When I think of the “plastics” industry, I recall the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, which was one of my favorite Christmas movies as a kid, and this scene from The Graduate:

One word: plastics


Back to Bendorf, in conversation with Oswald’s idea of sculptural shapes and the plastic art, and my own thoughts about my vision creating a plastic film that separates and distorts:

When you observe me and then the sculpture, is the volume of plastic more or less than what you would expect?

And, one more plastic poem:

Plastic: A Personal History/ Elizabeth Bradfield

How can I find a way to praise
it? Do the early inventors & embracers
churn with regret? I don’t think my parents
—born in the swing toward ubiquity—chew
& chew & chew on plastic. But of course they
do. Bits in water, food-flesh, air.
And their parents? I remember Dad
mocking his mother’s drawer of saved
rubber bands and his father-in-law’s red,
corroded jerry can, patched and patched,
never replaced for new, for never-
rusting.
Cash or plastic? Plastic. Even
for gum. We hate the $5 minimum.
Bills paperless, automatic, almost
unreal.
My toys were plastic, castle
and circus train and yo-yo. Did my lunches
ever get wrapped in waxed paper or
was it all Saran, Saran, Saran?
Sarah’s mom
was given, in Girl Scouts, a blue sheet
of plastic to cut, sew, and trim with white piping
into pouches for camping. Sarah has it still,
brittle but useful. Merit badge for waterproofing.
For everlasting.
You, too, must have heard stories,
now quaint as carriages, of first plastic, pre-plastic.
Eras of glass, waxed cloth, and tin.
Of shared syringes.

All our grocery bags, growing up,
were paper. Bottom hefted on forearm, top
crunched into grab. We used them
to line the kitchen garbage pail.
Not that long
ago, maybe a decade, I made purses for my sisters
out of putty-colored, red-lettered plastic Safeway
bags. I’d snag a stack each time I went, then fold
and sew, quilt with bright thread, line with thrift store
blouses. They were sturdy and beautiful. Rainproof
and light. Clever. So clever.
I regret them.
And the plastic toothpicks, folders, shoes that seemed
so cheap, so easy, so use-again and thus
less wasteful, then. What did we do before
to-go lids? Things must have just spilled
and spilled.
Do you know
what I mean? I mean, what pearl forms
around a grain of plastic in an oyster?
Is it as beautiful? Would you wear it?
Would you buy it for your daughter
so she in turn could pass it down and
pass it down and pass it down?

AQI (4:30pm): 247
AQI (6:30pm): 190

july 15/REST

When I started this entry, I was planning to go to open swim this afternoon, but I checked the air and water temperatures: hot, and saw on the radar that there’s a chance of rain. When I combine that with my desire to be cautious with my healing shoulder I decided I should take a break from swimming today. I didn’t run, either. So hot and sticky this morning! Instead, I worked on my plastic project and my cork board map of lake ideas. Fun!

the next morning: Hours after writing this first paragraph, the smoke from wildfires in northern Minnesota and the Boundary Waters arrived. By the time I went to bed, the AQI (air quality index) was almost 500 (anything over 125 is dangerous; 500 is hazardous). This morning it’s in the 400s. Scary stuff, especially when you think ahead to how this will most likely be happening more frequently. The smoke isn’t supposed to lift until noon on Friday, so open swim will probably be cancelled tonight and tomorrow.

the plastic process

This morning, I reorganized the area of my studio where I gather and process my plastic. Then I cut up part of a milk jug, which creates a cool texture of brittle little shards, and another one of my seltzer bottles. Later in the day, I showed some of the stranger remnants of plastic to FWA and he suggested using the top of the seltzer bottle as some sort of view finder or monocle — something that, when you looked through it, created a visual effect. Distorts what you see? Adds layers of color? Allows you to isolate words? I’m going to have fun playing around with this!

I showed it to Scott and he said, it’s a loupe. A what? A loupe (loop) “is a simple, small magnification device used to see small details more closely.[1] They generally have higher magnification than a magnifying glass, and are designed to be held or worn close to the eye. A loupe does not have an attached handle, and its focusing lens(es) are contained in an opaque cylinder or cone” (wikipedia). A new word, learned!

Here are some things I’ve been doing with the plastic so far:

Cutting up plastic into strips and shards, separating them by color. So far, I’m using these shards/strips to show the color of the lake during open swim. Maybe I’ll turn them into some sort of mosaic, or create interesting sounds with them. As I handle them, I’ve been thinking about the importance of texture for how I see and how I understand/process/identify color.

Looking for and setting aside bigger strips of clear plastic to use for my holes/how I read series — to cover words and/or make them harder/impossible to read.

Cutting out and collecting words printed on plastic bags to turn into found poems about vision or swimming in the lake or something else I haven’t thought of yet.

I’m planning to make things with these plastics, and I’m also using the processing of them as an opportunity to critically reflect on how much plastic I use and to explore plastic as metaphor for my vision and distanced relationship to the world. Maybe I should study plastic for a month? I’m also using the act of processing as something I can do with my hands that is physical and tactile and repetitive enough to open me up to wandering and wondering.

july 14/RUNSWIM

3.1 miles
2 trails
79 degrees / dew point: 70

Another hot morning. Another successful run. Not fast, but steady. Mostly running with some walking. 2 Regulars sightings: Santa Claus and the walker that always wears a skirt and sandals — I feel like I named her, but I can’t remember what. I checked the log and I have mentioned the woman wearing sandals and a skirt 3 times, but have never named her. I think I’ll call her Skirt with Sandals, which is a reference to a phrase we’ve (Scott, RJP, FWA, and me) used many times over the years: socks with sandals. It’s from the show within a Disney show: So Random in “Sonny with a Chance.” I used to unironically wear socks with sandals frequently.

I heard the far off echo of workers hammering something, trickling water, the click and clacking of roller skiers’ poles above me. As the skiers passed me, I heard 2 of them discussion “Love Island.” At least one of them didn’t like the show. I’ve never watched it, but RJP was very invested in this most recent season which ended earlier this week.

Into that World Inverted

1

In Hawaiʻi, you often hear the term “island time,” referring to the slow pace that pervades the culture here. But for me, standing on land just a few hundred years old, island time is a reminder that this is a place in the process of being both made and unmade. Here in ʻĀhihi, there are barely any trees—the soil still thin atop the hardened rivers of basalt and scoria. Not enough time has passed to erode these sharp and porous remnants into dirt. Yet in that short stretch of centuries, between that time and this one, the island has changed irrevocably. When I began snorkeling, I was warned there was little left to see on Maui, most reefs dead and dying—a result of rampant tourism, overfishing, commercial runoff, and warming waters. 

island time — land just a few hundred years old — I’m thinking about lake time and how lake nokomis only celebrated its 100th birthday in 2014 (see: 12 july 2025). Before that it was marshy land — wider and shallower. 100 years is the approximate time it takes for a human-made lake (nokomis was a marsh, dredged, made into a lake) to act like a natural like

“I settle into my liminal position, turning my back to the earth as I know it: the solid ground under my feet replaced by weightlessness. I trespass into this unknown world—below me, I feel how time itself has turned the stone to sand. At last, I cross the threshold with my entire body.“

“I am held in the veil between these worlds that are each, astonishingly, part of this place that we call Earth. Within minutes, my cells acclimate to the cool buoyancy. I am carried away from everything I know. As I kick out, the mechanisms of my movement grow more and more effortless. Anything heavy or painful drains from me. In the water, I am held—a child rocked in a mother’s arms. My body moves differently here, swaddled and swept in the cadence of waves, alongside all the creatures who share this space. . . .”

“I am flying now—a wingless bird gazing down, seeing the universe anew. Like Icarus, I feel the warmth of the sun against my back. Between realms, I face an ecosystem nothing like my own.”

seeing the universe anew — in the ocean, everything might be clear and vivid below, but in lake nokomis, and with my bad eyes, everything is murky, muddled, felt in the briefest of flashes.

“Beneath the inscrutable blue-black mirror of the water’s surface lies this universe in technicolor. “

What is the color of the lake water? As part of my plastics project, I’m gathering the colors of the water that I see when I swim. The plastics project = keeping as much of the plastic that my family uses for visual poetry projects — produce bags, seltzer water bottles, ziploc baggies, miscellaneous. packaging, T Joes’ pasta/rice bags. Here are the colors I’ve collected so far in greens and blues. (The lake is usually much moregreen than blue.)

plastic origins, from top left to bottom right: granola bag, little cukes bag, russet potato bag, Trader joe’s pasta bag, bottle of olive oil, bottle of seltzer water, squash bag

Are these all “green”? I see them that way. The bright green of the upper center is what the water looks like when a blue-green algae bloom is present. Last night’s warm and stirred up water at cedar lake resembles the brownish yellowy green in the lower left. Number 2 and 3 in the bottom row are shards from bottles, while the rest are bags, only colored on one side.

lake nokomis blue

plastic origins, from top left, top right, bottom: Trader Joes’ rice bag, shards of the locks from ziploc baggies, Trader Joes’ pasta bag. I don’t think I ever seen the lake water look like this below the surface, but above, when it’s sunny and I’m looking at it from the right angle: blue, often with purple vibes.

Scott asked me what I plan to do with these colors. I’m not sure yet, but I know it will be part of something that expresses how I see color and how color works in a city lake that resides in a lake city that prioritizes access for everyone and that is working hard to keep the lake and its people safe and healthy in the midst of a climate crisis (almost apocalypse?).

Once I gather more colors that fit, I could create some visual poem to place beside this poem, which is in by chapbook, Inklings:

Fish 3
between buoys 3 and 4

The fish in us escape.
They flash and streak and
leap, then return to
bubble whisper the names
of water’s colors. 

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
air: 96 degrees
water: 84 degrees

Hooray! 2 (almost) pain-free loops at lake nokomis open swim! Before it started, I was able to talk with 2 other swimmers about how much we love open swim. They were a little older than me — 5 or 10? years — and just as enthusiastic about the water.

10 Things

  1. 2 girls — older high schoolers or in college? — flirting with 2 guys at Painted Turtle: loud, awkward giggles
  2. a guy playing guitar, accompanied by a recording — I know I enjoyed 2 of his songs, even danced to one, but I can only remember the other — an instrumental “Careless Whispers”
  3. very choppy water — not the type of waves that put up a fair fight, that you can punch, but the ones that unsettle, disorient, jostle
  4. swallowing a wave of water, which made me more careful about when and where I breathed and stroked
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 breathe left
  6. a very LOUD metallic buzz beneath the surface — somewhere someone was doing something that was causing this noise — was it a boat? a machine drilling somewhere?
  7. slosh slap
  8. bubble friends!
  9. being routed by lifeguards when I swam too wide of an angle
  10. the first orange buoy was almost in the middle of the lake — maybe the farthest I’ve ever seen it

The water was opaque and the color was somewhere between these 2 colors:

green 1
green 2

july 13/RUNSWIM

4 miles
river road, north/south
85 degrees / dew point: 72

Last night, I planned to do my run early in the morning, but when I woke up it was already hot so Scott and I decided to walk and get coffee instead. As we walked back on the river road trail, we realized that it didn’t feel too terrible. There was shade and a breeze and the humidity was lower. When we got home, we both changed, then went out for runs — I went at 10:15, Scott at 10:40. I was surprised at how fine I felt. I was hot, but I didn’t feel like I would faint or get heat stroke; I just felt like I was working hard. No anxiety about it — a mental victory! Was it because of my HRT patch? Possibly.

Almost all of my route was in the shade, which was by design; I wouldn’t have been able to run in this heat with direct sun. I encountered many walkers, a few bikers, 1 or 2 other runners, 2 big groups of kids — one on bikes, one on foot.

I listened to my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist. I told Scott later that I was trying to manifest shade. It worked.

10 Things

  1. dappled light, jagged patterns of light on the trail
  2. kids on bikes in bright yellow vests
  3. 2 bikers stopped near the trail, recovering or fixing something on their bikes after climbing the franklin hill
  4. no bugs — no swarms of gnats encircling my face or single gnats trying to swim in my eye juice
  5. the crack north of the trestle is still blocked off — this stretch had the most sun
  6. passing a walker on the path in flip flops, near the rowing club — did they just finish rowing? probably
  7. a scooter on the edge of the trail, but not far enough on the edge — if I hadn’t been paying attention, I could have tripped over it
  8. air quality is good — no smoke from colorado fires this year!
  9. bright blue sky
  10. a flushed face, sweat-soaked shirt

swim: 1.5 loops (3 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
95 degrees

Wow, the water was warm! As another swimmer said to me, it’s like bath water. I tried to remember that and not swim too hard. Hot air temp + hot water temp = hot Sara, with no chance to cool down. No worries. I swam slow and steady. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left. By the 3rd loop, I had increased my strokes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 breathe left

Great news: My shoulder didn’t hurt at all on the first loop, and it hardly hurt on loops 2 and 3, and now, an hour later, it doesn’t hurt at all. Hooray!

Not so great news: I sacrificed my other new nose plug to the lake. Treading water at the end of loop one, trying to adjust my nose plug and unfog my googles, the nose plug fell down into the murky depths. Oh well. These nose plugs were slightly too big: I had to adjust them almost every loop. Time to go back to the slightly more expensive ($7 instead of $2) nose plugs. I wish I could find the exact one that I’ve been wearing for more than 5 years, but they’re always changing things, making them “better,” and I don’t think they make the exact one I have now.

The water was calm on the way to Hidden beach, rough on the way back. It was also yellow and murky. I saw some of my bubble friends but no silver flashes. I got tangled up in a few floating vines, had to stop swimming as clueless paddle boarders crossed the swimming course.

images of the day: the wide arc of some swimmers on the other side of the loop, swimming back. What I saw: some splashes, a few caps, buoys, the idea of a curved line. Also, the occasional swimmer, swimming down the middle, or crossing over to swim in the wrong direction. All these swimmers — their elbows and white foam and buoys — looked so far away. Distance is distorted in and on the water.

july 12/SWIM

1 loop
lake nokomis open swim
85 degrees
water temp: 81 degrees*

*measured on 6 july, so probably warmer today, almost a week later

Today the goal was to take it easy on my shoulder. It had been feeling better by the end of this week, but I’m thinking about my bigger goal for the summer: swimming one day (24 collective hours) in august, so I didn’t want to overdo it. Just past the first orange buoy, my shoulder began to ache a little and then ached, dully, for the rest of the loop. I think I can still swim; I just need to do less as I rehab it — strengthening exercises + RICEing it — well, mostly IIcing it: icing and Ibuprofen. It’s a bummer that my shoulder still hurts, especially since I was looking forward to July being a big month of swimming, but I’m not too upset. It could be a chance to approach my open swims differently, maybe spend more time going slow or stopping in the middle of the lake!

When Scott and I arrived at the lake, I noticed all the glittering on the surface. My first thought: wow, that looks so cool. My second thought: all that glitter means the surface is not smooth and that means the water is choppy. And it was. Also, warm — so warm! I liked the choppiness. It wasn’t rough — no big waves were crashing into me. Instead it was constant — wave after wave after wave, making me rock from side to side.

It was fitting that there were waves, because I’m working on revising/condensing a poem about waves (literal waves at open swim and waves of grief after my mom died). Hopefully today’s swim can serve as inspiration.

10 Wave Things

  1. stirred-up water below the surface with lots of sediment floating in front of me, 1: difficult to see anything, like my hands or bubbles or fish
  2. stirred-up water below the surface with lots of sediment floating in front of me, 2: water color was a mix between pea soup green and lentil dahl yellow
  3. stirred-up water above the surface, making it difficult to see buoys
  4. the surface: all glittered up
  5. no white-caps, but lots of spray flying high in the air
  6. an increased amount of breaststroke by other swimmers
  7. more breathing on one side, 1: in the first half of the loop, I breathed mostly to my right
  8. more breathing on one side, 1: in the first half of the loop, I breathed mostly to my left
  9. the yellow safety buoy tethered to my torso was bobbing vigorously
  10. I did not feel like I was fighting the water, but that it was holding me and reminding me it was there

Do I remember the sound of waves? No, I don’t recall the sloshing sound of the water as it rushed over my ears. I bet it was loud.

Found this poem when I searched, “waves” on poets.org. It’s a golden shovel poem, where the last word in each line comes from a different poem. The original golden shovel was Terrence Hayes creating a poem that ended each line with words from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool.”

[Waves rolling up] ii. / Kimiko Hahn

After Tada Chimako

If I don’t taste the complicated waves—
if I only see the rolling,
only hear the roiling up
or smell those waves
—then I will tumble
head over
stance. Then I spring
up, drenched in partisan sand.

I’d like to try something like this with my waves poem to suggest another meaning. I could either use words from a poem about grief or moving water. For grief, maybe Emily Dickinson, for water, Niedecker or Oswald? Maybe one of my favorites?

several hours later: 6:04 / 90 degrees, feels like 94

a reminder when experimenting with my wave poem: don’t try to force it — find some poems I like about waves or grief and see what happens

Sitting under my crab apple tree, where it is much cooler than on the deck, I reread an interview with Alice Oswald in the winter 2026 Paris Review. I’ve posted bits from it already. Today, since I’ve been thinking about spiriti visivi and insects, I wanted to post these lines:

1

. . . the contracts you make with the natural world that allow you to be in a place, the feeling of living somewhere you don’t own.

(But don’t you own the house?)

Yes, but it’s very clear that it’s really the insects who own it, and the river that comes right up to the garden. The rain comes through the ceiling. It’s interesting, the way the dead and the natural world are sort of exchangeable. That might sound theoretical, but ancient Greek lament, and lament from everywhere, has always used birds and plants as intermediaries for communicating with the dead. And I feel, when I’m here, a deference toward my uncle and my father, who once looked after the house, that’s kind of interchangeable with the deference I might feel toward a bird or an insent.

2

[after discussing the sound that flies and grasshoppers make, the interviewer asks: Is it the choral sound that you love?]

And the fact that they don’t speak with their mouths. I love the way insects speak with their wings or legs. For a

Interview with Alice Oswald

After the interview were 4 new poems from AO, including this one about the fly. 3 fly poets I immediately think of: Emily Dickinson, Aracelis Girmay, and Alice Oswald.

Fly-play/ Alice Oswald

Enter a fly
no sooner nowhere than here
wiping her rear-view eye and
tapping the world
with one foreleg

What is it you wish for Fly?

She merely glitters to me of silence
tapping . . . tapping the world
walks backward . . . refers me to her myth
and exits . . .

The scene is summer

Enter a yellow curtain:

One servant dressed simply as the sun
going in and out with a beam of dust
one fly . . .

WHAT IS YOU WISH FOR FLY?

She merely rotates for me her mask
as if to bring something
born in one world back in another

Then round and round with her weak voice
pleading that her one belonging is her life
which lasts but a day . . .

But you know full well, Fly, it takes
400 insect years for me to lift my ahnd
and by the time it lands
I too will be mute, I too will be you

glitter / silence / tapping
refers me to her myth? what is the myth of the fly?

Here’s another fly poem from AO: Flies

july 10/RUN

12 miles
franklin + ford + hidden falls + veterans home + falls
67 degrees
humidity: 86% / dew point: 65

Ugh! That was hard. It was too hot, too sunny, too humid. My feet hurt from warts and a big blister. I almost altered the route to cut off 2 miles. And I did it. And I felt okay for the last mile, like I could have kept going. Success! I’m proud of myself for persisting today.

3 things I did right

I didn’t have any unfinished business problems! I brought my water and made sure to keep drinking from it. I didn’t give up.

3 things to work on

Bring more snacks/fuel. A bandaid around my toe doesn’t work — it created a juicy blister — find other solutions. Be more intentional with music or mantras or experiments to try for distraction/focus.

10 Things

  1. Mr. Morning! upped his game today with his greeting. Instead of just, morning! He added: Have a Great Day!
  2. rowers!, 1: a coxswain’s voice, giving instructions through a megaphone
  3. rowers!, 2: the gentle slap of the oars hitting the water
  4. the crack just north of the trestle is bigger (again) — they’ve barricaded it off with metal gates
  5. the part of the trail near the trestle on the east side was blocked off — some sort of work with a tall crane
  6. the bells of st. thomas chiming
  7. a skate boarder at the skate park: doing a wide arc at the edge of the course
  8. filling up my water bottle: at the monument, near the skate park
  9. a group of three bikers — 2 adults, one kid — biking slowly in front of me
  10. stopping in the grass to adjust my laces (at least 5xs), stopping at a bench to take off my shoe to inspect my toe (1)

I have to do this again next week, but for the rest of today, I’ll celebrate the accomplishment of running (with some walking) 12 miles and moving for more than 2 hours.

For the first hour, I listened to birds, fragments of conversations, cars, trickling water, and bells. For the next 45 minutes, I listened to a Ruth Ware audiobook. And for the rest of the time: my Color playlist.

I’ve just barely started reading Kohn’s How Forests Think, which I was able to get through RJP’s college library. This is one of the opening lines in chapter 2, “The Living Thought”:

This chapter develops the claim that all living beings, and not just humans, think, and explores another closely related claim, that all thoughts are alive. It is about “the living thought.” What does it mean to think? What does it mean to be alive? Why are these two questions related, and how does our approach to them, especially when seen in terms of the challenges of relating to other kinds of beings, change our understanding of relationality and “the human”?

If thoughts are alive and if that which lives thinks, then perhaps the living world is enchanted. What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans. Rather, mean-ings—means-ends relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance—emerge in a world of living thoughts beyond the human in ways that are not fully exhausted by our all-too-human attempts to define and control these. More precisely, the forests
around Ávila are animate. That is, these forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate from, humans. This is what I’m getting at when I say that forests think. It is to an examination of such thoughts that this anthropology beyond the human now
turns.

How Forests Think / Eduardo Kohn

I’d like to put this chapter and the questions, What does it mean to think? and What does it mean to be alive?, beside Alice Oswald’s Homeric mind, with thoughts that don’t reside in the brain but travel outside of it, over the sea, Emily Dickinson’s bees, and the possibility that thoughts might be creatures themselves — and not just metaphorically. I’ve written about this before, and I’ll find where, either later today or tomorrow.

the next day:

1 — Alice Oswald on the Homeric mind:

Well, as you know, I’m quite fascinated, even obsessed, you might say with Homer. And one of the things that really tantalizes me in Homer is what is the Homeric mind? Because I think it’s very different from a literary mind. And it seems not to be inside the skull, but to be out in the world. So, there is a particular simile in the Iliad, which actually that first bit of the poem is based on, where it talks about two goddesses coming from heaven to the earth. And they’re very physically described. They kind of fall down from heaven to the earth. And then when they land, they take little pigeon steps, steps like doves or pigeons. So you can really picture them. But the way their flight moves from heaven to earth is as a man, you know, as the mind flutters in a man who has traveled widely, so you can turn it the other way around and say the way a man thinks is like this incredibly physical flight of two goddesses coming down to earth a bit like pigeons. And that’s always really interested me, that for Homer, the mind has the limitations of a pigeon, if you like. It is this kind of … this physical thing that moves. So, if you imagine a place over the sea, your mind actually has to get there. So, even though it may be as fast as the light, it is physical movement.

A Conversation with Kit Fan and Alice Oswald

2 — bee in your bonnet (19 march 2024)

Here’s an article about the origins of the phrase. According to the article, the phrase is still being used in popular culture. I use it, usually when I notice Scott hell-bent on some task — and usually it seems like a task, or idea, that is fool-hardy but that he needs to work through and figure out for himself. 

Sometimes instead of saying, bee in your bonnet, I say that someone (or me) is hellbent. Of course, writing that immediately makes me think of Jackie from the 1979 Death on the Nile:

Jacqueline De Bellefort : One must follow one’s star wherever it leads. 
Hercule Poirot : Even to disaster? 
Jacqueline De Bellefort : Even to Hell itself.

When I envision a bee in my bonnet, I see something that is relentless, impossible to ignore, urgently needing to be dealt with. That’s not quite how I imagine my preoccupation with haunts and ghosts and writing about the gorge. Still, I like the idea of bees in bonnets, and bees in general, so maybe I’ll spend more time with them this morning?

Reading through several ED “bee” poems, I suddenly had a thought: could the bee in your bonnet be your soul, trying to escape the confines of the body?

This thought was inspired by a poem I wrote about in an On This Day post: Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan. I didn’t mention it in the post, but the description of the soul in the poem, as leaving the body at night to roam around, reminded me of an ED poem I read a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about the difference between the brain and the mind:

If ever the lid gets off my head/ Emily Dickinson

If ever the lid gets off my head
And lets the brain away
The fellow will go where he belonged —
Without a hint from me,

And the world — if the world be looking on —
Will see how far from home
It is possible for sense to live
The soul there — all the time.

3 — thoughts as a swarm of bees, uncontrollable and unwanted

As I started thinking more about my discussion of thoughts as bees, I also thought about how those bees, especially if they are swarming in your head without the lid being removed, could be overwhelming, incapacitating. Then I found this in my log entry from 30 june 2024:

“During the first loop somewhere between the first and second orange buoys an alarming thought appeared: what if I fainted in the middle of the lake? In the past this thought might have caused panic which I would feel in my body — a flushed face, harder to breathe, hot tingling on the top of my head. Not today. No physical effect. Within a few minutes the thought was gone. Is this because of the lexapro? FWA says that sometimes he feels the lexapro working — he’ll start having overwhelming thoughts but instead of spiraling, he feels himself become separated from those thoughts — they become abstract and distant. I wondered about this as I stroked then connected it to Alice Oswald’s Homeric mind and the idea of thoughts not just living in our head but traveling outside of our bodies from there to there.”

from Thinking/ DANUSHA LAMÉRIS

And I found this bit of a poem:

Don’t you wish they would stop, all the thoughts
swirling around in your head, bees in a hive, dancers
tapping their way across the stage?

Who with their whispered psalm
can outvoice their huckster cackle, the trees
blustered to howls while the tesla bees

whine loudly to the shocked air?

other links: I have a page about bees in my “How to Be” project on Un || Disciplined (I had forgotten that I did this — thanks, past Sara!)

one more thing: Finding my archive of bee-related things, is putting a bee in my bonnet. I need to archive all of my resources — or, as many as I can — before my central vision is completely gone. I imagine it will be much harder to do this once that happens!

july 8/RUN

3.9 miles
wabun hill and back
67 degrees / humidity: 87%

An early-ish run. Started at 7:45. If I had run earlier, the temperature would have been a few degrees cooler, but the humidity and dew point would have been higher. Which is worse, higher temp or higher dew point? Dew point, I think. I’ll have to test it out — if I can get up earlier!

For the past month or so, I’ve been struggling with my feet and ankles. I’ve tried a few different pairs of shoes to see if any of them were better. This week — on Tuesday and today — I went back to my Brooks Ghosts. They seem to be working better. Today I realized (or remembered?) to put my laces through the extra holes at the top of the shoe. I think I had tried this early on with these shoes, but it felt too tight, then. It worked!

10 Things

  1. gobble gobble gobble a turkey calling out from a tree in turkey hollow
  2. a bike rushing past me on the wabun hill
  3. an older man and woman stopped at the bottom of the locks and dam hill
  4. thwack thwack the chain from the flag hitting the flag pole
  5. a few bits of glitter on the surface of the river under the ford bridge
  6. the older man and woman halfway up the hill, each of them dragging a tire
  7. almost all benches were empty
  8. stopping at the Rachel Dow Memorial bench for a quick view of the river and to retie my shoe
  9. the wabun hill was covered in wet dirt — a little slippery when descending it
  10. a woman standing on the edge of the trail, looking out somewhere, taking a picture of something

strong shoulders

Open swim tonight, but no Sara swimming. It’s a bummer, but I know that it’s a very bad idea to try and swim with my sore shoulder, My favorite, self-proclaimed “best PTs in the world,” Bob and Brad have some exercises for me to try in the next couple of days:

july 7/RUNSWIM

run: 4.1 miles
monument and back
70 degrees
humidity: 87% / dew point: 68

More uncomfortably warm conditions. Difficult, but doable. I did my run/walk plan: 5/1 (mile 1) — 1.5/.5 (miles 2-4). My feet didn’t hurt that much, and I had a lot of energy, especially in my legs, at the end of the run. I’ll take that as a victory. I listened to my striking feet and dripping water (shadow falls) and the st. thomas bells for the first half, Olivia Rodrigo for the second.

10 Things

  1. St. Thomas bells — faint and short, 8:45, I think
  2. rowers!, 1: on the way to st. paul, crossing the lake street bridge, 2 double rowing shells in the blueish gray water
  3. rowers!, 2: on the way back to minneapolis, crossing the lake street bridge, 4 6-man rowing shells + the white boat with the coxswain
  4. coxswain to rowers: okay and stop. good job!
  5. overcast — a gray sky — is it going to rain? no: soon, sun
  6. the dreamy reflection of clouds on the pale blue gray river
  7. the path near shadow falls: cracked, cratered, ridged — dangerous!
  8. at the top of the shadow falls hill, passing an adult and a kid wearing a backpack — summer school?
  9. honk honk
  10. near the beginning: a woman walking with a dog, holding the leash too loose, the dog licking my leg — sunday, I didn’t mind; today I did

swim: 1 loop
lake nokomis open swim
81 degrees

Written the next morning. Almost perfect conditions. Smooth, warm water, not too crowded, overcast. For the first half of the loop, I felt strong and relaxed, but sometime not long after I rounded the third buoy, my right shoulder started to hurt. It was difficult to lift my arm. Ouch. When I reached the final green buoy, I stopped and rested for a few minutes in the beach area. I tried to swim again. Nope. I had to stop. A big bummer. I think I could have swum 5 loops tonight in this water.

Looked it up in the middle of the night (which might seem like a bad idea, but didn’t make me any less able to sleep) and it’s probably swimmer’s shoulder, caused by overuse. Swimmer’s shoulder is a common injury. I’m hoping that taking the rest of the week off will be enough to make it better. The silver lining: I still have more than half of the season left, so I should be able to swim again.

july 6/SWIM

2 loops (4 cedar mini loops)
cedar lake open swim
88 degrees

Very warm. Choppy. Crowded. As always, a great swim. Before the swim started, the orange buoy was way off to the far side, which caused a delay. The lifeguards wrangled it back and we started with it in its usual place. When I returned after the first loop, the buoy was drifting far out again. Most people were not even trying to round it. I tried, then gave it up too. After the second loop, the buoy had been moved back but very close to shore. After the third it was back in its usual place. The shifting buoy and the too bright sinking sun made it difficult to sight.

10 Things

  1. small fish, about 1/2 foot long, bumping into my hand and my foot as I waited for open swim to begin
  2. a lifeguard kayak escorting a swimmer back to shore
  3. bright blue sky + fluffy clouds
  4. racing another swimmer who kept pushing me out and away from the buoy
  5. swimmers almost run into: 3
  6. swimmers run into: 1
  7. out in the middle of the deep lake, a few ghostly forms below: milfoil, I think
  8. a paddleboarder looming beside me before passing me at a safe distance
  9. on the back half of the loop, I mostly breathed every 4 strokes
  10. on the front half of the loop: watching the curved line of swimmers returning to shore

the next morning: Yesterday was Scott and my 30th wedding anniversary. 30 years?! Wow. Wonderful. We went out for lunch in our old uptown neighborhood then walked around Bde Maka Ska and Lake of the Isles before heading over to Cedar for open swim.

july 5/RUNSWIM

run: 11 miles
ford loop + veterans home + lake nokomis (x2)
66 degrees
humidity: 92% dew point: 60+

I did it! It was humid and hot in the sun and my feet started hurting by mile 4, but I did it! I ran through the neighborhood, then over the lake street bridge, up shadow falls’ hill, past the monument and (mostly) up the east side of the river. I crossed the ford bridge, went through wabun park to the veterans’ home, crossed over another bridge, ran on the edge of the park, then beside minnehaha creek. When I reached Lake Nokomis, I had to run around it twice.

10 Things

  1. teakettle teakettle — a carolina wren
  2. a single rowing shell on the river
  3. from the bridge, the water looked fuzzy, the air above it hazy
  4. just past the monument, I heard the St. Thomas bells — I think it was 7:30
  5. mostly dry dirt, or slightly damp earth on the desire path beside the paved trail — one spot was squishy mud and I almost twisted my ankle on it
  6. cloudy then sunny then shade then sun and sun and sun then shade
  7. someone on the other side of the mustache bridge, running and pushing a stroller, blasting some upbeat music that I didn’t recognize
  8. the creek water is high! I especially noticed that as I ran over my favorite part of the trail
  9. a woman with a dog — she wasn’t holding the leash tight enough and the dog leaned over and licked my knee as I ran by (surprisingly, I didn’t care)
  10. running and walking over the cedar bridge, looking down at the water’s surface: a soft gray blue with reflections of clouds

For more than half of the run, I listened to the birds and my feet and the sloshing water in my handheld water bottle. Near the falls, I put in “Olivia Rodrigo Essentials.” Even though I’ve turned it off many times before, apple music was still set to fading songs, which means it took the last few measures of one song and made its beat match the beat of the next song. When this first happened, the last bit of the first song suddenly slowed, sounding so strange that I was worried I might be having heat stroke. Why does Apple do this? Boo.

3 things to celebrate / 3 things to work on

  1. I kept the negative thoughts away (hooray)
  2. I was able to eat a fig bar during the run and didn’t feel an urgent need to go to teh bathroom (yay)
  3. My legs felt good in the last mile and I had some energy (woo hoo)
  4. My feet hurt for almost half of the run (boo)
  5. My ankles hurt some too — I need to tie my shoes tighter and/or get shoes in a smaller size (bummer)
  6. As is often the case after a hard effort, I was cranky at the end when I met up with Scott (grr)

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
71 degrees

The plan: run to the lake for open swim. Scott would bring my bag with my stuff. I wanted to do at least one loop of swimming. I imagined it would be refreshing and restorative for my sore legs. And it was. Wow, that water! Almost perfect. Calm and warm enough. There was milfoil but no blue green algae. As I neared the beach, I could see clumps of the milfoil washed up on shore. Yuck!

The swimming felt easy and relaxing. Steadily, I stroked, breathing every 5 strokes. Occasionally I stopped stroking and listened to the quiet as I tread water. All I could hear was the soft slap of the water from another swimmer’s hand.

Today, I started counting strokes as I passed by the 4th buoy. 275 to get to 5th and final buoy.

A strange feeling: as I swam from buoy 3 to 4, I could see the green buoy up ahead. It seemed like I kept drifting out, almost too far to the left. Trying to correct my path felt strange and awkward. I briefly wondered if there was a current I wasn’t consciously feeling or if my run had made me less able to swim straight.

overheard: one swimmer to another: not many people here this morning! and you don’t have to rush off after we’re done, do you? and the water is wonderful! Except for the weeds!

Today I decided to start at the normal spot, instead of entering at the far end of the swimming area. The weeks were there, and I had to shorten my stroke when I reached them, but they weren’t too bad and didn’t last that long.

Speaking of weeds, I noticed a bad patch just below the cedar bridge when I was running. So thick, just below the surface. Looking brown and orange, then dark dark green.

Today would have been a perfect day to swim 5 loops. And if I hadn’t run for 2 hours before swimming, I would have done it. I wish I could have, but I’m glad I didn’t try. That would have been too much!

added at the end of the day: Even though I ran 11 miles and swam 1.5 miles today (and achieved 300% of my move goal), I don’t feel wiped out or that sore. Only my feet hurt, and that’s because of the warts (yuck!).

earlier today, I was looking through my 5 july entries from past years. I would like to remember some things from them, including:

1 — 2025

Yesterday, in a ramble about rumors and whispers, I stumbled upon a tentative theme for the month: the language of water. First step: read/skim How to Read Water. 

Here’s an interesting bit I’d like to remember:

. . . ponds and lakes are far from permanent; rivers will tend to grow naturally with time as they do their own excavating, but the opposite is true for still water. Unless ponds and lakes are given some help, they will all eventually return to land, It starts with algae, then the rushes and other shallow water plants getting a foothold, and this allows sediments to gather, water turns to wet mud, and a reinforcing cycle begins that culminates in the water losing the battle against the encroaching land. 

How to Read Water/ Tristan Gooley

Shallow water plants getting a foothold. No!

2 — 2024

Because the buoys are positioned by lifeguards every swim — they paddle out on kayaks where they are advised by someone on shore where to drop their anchor — and because there’s no exact spot for each of buoys, the loop distance varies. Today it was long, which I like — the more distance, the better! Here’s a comparison on 3 different 4 loop swims by number of strokes I took / distance (which I’m pretty sure my watch doesn’t measures accurately):

25 june 2024: 2094 strokes / 3100 yards
30 june 2024: 2124 strokes / 3600 yards
5 july 2024: 2374 strokes / 4000 yards

I like how approximate the course is. Some things about it are set, some aren’t.

3 — 2021

Why I do and don’t like Cedar Lake + differences between Nokomis and Cedar Lake (see 23 June 2021). The first time I ever swam at Cedar Lake was 14 August 2019.

july 3/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
72 degrees

Another great swim. The water was smooth and calm and not cold. It was overcast, which I thought would help me to see the buoys better — no sun in my eyes — but ended up making it harder. Not enough light for my cone-starved eyes. It didn’t matter; I kept swimming and trusted that my shoulders and hips and feet knew where they were going. They did!

Leaving the shore, and entering the lake, I made the mistake of swimming through a terrible patch of milfoil. So thick and tangled! I had to glide over it in order to not get entangled by the thin vines. Future Sara remember: do not swim close to the two white buoys nearest the swan boats!

I swam 2 loops, then got out for a bathroom break, then 2 more loops. After I was done, as I waited for Scott to finish his long run, I took some notes in my Plague Notebook, vol. 28 about the swim. Without intending to, I started jotting down words grouped by their first letter:

smudged (sky), smooth surface, submerged, shoulders, strong, swans

glassy, green, grit, geometry, grabbed (by milfoil), glimmer

flash, fin, finished, flat, far

Broken Bells (blasting from a bike in the park), barely there buoys, bridge

marbled legs, monstrous milfoil, mistakes made

in navigation, nose plugs

leaking, lost, looping,

(metal) detector discoveries (a rare nickel)

As I returned to land and gravity, I lost my nose plug: it fell off my finger. I think that’s the second or third nose plug I’ve donated to the lake over the years.

On the last loop, I looked up after passing my the 4th buoy and sighted the final buoy. It looked so far away. I decided to count my strokes to it: 225.

Last night, I was telling Scott about how I always see lifeguards on kayaks that aren’t there. Today, I think I saw why: something about the Cedar bridge and the tree line and the land, far off and to my left, looks almost like the shape of a figure on a kayak. Well, at least to me.

Before leaving for open swim, I re-memorized Tony Hoagland’s awesome poem, “Summer Studies.” For some of the loops, I recited it in my head. I can’t ever recite it, or any other poem, straight through, from beginning to end. I always get distracted or repeat myself. I think I got to the end of the poem just once.

july 2/SWIM

3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
83 degrees

What a wonderful night for a swim! The first loop was smooth and fast. I felt like a boat, powering through the water, my feet little rudders. I’m not sure what happened during the second loop, but it was much tougher. Water trying to pull me down, 2+ foot waves crashing over me. Did the wind pick up? Whatever happened had stopped by the third loop. Calm again.

note: I’m writing this list the next morning because I didn’t have time last night.

10 Things

  1. blueish green water
  2. clear, and bigger than usual, bubbles being made by my hands — translucent
  3. mostly the light was not too bright, until it was — at one spot, not far after rounding buoy 3, light suddenly illuminated the water in front of me and I saw a thin strand of something — hair? — floating in front of me
  4. a flash of silvery white just below me — a fish?!
  5. my reoccurring optical illusion: swimming back towards the big beach, I kept thinking I was seeing the silhouette of a lifeguard on a kayak — it was there, out of the corner of my eye, but when I passed it, it was gone — was a lifeguard there, or something else that I was imagining was a lifeguard — another swimmer? the tree line? a far off boat?
  6. before open swim began, encountering a guy who called out, doesn’t this water feel great! Then he started singing a Backstreet Boys song — I don’t think it was “I want it that way” but I can’t remember
  7. nearing a far buoy, experiencing that strange effect of the buoy always appearing far away, and me feeling like I’m swimming in place
  8. passing a swimmer doing breaststroke, experiencing that irritating effect of the swimmer seeming to speed up and me feeling like it’s taking forever to pass them
  9. maybe because of the choppy water or the light making it hard for them to sight the buoys, several swimmers were doing a mix of freestyle and breaststroke — a few strokes of freestyle, then stopping to look, then a burst of breaststroke, then freestyle again
  10. as is often the case, the water was extra turbulent and more crowded around the final buoy — a cluster of swimmers nearing it at the same time*

*I like to refer to this section of the swim as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Mostly, I find it fun.

Earlier in the afternoon I printed out and posted the draft of a poem I wrote about 5 years ago that doesn’t quite work . . .yet. The current title: Look pal, this isn’t the sea. It’s about the joy I find in fighting the “waves” and the choppy water as I swim across and around the lake. The poem is up on my big cork board and I’m planning to gather together and post all of its references: facts about the lake, lines of poetry, the significance of particular words, etc. I don’t want to overwork the poem, but I do want to give a lot of attention to making it work. As I swam through the rougher water in my second loop, I thought about the poem and the fun I have in punching the waves and battling the spray. I prefer the waves crashing into me over the waves sucking me down. The former requires strong shoulders; the latter demands frantic kicks.

The overall vibe of last night’s swim was strong and steady. Stroke after stroke after stroke with little kicks beginning with my hips. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right and 1 2 3 breathe left and 1 2 3 4 5 6 breathe right and 1 2 3 4 breathe left. My feet, relaxed, shifting slightly to adjust my direction.

laked words / laked forms

written earlier in the day: Yesterday, while writing about an podcast interview with Moheb Soliman, I posed these questions, How do rivering words look different from laked ones? What else do lakes do, besides pooling? I was reminded of that question, when I encountered what I wrote on 18 august 2025:

Later in her process notes, Hartigan describes the three forms she uses in her book:

The forms I arrived at became a way of moving with different paces in time, moving in primarily three different forms/paces: hour entries which are prose-like and which move at a slower loosely-shadowed mental pace that allows for sentences; second entries which are like little insect legs notching forward with alliteration and gap-jumping nonlinear narratives; and a variety of lyrics that often use the slash as an entrance. They work together and of course the forms mix and disrupt their own boundaries too. The slash was important to my mental movement. 

Very cool. I’m thinking about my own forms and how to express different modes of swimming in the lake. Inklings, which is the chapbook I’m working on, are short 5 syllable, 5 line, flash encounters with the lake. Brief glimpses, approximations, things witnessed in the midst of motion. Then I have some shortened sonnets — 5 syllable 14 line poems represent more sustained encounters. What other form to use, and what does it represent?

—

I imagine inklings as changing form slightly (line length, syllable count) depending on the type of water. On and in the lake, my inklings are 5 lines / 5 syllables because that is my stroke/breath pattern. It is different in a pool (I switch up my strokes more), and, if I swam in the sea, I imagine it would be different, too: shorter — 2 or 3 strokes, then a breath, as I navigated the choppier water.

The inklings in my chapbook aren’t just about a type of water, but are specific to one body of water, Lake Nokomis, and one organized activity in that water, open water swim club. I would like to gather details about open swim and the lake for my further reflections on my inklings.

Another thought that I don’t want to forget that I had while reading my entry from 18 aug: For this year’s “Swimming One Day in August” challenge (24 non-consecutive hours of swimming during the month of August, partly inspired by M Oliver’s poem of the same name), I want to return to time and clocks and being inspired by Endi Bogue Hartigan and on orchid o clock.

note: As I work on this, I am overwhelmed. I have so many ideas, so many experiments to try. It feels like I should write something BIG, but there’s too much to read to write to do. I’ve been trying Annie Dillard’s bird by bird method: slowly archiving one thing then another thing then another (see my How To Be project for my ongoing efforts). I think what I’d like to do now is something (fairly) straightforward: 1. Collect all of my summer/swimming log entries in one document 2. Do a rough edit (cut out non-swim and non-water bits) 3. Do another rough edit and another.

more HOMES / Moheb Soliman

walking a beach : moheb soliman

I’ve also typed in the text without the proper spacing, which is too fiddly to do on wordpress:

Walking a beach a drive away from Oswego

Algae break water webs of puce the shoreline lipstick left by
the lake on lovesick miles of napkin good-bye Fudgies snap your towels
of assy sand make the kids chase down the wrappers I’ll replant their
gutted hawthorn and piss off the beach fire from the driftwood
it’s time we got back to work consummate vacation fuck the lake
no love to salvage memories of drinking each other completely
empty of their taste better to forget the acrid pics of summers luxuriating
with anything precious fenced the lifestyle we desired here
the zoos of microenvironments the patios crawling out of the mudflats with
the frogbit floating in impenetrable mats the glass pole dance of dusk
slick stage left just hold your liquor and keep down the zebra mussel-
sucking noise when the speckled black other shoe drops just look away
vacate the promises

2

As I read this poem, and some others in the collection, I thought about something else Soliman said in their interview:

And as far as the writing and the editing, you know, I just am such a convoluted writer sometimes and like I feel like a really sometimes poetry from your writing is like a problem solving, you know, like, how do you just stack this house of cards up enough to sit and just back away before it falls down?

Just enough to not collapse. This idea reminds me of a game I play with myself: how much data/information do I need to “see” something? The version of this game that I play in the water is: how many times do I need to sight the orange or green buoys in order to stay on course? The answer: not many! I’d like to play this game on land, with words. How little can I write/say and still communicate how/what I’m seeing or feeling or experiencing? Beyond a game, as my vision continues to decline (the end point: no more central vision) and my ability to read decreases, I must rely on fewer words. I want my poetry to reflect that economy.

experiment: Take an existing poem that I’ve written and try to take as much out of as I can without it losing its meaning. I think I’ll start with a favorite poem that has never quite worked: Look pal, this isn’t the sea. A further thought: put the poem on my board, along with all of my thoughts, log entries, poems/lines from others about it. Gather as much information as possible, put it on the board, then condense it. Condense!

Poet’s work/ LORINE NIEDECKER

Grandfather   
   advised me:
         Learn a trade

I learned
   to sit at desk
         and condense

No layoff
   from this
         condensery

What a master of condensery L Niedecker was!

2 — better to forget the acrid pics of summers luxuriating
with anything precious fenced

acrid pics — looked up acrid to double-check meaning: “strong, sharp, unpleasantly biting smell” and “bitter in language/feeling” — tried to remember, did polaroids smell? Yes, a distinctive warm, chemical smell. Is his use of acrid here a deliberate conjuring of polaroids? I grew up with polaroids, and using the word acrid offers a much more visceral reader response than just pics or pictures. And acrid as bitter — some regret over what happened/didn’t happen on those summer trips, over not being on vacation anymore?

anything precious fenced — here I’m thinking of Alice Oswald’s description of the sea as unfenced in Nobody: “If you want to imagine the colour of Odysseus’ gown you will have to swim out into the unfenced place, the place not of definitions but of affirmations. ” And, I’m thinking about lucille clifton’s “unfenced is” in “All Praises.”

I’m also thinking about Soliman’s own critical (as in, seemingly negative) use of the word “precious” in his interview:

I was just doing a lot of, like, site, I don’t know if the word would be site-specific writing, you know, just writing on the go, you know, like showing up and wanting to capture a place and not feeling too precious about capturing it because really being there was so, like, sublime, you know, it was just so amazing and seeing such, like, really beautiful hidden pockets of the Midwest and, you know, these, like, oceanic spaces, you know, where you wouldn’t think, you know, Michigan would offer that or something.

and

A lot of these poems are these justified text blocks with like, internal line breaks. And a lot of them started as lineated poems. Uh, and I just liked the ones that weren’t like that more because I felt like line breaks were too precious sometimes.

Just in poetry, not just mine, but sometimes I just kind of bristle at line breaks, you know? Um, they make, yeah, sometimes they make poems feel too precious. And I wanted this to have a bit more of a, like, robustness, you know? That they’re, they kind of just sit there on the page, you know, like a paragraph, you know?

july 1/RUNSWIM

4.6 miles
veterans home
74 degrees / drizzle?
humidity: 89%
dew point: 69

Woke up at 6 am to get in a run before it rained, then heard thunder. Bummer. Had to wait until 9. When I left, the sun was coming out but a mile in, the wind picked up. Did it start drizzling or was that just dripping trees? I think it was a little of both.

It was hot and difficult and I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to do when I started — 2 miles? 3? — but then I just kept going and it kept feeling a little more doable. Just make it to southern entrance to the Winchell Trail. And, just make it to the locks and dam parking lot. And, just make it to the top of the Wabun hill. Once I got to the top and kept going through Wabun park, there was no turning back, just through the grounds of the Veterans home and over to the falls then north on the river road to home.

10 Wet Things

  1. big puddles on the sidewalk
  2. smaller puddles on the path
  3. muddy ruts
  4. dripping trees
  5. dripping ponytail
  6. soaked shirt
  7. roaring falls
  8. gushing sewer pipe
  9. whooshing wheels
  10. damp face

Early this morning, while making breakfast, I listened to a podcast interview with Moheb Soliman whose book, Homes, I’ve just started reading. Love it! I think I’ll buy this book as a birthday present to myself!

In the interview, the interviewer mentions another poet who I’d also like to check out: Cecily Nicholson. Cecily Nicholson: interview + book, Crowd Source

Also in the interview, Soliman reads several of his poems, including this one:

Great Lake Swamp come heavy-use wetlands:
powers of Toledo origin song

Who let this wetland wet / Who cut this little inlet / Laid the hill for golden
hours / Fit the logs with the salamanders / Foretold the lichen and the mosses
/ Who offered the wildlife crossing

Along this promenade I sing / about how the world’s made / my behorned
serenade to nobody but

Who wet this aggregate / Who raised this bamboo deck / Who had these
grasses mown / Who made the birches grow in groves / Who made this prairie
seric1 / Carved out a space for heron

This is my behorned little dirge / I sing along this little bridge / about how this
little world’s birthed by no body but

Who left this river wet / Sowed the embankment / Set the grade for the slope
of the island / Spawned the minnows to feed the walleye / Who knows the
ripples till flood / Who reads teh dried-out flats of mud

About how the world’s mocked up / I sing along this ply boardwalk / This is
where the trombones stop

for nobody / By no body but / you local / No melody but vocals / As is / La la /
La li / La las / La lis / As is

Who let this wetland wet? I love all of these question about the creating of a place. I frequently think (and ask) about how the paths I run on, the lakes I swim in, were made what they are by people, particularly the city of Minneapolis and Minneapolis Parks. For years, I’ve been studying the documents and the places to find evidence of this creating and shaping.

Before reading the poem, Soliman says this:

And this is a big part of our discourse right now that, you know, humans aren’t separate. I mean, I have a really hard time kind of following that to the end, because I do feel that there’s a profound difference in how much we are able to control and shape that world to the point where we’re not really a part of it in the same organic way that so many other parts of it are, you know, and a lot of the poems like sometimes absurdly, you know, and I mean, I could even read some of those like, but absurdly play with that idea that, you know, we created this place, you know, the hiking trail, like it is actually, it’s not just some natural path.

You know, there’s a lot that has gone into making you feel that you are here at one in a harmonious, quiet moment in the woods or on the lake. And, you know, so our hand is like so strong in those places, and it would be really, like, naive to just write a poem about being out in the woods without also being aware about, of how we came to that place, and how humans are really, uh, yeah, sort of different and yet a part of.

Commonplace interview with Moheb Soliman

I was prompted to find this interview because I wanted to hear Soliman read his own poems; I hoped that might help me understand the strange spacing of the lines. He addresses this desire directly in the interview:

A lot of these poems are these justified text blocks with like, internal line breaks. And a lot of them started as lineated poems. Uh, and I just liked the ones that weren’t like that more because I felt like line breaks were too precious sometimes.

Just in poetry, not just mine, but sometimes I just kind of bristle at line breaks, you know? Um, they make, yeah, sometimes they make poems feel too precious. And I wanted this to have a bit more of a, like, robustness, you know? That they’re, they kind of just sit there on the page, you know, like a paragraph, you know?

Yet, I still love, like, the wordplay of, like, enjambment, and, uh, so, I came to a point where I thought, well, either all of these have to be these text blocks, or they just all need to go to lineated. And I spent a lot of time, like, reworking so many of them into these text blocks. And at one point I was really terrified that, like, I’ve made the reading experience really hard for people.

I don’t know, because to me, I’m just so familiar with them. They’re really, I see them in my head and I understand how they move, like, you know, orally, you know. So, it’s part of the reason I, like, really appreciate the chance to read them, because I feel like if I can just get my voice into someone’s head about the book, it’ll just make the rest of the experience, you know, easier.

Very helpful to read this, and to hear him read his own poems. The next thing he says is also helpful, and is sparking some new thoughts on (my) forms:

A friend of mine kind of made this interesting point where they sort of, like lakes, like on the page. They just kind of pool there with some like, gaps. And I think she was kind of first saying how the poems have a real flow. And then we were talking about how poems sometimes really feel like rivers, you know, and without really meaning to, I kind of forced these to have a bit more of like a lake, like, you know, here they are, in one place, and there, there’s the pooling, you know, that’s happening.

Oh — I want to think about this some more! How do rivering words look different from laked ones? What else do lakes do, besides pooling? They settle, shimmy in place . . . . This question is an excellent one to think about and to go back into my log to find some answers!

a few minutes later: they sink and sour and are stuck, still, stagnant, unstirred. Could it be that lakes, more than oceans or seas or rivers, are about what’s at the bottom, what sinks down, unmoved by currents? Stale and stymied. Layered and sedimented, cyclical – circular

plastic project

Since March, or was it April?, I’ve been collecting the plastic that we use for some unspecified future project. It started with old freezer bags, but expanded to include grapefruit, zucchini, and mini cucumber bags. Now I have sandwich and pita bread bags and the plastic bags that covered the new fan I recently bought. My favorite one: the plastic shell my new googles came in, which looks like another pair of clear goggles.

Definitely in April, I began deconstructing the freezer bags — cutting off the bright blue (zip) locking part, cutting open the clear plastic, then cutting out the white label. Last week, I decided I wanted to use the blue zip lock parts for some sort of visualizing of the lake. Maybe a big map of a lake nokomis loop? My first thought was to connect the strips together with thread or tape, but that didn’t really work. This week, another idea: shred the plastic! I tried to do it in the paper shredder, which would have shredded it almost instantly, but that wasn’t working. So, instead, I’m using my mother-in-law’s old silver scissors and snip snip snipping the strips. This snipping labor is reminding me of the satisfaction I got in the winter from drawing and shading in circle after circle on my New Yorker essays. There is something therapeutic about using my hands in this repetitive task, but also something that encouraged deep, creative thinking. These blue plastic strips are also satisfying to scoop up and sift through my fingers. Will these plastic blue shards become part of my map, or just the process that leads me to that map? Time will tell.

from the zip on a freezer bag to shards of blue lake
  1. seric = silk ↩︎

A few other thoughts:

As I cut up these little shards, I thought about all the plastic that ends up in the lake and an ocean and my organs and tissues and bodily fluids. Yikes!

As I accumulate more and more plastic I wonder: how can I stop using so much plastic? First step: stop using ziploc bags for storing my half used produce! Make my own bread? What else?

Telling Scott about my shards last night, he suggested trying to (just barely) melt them. In one of my bouts of insomnia I looked it up and found some suggestions, but not for what I wanted. In the various sources, toxic fumes was brought up more than once. Also: homemade shrinky dinks.

They are not the same texture, but I have some great green plastic — from zucchini and cucumber bags, and from the plastic wrap on two olive oil bottles. I’d like to mix some bits of them with the blue and see how that affects the color. Could I melt these together?

swim: 3 loops (6 mini)
cedar lake open swim
84 degrees

A calm and warm lake! Wonderful for swimming. I did 6 cedar loops without stopping. or only stopping mid-lake to adjust my nose plug. I noticed orange and pink buoys. Was mine the only yellow one? A few vines wrapped around my head and shoulders as I returned to the first buoy. The water was green-ish. The only fish I encountered were little minnows near shore. My bubble friends trailed below and in front of me.

overheard, one lifeguard to another — I told him he needed to head over to lake nokomis to pick up his swim cap.

A uncapped swimmer was out in the middle of the lake, some more uncapped swimmers were lurking at the far orange buoy.

Anything else? I felt strong and smooth, and often the swimming seemed effortless. Even so, I was glad to be done at the end of the 6th loop.

june 30/RUNSWIM

run: 3.25 miles
2 trails +
75 degrees
humidity: 77% / dew point: 68

Hot! And not too terrible. Yesterday morning, walking to a coffee shop in the heat and humidity I felt like I struggled to breathe but today, when it’s almost as hot, I didn’t struggle at all1. As I ran above, I listened to my “Doin’ Time” playlist. Below, I listened to water trickling out of the sewer pipes and the occasional voice and the cars driving by. I noticed puddles and some wet dirt (it briefly rained earlier this morning). I thought about how fast the summer is going by and if I encounter any coyotes or the den that I’ve seen signs about.

No rowers or roller skiers or regulars. No poetry or flashes of inspiration. And that was fine with me. I was relaxed and free and happy to feel how strong my legs and back are, thanks to several weeks of solid swims.

A week or so ago, I discovered Moheb Soliman’s Homes, a collection of poems about the Great Lakes. I requested it from my local library and picked it up on Sunday. Here’s one of the first poems:

from Homes

At Point Pelee–Leamington,
Sandusky–Cedar Point / Moheb Soliman

This beach has more than two sides
more than the lake and the parking lotmand cultivated and sandwiches farms
and kiosked
aside it
and defies properties
I’ve peed
behind every sorta flora
scared away all kinda fauna
I crossed the lines
of r&r
to bridge the banks of main and head streets and waters
I tried myself
had myself
washed ashore to hamlets
faceup
the whole time
my figure
a petty viaduct only shallow beach could love
I swam each day I changed
myself in the Corolla
and diaspored
footfalls of mollusky sand all over the motel districts of Canuck Sanduskys
where in touch more
with
nature’s what they are
more
than
amusement
or
national park
and
lark
Cedar Point and the
tip
this land does not come to
two
states
means ends
nations
and defies commodity
recreation’s and conservation’s
this place
has
more
than
the
all-night
or
primitive drive-thru and the camping
this whole time my body held in feet
of surf
not diverting to the water
or exiting
but bridges fail all the time nothing new
bridges are being built and rebult
all over these lakes
adding sides to
no end
defying the accounts of travelers
homing in
pointing out
we came in off the water
not really having been
out there
you come out of the water turn right
around get back in there
I’m going out to the water
never really having left there

I wasn’t sure how to keep the spacing with my typing, so I took a screen shot of the page (see above). I’d like to hear the poet read one of these poems to get a better sense of how to understand their spaces….I found them reading it!

Does this help? I’ll hav to listen a few more times, and read more of the poems in this collection. I should also watch this:

So much to think about in this short prose poem. Today, if I can remember as I am battling the wind and the waves, I’d like to think about these lines:

but bridges fail all the time nothing new
bridges are being built and rebult
all over these lakes

There are literal bridges and metaphorical bridges and metaphor as bridge. I want to think about the bridges in the ending lines:

we came in off of the water
you come out of the water
I’m going out to the water / never having really left there

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
90 degrees

It didn’t seem windy but, wow, the water was wild. Very choppy, with an undertow and lots of waves. Mostly I breathed on my right side and did as much punching of the water as stroking. Rounding the buoy during the second loop, a lifeguard approached and called out, we need to evacuate the water! head to the beach! I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I didn’t ask, just swam to the beach. A few minutes later, we all heard a lifeguard tell everyone that the open swim course was just for open swimmers. Then another lifeguard (or was it the same one?) call out, there was a distressed swimmer, but we were able to help them. I’m not surprised that someone was distressed out there; it was rough. I didn’t mind how rough it was, but I didn’t want to blow out my shoulder with another loop. So I stopped after two. I told Scott that June is for being cautious as you build up your muscles, but July is for pushing yourself to keep going. July doesn’t start until tomorrow, so I’m fine with stopping tonight.

I had wanted to think about bridges and being on the water or in the water or out at the water, but I was too distracted by the waves and the need to give attention to breathing and not swallowing water and delighting in the fun of fighting the waves and winning.

A question to ponder: will this be the week (the month?) of choppy water? I don’t mind having a few choppy days, but I hope the water calms down.

  1. Just checked and the humidity was worse yesterday, 89%, so I guess that could have been why it was harder. ↩︎

june 29/WALKSWIM

walk: 50 minutes
to loons coffee and back
79 degrees
humidity: 89%

The heat wave has hit. I had planned to get up early and run this morning, but when I checked the weather and realized that it would already be 76 degrees with almost 90% humidity at 6am, I decided to skip it. As I get older, my tolerance for heat gets worse. So, instead of running, Scott and I walked to Loons for a birthday coffee.

10 Things

  1. some screeching bluejays
  2. the feebee of a black-capped chickadee
  3. a willow in a yard bent over the sidewalk in a arch, creating cool, green shade
  4. a cacophony: 2 bus ticket machines beeping and calling out warnings beside each other, a woman yelling — this is annoying the shit out of me! — at her companion who had pushed the buttons too many times
  5. acquiring a sheen of sweat before reaching the coffee shop
  6. the sharp, truncated bark of a dog somewhere far off
  7. walking by a pick-up truck, hearing a man inside the cab call out, it’s siesta time! — later learning from Scott about the things I didn’t see: 2 construction workers sprawled out on scaffolding in the back of the truck, looking at their phones
  8. the loud buzz of a chainsaw, orange cones blocking off a street: someone getting a tree trimmed or removed
  9. the cottonwood three: 3 gigantic, towering cottonwood trees in the front yard of a 1950s rambler on the triple (or more) sized lot
  10. a bit banner draped across a neighbor’s fence: I’m not mad at you (Renee Good’s last words)

a response from minneapolis aquatics!

Since open swim began, I’ve been frustrated with the amount of milfoil at the beginning of the swim course. Frustrated, and a little anxious. I thought about complaining to open swim. I also wondered if it was even worth saying anything. Then I decided to contact Aquatics and ask about when and if they would be harvesting the milfoil this summer. I ended my email with, I deeply appreciate all that you do to make it possible for us to swim across the lake, and I meant it. I love Minneapolis Parks and I love open swim. I wasn’t sure if anyone would respond, but they did this morning. A long email outlining the different steps they’re taking to alleviate the problem, including another round of harvesting with SCUBA divers and possibly enlisting lifeguards to help. Can the milfoil be controlled? I’m not sure, but it helps to know that they recognize the problem and are trying to do something about it.

swim: 1.5 loops
cedar lake open swim
92 degrees / wind: 17 mph

Very choppy water, which I don’t mind, but I also don’t want to pull a muscle by working too hard to stroke through it, so I only did 3 cedar loops tonight. The water was warmer; I didn’t feel cold at all when I was done. Hooray! I mostly breathed every 4, with the occasional 5 or 3 or 2. Almost always on the right. The beach was very crowded and the vibes were very Cedar. Wading in the water, I could smell weed somewhere nearby.

10 Things the Wind Did

  1. open swim was delayed by at least 5 minutes because they couldn’t get the buoy to stop drifting away
  2. it was also delayed because the lifeguard was struggling to swim back with it in the heavy chop
  3. runners coming in at an angle, 1: the first half of the loop, they were at my back, which sometimes made it easier to swim and sometimes didn’t
  4. runners coming in at an angle, 2: the second half of the loop, I mostly swam straight into them, which made it harder to breathe and to stroke and to see anything
  5. with barely any visibility, I got very close to swimming straight into 3 women — I felt the current their kicking legs made in time and was able to shift my angle
  6. big splashes and sprays from flailing arms
  7. returning to point beach at the end of the second loop, trying to round the buoy, noticing it moving away from me: it had come untethered from the anchor — I gave up and didn’t try to loop around it
  8. returning to point beach at the end of the third loop, I saw that orange buoy way out and off course
  9. leaking goggles, dislodged through the force of waves battering my head
  10. only 3 loops today: too tiring to do more

A great birthday swim! I like swimming in choppy water, especially at the end of my June when I’ve built up my shoulders from 20+ miles of swimming already.

june 27/RUN

6 miles
veterans home + extra
64 degrees

Another beautiful morning. Quiet, calm, low-ish humidity. Ran on as much soft dirt as I could find, which helps my feet. Ran for 12 minutes straight, then 90/30 for the rest — with an occasional 2 or 3 minutes of running thrown in. My legs felt strong and bouncy. My feet started hurting around mile 4. I need to figure this one out. I think it’s mostly warts — yuck! — a few on the ball of my feet, one or two on or under a toe.

10 Things

  1. a coxswain’s voice, down in the gorge
  2. the dirt trail on the grass between lena smith and the river road was narrow and overgrown
  3. nearing locks and dam no. 1, voices somewhere in the trees — on the upper trail leading to the ford bridge
  4. ding ding ding ding ding the recorded bell from the light trail train passing through a intersection
  5. the soft roar of the creek far below me as I crossed the tall bridge that connects the veterans home to the park
  6. a glimpse of the trail Scott, RJP, and I hiked yesterday evening through the trees, below
  7. mostly empty benches
  8. a few e-bikes on the trail, going way too fast
  9. glanced over at the statue of Big Feet/Gunner* when I turned to run through the archway near the falls
  10. surfaces: asphalt, concrete, dirt, roots, brick, sand

*I looked up Gunner on this log because I knew I had written about him. A fun coincidence: I wrote about him on June 27th, 2021! “Ran south on the river road trail past the falls and stopped at the big statue just past the pergola garden. When I would walk or bike the kids over here, about 10 years ago, we (or was it mostly me?) called this statue “big feet” because all the kids could see was his big feet. There was also a little feet (John Stevens)–a much smaller statue not too far way. Today I wanted to find out who Big Feet actually was. I assumed he might be someone connected to Fort Snelling–Zebulon Pike or Snelling or Franklin. Nope. Gunner Wennenberg, a Swedish composer, poet, and politician. This statue was erected on June 24th, 1914.”

Found this bit about names on Poetry Daily (poems.com):

A name is a word but not a word. Some words are names and some names are words. When you’re alive your name means you; sometimes it means the you you mean to yourself; more often the you you are to each person who knows you well enough to use it. If it’s a word, it also means what it means as a word in the mouths of people who don’t know you, and also sometimes in the mouths of people who do know you. When you’re dead your name means you until the people who used it are all gone and then it means pure sound (if your name was not a word), or it goes back to meaning what the word means (if your name was also a word).

Danika Paige Myers on Grave Markers

june 26/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
66 degrees

Wow! A beautiful morning for a swim. Mostly smooth water, a little warmer, sun. I felt strong and relaxed. I avoided the milfoil again by swimming out from the middle of the swimming area, closer to the last green swim buoy. I had to pass over some ghostly vines, but they weren’t tall enough to bother me. I couldn’t see the 2nd orange buoy until it was almost right in front of me (as usual). I thought about how many years — and loops and strokes and kicks — it has taken me to get used to trusting myself and my shoulders and not worrying when I can only see water and sky and generic trees. Occasionally I encountered other swimmers and the lifeguards. I don’t remember seeing any birds or dragonflies or military planes.

What did I think about? 10 Things

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left
  2. through black then cold red then cold brown then warm, giving water the full size and weight of myself in order to imagine it (A Oswald, Dart)
  3. why is that orange buoy (tethered to a swimmer) swimming so far away from the next green buoy? are they off course, or is it my strange sense of the path in the water?
  4. when you can’t see the buoys, use the direction that your sparkle friends are floating as a guide (which is really the angle of the sun — I think — as it illuminates the particles and makes them sparkle
  5. he lifts the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky jumps in and out of the world he loafs in (A Oswald, Dart)
  6. I should recite more water poems next time — but not, M Oliver’s “Swimming One Day in August” — that’s reserved for August
  7. out here, in the middle of the lake, I am not alone, but I feel alone, both singular and not — not human, but water or fish
  8. should I get out and go the bathroom? (yes, and I did, after loop 2)
  9. is that another swimmer or a wave? (a wave)
  10. (as I approached the last green buoy) I thought about being trapped under it by other swimmers as I rounded it — not in this lake, today, because they’re weren’t many swimmers, but if I were in a open swim race with serious swimmers

I saw my sparkle friends and some swan boats and sail bots on the edge of the lake. I felt the cold water on my fingers, a slimy vine on my shoulders. On the sand, near the lifeguard stand, the air smelled like a farm pasture — the faint scent of manure. And I heard a tinny chime several times on the back stretch of loop 2. I wondered if it was my watch — no, my watch doesn’t chime like that. Was it someone else’s watch? A far away boat? Water does strange things to sound.

I love morning swims at Lake Nokomis! Everything is a little quieter, calmer. Today, Scott came with me and ran his 10 miles. I finished before he did and was able to sit on the sand and take in the lake and the beach and beauty of late June afternoon.

encounters with others

As I exited the water to walk over the bathroom, a guy asked me about the quality of the water and how deep it was. It’s great / probably about 12-15 feet where we’re swimming.

Walking out of the bathroom, heading back toward the water, a man asked, excuse me, I signed up for open swim club. Where do I pick up cap?

Exiting the water after loop 4, a little kid called out to me, Isn’t this great? I love playing in the water!!

Bark bark — officially there are no dogs allowed on the beach, but there was one today, barking a greeting to swimmers as they exited the water — hello friend!

Here’s a photo Scott took of the final green buoy as we sat at Painted Turtle after my swim:

the final green buoy of a loop at Lake Nokomis

I wanted to add a new poem in this entry, so I searched, “aquatic plants” on poems.com and found this great prompt in Orchid Tierney’s EcoPoetry Now essay about her poem, “a field guide to future flora”:

Writing Prompt

this field guide began with a series of interviews with random plants—including artifical flowers—that I encountered on my daily movements—in my garden, on the street, in parks, at work, on the Amazon digital store. I read these interviews as an exploration into the breach of an alien consciousness. look, vegetal life may exceed our capacity to comprehend but these life forms still demand that we listen. perhaps their particular modes of communication travel at scales too slow for our species to register. but those unnamed flowers in your garden—perhaps the little ones, blue and purple in their faces that nudge into dirt—have demonstrated a special kind of intelligence to do so. if you sat down to interview these strange kin on your lawn, what would you say to them? what would they say in return? this is not a metaphor. go on. sit. listen. you have to watch them for a very long time.

Orchid Tierney’s EcoPoetry Now essay about her poem, “a field guide to future flora”

I’d like to try this with the Eurasian Milfoil at the edge of swimming area. My questions would be spoken in my head, not out into the water. Maybe I’ll bike over early one morning? What do I want to ask this milfoil? What might it want to tell me? An initial thought: Eurasian milfoil is an invasive species, brought to North American sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s on the hull of some boat (I’ll double-check that — just checked. I had recalled reading somewhere that it was brought by a boat, but this helpful resource, There’s more to milfoil, offers another, equally vague explanation: “Eurasian watermilfoil was brought to the U.S. as an ornamental plant decades ago. The state first became aware of it as an invasive plant in the 1970s.”

Orchid Tierney’s entire essay is awesome, offering many ideas to ponder. They begin with this line, what if, as Maureen M. McLane suggests, we are already preplant?

Preplant?! I tried to find the source of this question, but couldn’t. I did find McLane’s collection, This Blue, and requested it from my local library. Maybe the question is in there? Regardless of where they ask it, I like this question. It makes me think of Lorine Niedecker’s and Alice Oswald’s discussions of us as being distilled to our animal -vegetable – mineral selves — or something like that; I’ll have to search for the lines later.

a mapping

I cleared off my bulletin board for the summer, wanting to come up with swim and water things to cover it. An idea: what if I create a map of the open swim circuit on it? I could include the orange and green buoys, the patches of milfoil, specific locations of inklings + other things I experience in that water. Yes! This sounds fun!

to remember and add to my How to Be project

Found this useful discussion of naming thing in an interview with Maureen McLane about This Blue. I wanted to archive it here, and find where I write about naming on my “How to Be” project.

HM: This Blue seems very interested in how language changes the way we inhabit a landscape. Its first poem contains those lines, “Take it up Old Adam—/every day the world exists/to be named,” and in later poems there are trees that are said to go unnamed, or wildflowers that have forgotten their names.

MM: I think it’s very interesting—what it means, say, to come across the name for a plant in French. Part of this question of naming and place aligns with my interest in English as a big and actually multilingual instrument. I guess I really do subscribe to the notion of language in general, and names in particular, as having a kind of spell-like or incantational or incarnational potentiality. That’s a pretty archaic and powerful trope. I was not a person who grew up knowing the names of almost anything. I often encountered things first verbally and only then in the world.

Actually, Jamaica Kincaid talks about this, in another key, in her book Lucy, where the heroine talks about having Wordsworth shoved down her throat—his poem about daffodils. Our heroine is from the West Indies and she’s in New York as a nanny, and her employer wants to take her to Central Park and show her all the daffodils. This is the first time Lucy’s seen actual daffodils, and Lucy’s incredibly annoyed with this bourgeois white woman who’s trying to have her say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” So I think that, (a) Kincaid is amazing, but (b), another way to think about it is that words are as palpable as things. A lot of my poems might be working through that: how we can feel that way, and how naming both honors things and lets them blossom, but how names may not be the only, or very efficient, way for talking about energy in the world.

Learning the name of a fungus could really anchor you in a region; certain words for trees could conjure something about the American Northeast. But somebody like Wordsworth, for all his yammering on about nature, apparently couldn’t tell one bird from another. So I sort of feel like my interest here both is and is not about being an actual naturalist. There are a lot of ways to anchor oneself in the world. For me, it tends to be a linguistic anchoring.

Talking with Maureen McLane, author of This Blue

june 25/RUNSWIM

10 miles
ford loop + hidden falls + veterans home + falls + locks and dam
60 degrees
humidity: 80%

10 miles. It’s been a few years since I ran 10 miles. I just looked it up and, according to my records, it’s been since Sept 29, 2024. That’s a week before the marathon. Wow. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t fast. My feet really hurt in the last mile. And I did it. And I feel good about it. More than good, great. These long runs are really helpful for me as I try to work on my mental strength and endurance.

Yesterday I was listening to Kara Goucher giving advice on her podcast. What I remember her saying is this: find something positive to focus on for each stretch. Don’t allow yourself to think about what’s going wrong; think about what you are doing right. For many of the running stretches I felt strong and bouncy and in a dreamy state. Not sure I’d call it a flow state, but a state of non-thinking. Of being.

When I was thinking, I thought about my running. In the last three miles, I thought: I need to be particularly intentional in these last miles of my long run to not let it fall apart. I need to work at keeping to my schedule of walk runs. Keeping to this schedule should be something I work on in future long runs.

my route

My route took me many different places: through the neighborhood, past the daycare at the church, over the lake street bridge, beside shadow falls and the monument, on the edge of the new Highland bridge development, just above Hidden Falls, next to a skate park, over the ford bridge, past Wabun and the splash pad, through the veterans’ home grounds, behind the John Stevens’ house; above the falls, back up to wabun, down to the locks and dam no. 1, then north on the west river parkway. There was lots of shade and only a few stretches of direct sun. It was cool and overcast for the first half, a little warmer and sunny for the second half.

10 Things

  1. one rowing shell out on the river — I noticed in my peripheral as I crossed the lake street bridge — kept trying to see it in my central vision, but never could
  2. a woman’s voice at the construction site for home being renovated — she said something like, they’ll be here to hook up the garbage disposal — is that what she said? I can’t quite remember
  3. the soft shushing of my feet as they stuck the soft dirt then slid backward
  4. music blasting from a bike
  5. the soft rushing of water down the channel under the bridge that leads to a hidden falls overlook
  6. a ladder at an angle, leaning against a house, reaching a window on the second story
  7. the hum of skateboard wheels, a flash of a skater behind me, the sound of the board flipping as the skater went up a ramp
  8. a woman sitting on a bench near the veterans home, reading something
  9. 2 people, close together, on the little bridge overlooking the falls, taking a selfie
  10. the thwack of the flag rope hitting the pole in the wind

For the first mile, I listened to the traffic, then I put in Olivia Rodrigo’s new album. I listened to it 3 times as I ran. They lyrics I remember most come from the song “Expectations”: past mistakes are just new information

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
74 degrees

I entered and exited the swim course at the other end of the beach and avoided the worst patches of milfoil. Only a few ghostly vines not quite reaching my toes. Nice. I like starting there, much closer to the last green buoy. It’s less crowded and it shifts where and when a new loop begins. At least, this is what I thought as I swam the second loop and reached the second orange buoy, which was now the third buoy I swim by in a loop and not the second.

The water was a little warmer, or I was. Whatever the reason, the result: no freezing feet or fingers. I witnessed lots of bubbles, some menacing swims, lifeguards that were too close to the buoys, forcing me to take sharper angles around them. No fish seen below, one bird, flying low with its wings spread wide, above, a duck near the shore as I swam into the beach. Two little girls, chasing after it.

Overheard: one of the girls to the other — then he picked it up with his bare hands and threw it!

Overheard: one kid to another, on the beach — how old are you? Eight, you’re eight?!

A big exercise day today. Almost 1500 active calories. 10 miles of running, a mile and half of swimming. It felt good.

june 24/SWIM

5 cedar loops (2.5 nokomis loops)
cedar lake open swim
76 degrees

A wonderful swim! No numb fingers, no worries about being too cold or cramping or running into thick thatches of milfoil. A little choppy, but no waves crashing over me. During loop 4 or 5 I stopped to tread water for a minute at Hidden Beach while I adjusted my nose plug. As I kicked my feet, I could feel the vines reaching up, touching my toes and heels.

I don’t recall seeing or feeling any fish. No stray vines that wrapped around my shoulders either. I was routed twice: once by a lifeguard on a kayak who incorrectly (imho) thought I was swimming off course, and once by a swimmer taking a sharper angle than I was. Both times I had to stop my stroke. I didn’t care.

I felt good when I was done, like I could have done another loop or two. I delighted in all of the bubbles surrounding my hands. I wondered how close to the oncoming swimmers one swimmer was going as I tracked his cap, his buoy, and his frothy kick. I stopped several times to adjust my new nose plug.

Earlier today, before the swim, I was reminded of these lines from the wonderful poet/swimmer, Maxine Kumin:

from “Morning Swim”

the beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea.

I didn’t think about these lines as I swam, but I did give a lot of attention to my feet and my kicking legs as I moved. Did I notice a beat? Would I describe the kicking of my feet as a fine thrashing? I like the idea of my bones drinking water. It reminds me of the lines from Alice Oswald I re-memorized last week: giving water the full weight and size of myself in order to imagine it, water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding.

unravel (this morning)

Watching a behind the scenes video for Olivia Rodrigo’s “The Cure” (it’s very cool to see how they created the red thread unraveling effect) and heard these lines: Why can’t you come stitch me up? I suddenly thought about Emily Dickinson and her lines about seams and stitching. Then I thought about Homer’s Penelope and how she wove the funeral shroud for her father all day, then unraveled it each night, to trick her suitors.

tag: aquatic plants

This morning, I’m searching through past entries for mentions of milfoil and tagging the entries with “aquatic plants.” As I read through the entry for 10 july 2025, I found this description:

Sparkle friends, bubbles. an orange glow off to the side, marble legs, ghostly milfoil, blue sky with a few clouds. Above: blue water, below: a light greenish-blue. An interesting effect: looking up blue, down below green.

10 july 2025

It made me think about my chapbook, inklings, and how to talk and write about it. In it, I have brief poems about my sparkle friends, bubbles, ghostly milfoil. In other entries, I’ve written more about marble legs and the orange glow off to the side. Could I expand on inklings through my waterlogged project? A book-length manuscript combining poems with the descriptions of lake experiences that inspired them? Could Mary Oliver’s Long Life be an inspiration for this project?

Here are a few more bits from my reading through milfoil entries that I’d like to remember and play around with for the rest of this week:

1 — rumors whispered by bubbles, spread through nets of ghostly vines (4 july 2025)

Alice Oswald’s nobody and pondering a word, rumor/rumour:

what kind of a rumour is beginning even now
under the waterlid she wonders there must be
hundreds of these broken and dropped-open mouths
sulking and full of silt on the seabed
I know a snorkeller found a bronze warrior once
with the oddest verdigris* expression and maybe
even now a stranger is setting out
onto this disintegrating certainty this water
whatever it is whatever anything is
under these veils and veils of vision
which the light cuts but it remains

unbroken

*verdigris: a green or bluish deposit especially of copper carbonates formed on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces

A fun rumor to make imagine believe in spread: maybe your brain, or some part of your brain, or your breath, or some other part of you that is not (only) you, has secret conversations with the water in which the water reveals the location of the buoy and the part of you that is you but not (only) you guides you towards it. Of course, this only works if you listen, which I have learned to do. Can you?

rumour (OED): 

General talk or hearsay, not based on definite knowledge

General talk or hearsay personified
1600: “Open your eares; for which of you wi’l stop The vent of hearing, when lowd Rumor speaks?”/ W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 Induct. 2

Clamour, outcry; noise, din. Also: an instance of this

To make a murmuring noise

This last one — to make a murmuring noise — reminds me of the idea of bubbles speaking to me in a soft, faint, bubble-whisper. And now, I’m thinking of a book that I checked out of the library years ago: How to Read Water. Since the ebook is available, I just checked it out again! What are water’s languages?

Back to Alice Oswald’s words and her bronze warrior. Have I written about these particular lines (I’ll check later)? I’m thinking of the ghosts — people who drowned, objects forgotten or carelessly discarded — on the bottom of the lake. What do/can they say to me? Do their messages travel through the pale milfoil that stretches up to the light?

2 — a lake is not as wild as the river or the sea, but it’s wilder than a pool (9 july 2024)

An open water slogan I’ve seen before: no walls. No lane lines or lanes. But, this isn’t Homer’s sea, Alice Oswald’s unfenced purple. There are shores in sight (well, mostly in sight) and only vines, fish, and swan boats to encounter. No sharks or motorized boats or big waves. Does that mean the lake is all routine? Safe, steady, predictable?

from A Swim in Co. Wicklow/ Derek Mahon

Spirits of lake, river
and woodland pond preside
mildly in water never
troubled by wind or tide;
and the quiet suburban pool
is only for the fearful —

no wind-wave energies
where no sea briar grips
and no freak breaker with
the violence of the ages
comes foaming at the mouth
to drown you in its depths.

Lake Nokomis is affected by wind and watermilfoil reaches out to grip me near shore almost every swim. No, it’s not the sea, but it’s also not a suburban pool.

In the lake, you can’t see much, either above or below. Above: water, vague trees, sky, sand. Below: your hand, ghost vines, silver flashes. No bottom, just void, nothing, or something not-seen. 

In an essay about open swimming in the sea, Lauren Groff (love her writing and her awesome Olympic triathlete sister!) writes:

There is danger, a great deal of it. There are sharks that circle her. They wait. Their teeth shine in the murk. Their bodies lazily trail her shadow as it darts over the coral reef. 

Lake Nokomis doesn’t have sharks. It has uncertainty, mystery, a floor only 15-20 feet below scattered with things we can’t see because the water is stirred up, murky. I wonder, which is scarier? Swimming above sharks you can see, or above a nothing that could be anything that you can’t?

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
75 degrees

A few hours before open swim started, the sky unzipped and it rained hard. I think that might be the reason the water was so full of vegetation: whole vines, chunks of vines, and some green slimy substance. Gross! Before I realized what was happening, I swam through the slime — bright green, soft but not in a pleasant way. I’m glad my mouth was closed and I had a nose plug in. Hopefully it’s not toxic. In the 10 years I’ve been doing open swim, this is the first time I’ve experienced anything like this slime. I almost stopped after one loop, but decided to swim 2 more.

added, 10 july 2024: Reading back through my description, I wanted to add that I didn’t just swim through one random patch of this green slime. It was everywhere, all around the lake. Starting the first loop, before I realized the slime was there, I recall feeling something on the side of my head and wondering if some of my hair had escaped from my cap. No — I think it was some of the slime. The first loop was the worst, but for every loop, I could see it, often below me, but sometimes near the surface.

Okay, against better judgment — mine and Scott’s — I looked it up and it might be blue-green algae, which could be bad and make me sick. Hopefully not. Probably not. If were blue-green algae I think someone would have seen it and they would have cancelled open swim. Future Sara will let us know. (note: future Sara added an update on the original entry)

3 — working on inklings (1 aug 2025)

Today I’m working on more swimming sonnets and Inklings. Some subjects: water quality, blue-green algae, milfoil, water as the medium, loops at lake nokomis are actually triangles, the color of the water, Alice Oswald seeing self in water, again and more darkly, Mary Oliver and the deepening and quieting of the spirit

note: I should look for the pages document in which I might have drafts of some of the poems that I didn’t use!

4 — some poetry lines (12 june 2020)

O for the rising ozone, the dropping oxygen, for algae overblooming like an omen or an oracle.
(from O/ Claire Wahmanhom

5 — a ramble on lake water testing (14 aug 2025)

a ramble on lake water testing

A revelation just last week. Minneapolis Parks tests the lake water weekly, and testing the water is better than not testing the water. But the slow and rigid system of testing only on Mondays and getting results on Tuesdays (e-coli) and Wednesdays (algae blooms) combined with the fickle changes in quality based on weather and other environmental factors, means the testing is not very accurate for what the conditions are at any given time. On an abstract level, it seems obvious to me that you can’t rely on tests to guarantee safe water, but on an experiential level — that is, being in the water swimming for over an hour at a time roughly 6 times a week for 11 summers — I needed an unquestioned faith in those tests and the park’s ability to let me know when it was/wasn’t safe to swim in order to get in the water.

And, mostly it is safe in the water. And it is clean. I get very irritated when someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about says to me, eww, how can you swim in that dirty water!? Minneapolis Park workers and volunteers do an amazing job of keeping the water quality high. And this is partly due to their regular testing. But, these tests can’t guarantee anything.

What am I trying to do here? I’m not blaming the parks department; these tests are expensive and it would be difficult to test regularly enough to keep up with the quick shifts in wind and rain and the groundwater problems (like unstable sewer systems) that have existed from the beginning of the lake’s modern shape in the 1920s when workers excavated peat and used it to build up the surrounding neighborhood. Not to mention climate change and erratic weather and an excess of nutrients getting into the water from lawn fertilizers. And people feeding ducks who poop in the water which increases the amount of e-coli. No, I think Minneapolis Parks, especially Minneapolis Aquatics, are amazing.

All of this is complicated and messy with no easy answers. And it’s scary. I’ve been wondering for a few years when it’s going to happen — because it seems inevitable that it will happen — that lakes will no longer be safe to swim in, unfiltered outside air will no longer be safe to breathe. And this is how it happens, I think. Not all of sudden, but slowly. More days with bad test results and beach closures. Or inaccurate test results and water that is pea-soup green and slimy and that might get you sick.

I suppose this last paragraph sounds depressing, and it is, and also it isn’t. I love swimming in lake nokomis, and I would do a tremendous amount to keep swimming in it. Maybe it’s time to figure out what I can do to help keep it safe.

6 — in the still water of a lake, land will try to reclaim water (5 july 2025)

. . . ponds and lakes are far from permanent; rivers will tend to grow naturally with time as they do their own excavating, but the opposite is true for still water. Unless ponds and lakes are given some help, they will all eventually return to land, It starts with algae, then the rushes and other shallow water plants getting a foothold, and this allows sediments to gather, water turns to wet mud, and a reinforcing cycle begins that culminates in the water losing the battle against the encroaching land.

How to Read Water/ Tristan Gooley

june 23/RUN

4 miles
monument and back
65 degrees

Hot! Bright sun. Some shade. I watched my shadow beside and below me as I ran the stretch of the east river trail between the lake street bridge and shadow falls. Heard a coxswain, then 20 minutes later saw the white boat on the river. I think I saw some rowers, too, but it might have just been waves.

I did 90/30, which should have felt easy, but didn’t. But it kept my pace and heart rate a little lower. Wore my Brooks Ghosts and some new socks — size: youth. I like this size — not too tight or too loose. My feet felt okay until the last mile when the widest part, below the big toe, started to rub, then slightly ache. No Brooks for my long run, either tomorrow or Thursday. 10 miles this week.

Listened to the cars and the kids and the sound of my feet striking the ground for the first half, then Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, for the second part. I like it; it’s fun to run to. As I walked back, I listened to her song, “Purple” — I better add that to my color playlist!

10 Things

  1. the sandbar, under the lake street bridge, was just beneath the surface of the river
  2. little kids being dropped off at the church daycare — as I ran by, I heard the bell for them to go inside and start the day
  3. cars backed up on the bridge due to a red light far up the hill
  4. voices in the ravine, near shadow falls
  5. the bottom of the water fountain at the monument was flowing continuously — had someone left something on? was the button stuck? no, I think it’s designed to do that for draining and dogs
  6. only one open spot at the monument parking lot
  7. workers were doing something under the lake street/marshall bridge — it didn’t impact pedestrians or the walking trail, but the road up the hill was closed
  8. a line of bikers on the trail — about 8 silver riders in bright yellow vests
  9. running by a house — a flash of red, then a small bird landed on a railing — mostly it had no color for my bad eyes, but a few times I could see that it was red
  10. the slide-y (but not slippery) feel of my feet striking the soft sandy grit on the desire path next to the paved trail

note: It is 2:44 pm and thunderstorms are predicted, starting at 4. Open swim is set to begin at 5:30. Will it happen? Future Sara, let us know! . . . Future Sara here: cancelled at 4 pm, amidst a steady rain with occasional thunder.

weeds / entanglement

Remembering this hours after my run: near the end of the walk home, I thought about nets and being entangled. Why? Just remembered! It was the lines in Olivia Rodrigo’s “Purple” in which she sings about unraveling. Wait — not “Purple” but “The Cure”:

Refrain]
But I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)
I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)
I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)
I’m unraveled (I’m unraveled)

[Chorus]
And my head is full of poison, and my heart is full of doubt
I got toxins in my bloodstream, you tried hard to suck ’em out
And it feels like medication, and it’s good for me, I’m sure
But it don’t matter how your love feels anymore
It will never be the cure

I thought about unraveling is the unwanted thing here; she’s falling apart. But, unraveling can be desired; I’d like for the thick knots and tangles of milfoil to unravel in the swimming area at lake nokomis. This lead me to think about nets and how they can trap us or keep us safe. And knots — in hair, of stomach anxiety, with thread, they’re bad, but on anchors, on the ends of drawstrings, for keeping shoes tied tightly as you run, they’re good.

Knot is a tangle, a problem that needs
unraveling. Not is the thing that isn’t / doesn’t /wouldn’t. Knot a securing, a way of holding on.

Knot Work / Not Work / Knot Hole / Not Whole

When I looked up the lyrics of “The Cure,” I discovered that Rodrigo is calling her tour the Unraveled Tour and has a very cool video for the song, which involves some visually freaky and cool unraveling:

Midway through the video Rodrigo begins unraveling as red threads emerge from her outstretched fingers. More and more red appears.

screenshot from “The Cure” by Olivia Rodrigo / red thread emerges from an outstretched hand

And here’s another knot poem that I posted on this log years ago. It’s a favorite of mine:

Epistemology / Catherine Barnett

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

Her discussion of trees talking to each other and growing through fences returns me to the Knot Work / Not Work poem. Here’s what Jishin No-ben (Lee Ann Roripaugh, trans.) writes about tree knots and burls:

from Knot Work / Not Work / Knot Hole / Not Whole: a Mapping

2.
Formed in trunks where branches used to be,
or where the trunk’s growth has choked off
the smaller, lower branches in a tree. Each knot
the mark of a tightening tourniquet surrounding
a phantom limb. Each knot a scar, a toughening
over to cauterize loss, seal the body shut so it doesn’t
bleed out in the snow. In a concentration camp
in Minidoka, Idaho, wood artist George Nakashima
learned to burnish the souls of trees through their scars:
their knots, their holes, their cracks, their broken histories.

. . .

4.
Burl’s the wood formed when a tree is sick
or stressed, causing the grain to arabesque
into strange spirals, distorted forms, eye-spotted
with visible knots. Burl erupts when infestations
of insects or mold spread unchecked beneath bark’s
façade, the burl becoming larger, more ornate,
as the tree continues to grow. They sound like tumors,
or eyesores, but burl’s actually expensive and rare.
A tree can’t survive without its burl. When burl
is cut from a tree while it’s still alive, the tree dies.

I’d like to use these descriptions of tree biology as an inspiration for my discussion of milfoil biology — about how milfoil spreads and chokes out the light and starves fish and ensnares swimmers’ arms.

june 22/SWIM

3 loops (6 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees

Summer! A beautiful night for a swim. Hardly any wind, warm sun. There were lots of swimmers with yellow and pink buoys. Someone was playing dance music over at Hidden Beach. As I rounded the far buoy during loops 5 and 6, I did several breaststrokes so I could listen. A few very long milfoil vines stretched up from the bottom, which is much deeper than lake nokomis.

I recited some of my favorite lines about swimming from Alice Oswald’s Dart. He dives, he shuts himself in the deep soft-bottom silence — I forgot to recite the next line, which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous — and jumped ahead to, he lifts the lid and shuts and lifts the lid and shuts and the sky jumps in and out of the world he loafs in. I couldn’t quite remember how the next line started, but now I do: Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts. Love those lines!

10 Things

  1. a swimmer wades in the shallow water near the buoy waitint — to warm up? to get the courage to swim across? to take in the beauty of an early evening?
  2. bubble friends! more of them, below me
  3. a tapping on my toe as I rounded the far buoy — was it another swimmer? a fish? something else? who knows
  4. music, laughter, lots of chatter at hidden beach
  5. all I could sight on the way out was the red kayak of the lifeguard
  6. all I could sight on the way back was the break in the trees
  7. a few spots of glimmering surface
  8. the orange buoy at hidden beach was rarely there and when it was, it was only an orange dot, or the idea of an orange dot
  9. the orange buoy at point beach was muted and covered in shadow — I never saw it from far away, only when I was pretty close to it
  10. strange undercurrents in the water — something disturbing the water — sometimes it was another swimmer, sometimes it wasn’t

A great swim. I did one more loop than I did last time and never really stopped — other than the brief seconds when I readjusted my nose plug. In the later loops, my feet felt a little strange. Were they about to cramp? I paused and treaded water as I assessed them.

Found this in my entry from 2025 on 22 june — the return of my “On This Day” practice!:

Saturday 6:30 a.m. Swimming.

Red water plants waver up from the bottom in an attitude of plumes. How slow is the slow trance of wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.

“An Essay on Swimming” / Anne Carson

Thinking about the Eurasian Watermilfoil (milfoil) at Lake Nokomis, It does not waver in an attitude of plumes. It is a thick thatch, choking out the light, wrapping itself around arms, legs, shoulders.

Thinking more about the Eurasian milfoil, I recalled looking it up and posting some information about it a few years ago. I searched, and found it: 5 july 2024

aquatic plant management

“A few days ago, I looked up information about the vegetation/vines that I swim above in lake nokomis. I looked them up a few years ago, and recall learning that they were milfoil, but this summer I started doubting that I was remembering the name right. I was! There are two types of watermilfoil: 

Eurasian watermilfoil : invasive, choking out native plants
Northern watermilfoil: native, food for the fish

On the Minneapolis Parks’ site, they describe aquatic plant management, which was fascinating. The most effective way to control Eurasian watermilfoil is to harvest it, either with a mechanical harvester or by scuba divers (!). The mechanical harvester, which from what my bad eyes can see is a boat with a big spinning blade

removes plants that are in the top four to six feet of water. The harvested plant material is removed from the water and stored until the end of summer when it is brought to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum to be used as organic fill for their operations. 

Aquatic Plant Management

The scuba divers, who only do this on Wirth Lake and Lake Nokomis, hand-pull the watermilfoil in areas that are inaccessible for the mechanical harvester. I wonder what areas are inaccessible and if I’ve ever witnessed the scuba pulling and not realized it. Very cool!”

Looking through the page today (2026), I noticed that they have a harvesting map for 2026. I also read on the aquatics plant management site that harvesting happens (roughly) from memorial day – aug 31st. I decided to send Minneapolis Parks a message and ask if and when they were planning to harvest the milfoil this summer. Hopefully they will answer, and hopefully it’s soon!

In the meantime: I will avoid that area! And maybe, I’ll try thinking about entanglements and knots and being tethered in ways that restrict, bind, limit. Or, I’ll think about weeds and invasive species and lake vegetation and how and why it overtakes lakes.

a note from Sara-this-second and Sara-since-Saturday and Summer Sara for Sara-sooner-or-later Listen lady, we are taking a break from reading and holes and Alice in Wonderland. We want to be immersed in water — waterlogged and water-logging! Come back in the fall!1

  1. I want to finish my May monthly challenge summary this afternoon and then shift into re-reading my favorite swimming/water poems and working on my waterlog project and returning to Alice Oswald and Anne Carson. ↩︎

june 21/RUNSWIM

run: 2.3 miles
lake nokomis
64 degrees

Decided to run a loop around lake nokomis before open swim in order to be warmed up when I entered the cold water. The run was hard. It felt warm and my gait felt awkward. My favorite part about the run was nearing the big beach and hearing, then seeing, swimmers rounding the far green buoy. I thought: that will be me in a few minutes! And it was.

Overheard: a group of 7 or 8 runners, one of them calling out to the others: They didn’t give us any room. I guess they thought it was their path. Yep, I’ve thought, and probably said, that same thing to Scott on some run around this lake.

I was just reminded of this when I heard the bells of St. Thomas as I write this at my dining room table: When we arrived at the lake, I heard some bells chiming in the distance. I’m assuming a church service was starting somewhere — maybe at the church on Cedar, near Fat Lorenzos?

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
67 degrees

It felt warmer today, maybe because it was sunny. I noticed pink and yellow and orange safety buoys tethered to torsos, bent elbows, glittering water, a few splashes. Some swimmers wore wet suits, some wore training suits. I don’t think I noticed any swan boats or non-lifeguard kayaks.

I’m not sure I felt strong, but I felt stronger in the lake than last week. I decided as I stroked 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left that June is always a more challenging month for open swim: the water’s colder and I’m using muscles that I haven’t used for 9 months.

The milfoil in the swimming area and near the start of the loop was terrible. Thick stretches of it, with individuals vines wrapping around my wrists and feet. I managed to avoid the worst of it on the way out, but when I returned I got stuck in a wide patch of it that I struggled to swim out of. As I have said to more than one person, I am a very strong, experienced swimmer and, even so, I had a few flashes of panic as I wondered how to get out and around these vines. I am seriously concerned that someone will drown in them. They are in the swimming area.

I wonder, is there anything Minneapolis Parks can do about this? Also, if enough people complain, will they have to close down the beach? I don’t want that, but I also don’t want someone to drown in this water or these vines to not be addressed. Sigh.

I’m glad that I ran and that I was able to swim 2 loops in slightly warmer water. Unfortunately, it didn’t help my mood. A few days ago, I wondered what was worse: perimenopausal anxiety or perimenopausal irritability. I thought anxiety was worse, but today, I am irritated and upset and I think it’s just as bad as anxiety. Oh well, like a wave, it will pass over.

Speaking of passing over, I noticed the dark shadow of a plane, blocking out the sun for a few seconds. Even though I know what it is, it is strange and settling (and kind of cool) when it happens.

10 Things

  1. bubbles — surrounding my hands as they entered the water
  2. clouds
  3. breathing to one side: blue sky
  4. breathing to the other side: clouds
  5. stopping in the middle of the lake: silence, solitude
  6. the bright orange first buoy, sometimes looking orange, sometimes white, once or twice green, a few times not there
  7. swimmers: 3 across, a good space between us, all heading towards the far green buoy at the different angles
  8. overheard before beginning: Theo, get your shoes! It’s time to go!
  9. exiting the water, watching as a toddler in a polka dot bathing suit ran across the sand and towards the swings
  10. chanting to myself, lifts the lid and shuts1
  1. I need to re-memorize the A Oswald lines so that I can recite them properly! ↩︎

june 20/RUN

6 miles
hidden falls loop
61 degrees
humidity: 77%

The sun and the humid air made it feel warmer than 61. If only it could feel like this tomorrow during open swim — warm, that is. A quiet, calm morning. Not too crowded on the trails or the roads. Lots of dappled light, flickering leaves. The only time I remember looking at the water was when I had just started crossing the ford bridge. I could see the dark reflections of the fir trees on the water.

I wore my bright yellow shoes. Today, they didn’t feel so bad. Before I went out for my run, I studied the bottom of my shoes. The Brooks Ghosts are already starting to wear down near the big toe, but the Saucony Cohesions and Rides are not. So, do the Ghosts change where I strike my foot, or are they just thinner at that spot? One day I’ll get my stride evaluated by someone at Mill City Running or another local running store.

I did some variations on the Galloway method (90 sec run/30 sec walk). I started with 15 minutes of running, then 90/30 for some time, then 3 min/1 min. Next time I need to commit to just running 90/30 the entire time and see what happens.

Right as I began running, I looked far ahead at the small circle of light at the end of a tunnel of sidewalk and trees. I thought about Alice and her view as she first falls down the hole:

down
and down

Watching this again, I remembered the light from above being brighter. Oh well, I still like it as inspiration for my hole series. Does it work for blur (see below)?

A few times, I recited “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” by Emily Dickinson as I ran. Not sure I ever made it all the way through; I was distracted by the sound of a skateboard or the flash of a leaf or the feeling of sweat dripping down my face.

As I ran by the empty benches near the Ford/Power Plant overlook, I imagined biking here on some other day and sitting and reading a book, or writing or poem, or taking in the world around me.

10 Things

  1. loud music — dance? techno? — booming from a bike speaker
  2. a sprinkling, tinkling sound — was it falling water or rustling leaves?
  3. a few puddles from yesterday’s rain
  4. soft, wet dirt on the trail between the river road and lena smith boulevard
  5. the flickering shadow of one leaf being moved by the wind
  6. 2 older men talking, sitting at a picnic table near the skate park in Highland Park
  7. a woman running with a stroller, crossing near hidden falls — did she or the kid she was pushing make any noise? I don’t think so
  8. hot sun, then refreshing shade, at Highland Bridge
  9. passing a woman talking on a phone: then, what is it?
  10. 2 women walking — one, to the other: I haven’t perfected my pizza yet

holes and Alice

As I (finally) worked on my summary for April’s monthly challenge, I was inspired to return to the holes project. I want to keep experimenting with the Alice in Wonderland angle and the rabbit hole. What inspiration can I get from some of the scenes in Alice in Wonderland (1951)? So far, I have 3 scenes in particular: Alice falling down the hole1, Alice talking with the Caterpillar, and Alice and the Cheshire Cat.

Just now, I re-watched the Cheshire Cat scene and I’m thinking of pairing it with parts of hole 3: “land in a logic of blur and almost” and “read sentences sliced in half, glitching just enough to scramble what is real and imagined.” At the beginning of the scene, the cat is only a voice singing nonsense words, then a mouth, then eyes. Later, he is only footprints and stripes. How to represent that on the page? And, is that more almost than blur? Should the line be, “land in a logic of almost’?

Another part of this new approach is to simplify the image so that it is easier to understand as form/silhouette. I’m thinking of putting it on a single page — the page in which the word “hole” appears in the NYer essay — instead of the 4 panels. I’m hoping that will translate more effectively online (and on smaller screens).

Back to hole 3: what if I made the blur and almost as two different scenes/pages — one is blur, one almost. “Almost” would be the cat, and “Blur” would be –? I’ll keep thinking about that one. Blur = soft and fuzzy forms, before we grow accustomed to the Dark, right after the light has gone out, or grown too dim? Maybe, the image of a small hole of light, with everything else growing darker?

is water alive?

I was looking for something else (search on poets.com = “blur”) and found a wonderful essay about a poem, “on the water” and its dis/connection to ecopoetics. The author of the essay and the poem, Moheb Soliman, says this about water:

It’s a sacred hook—an existentially common denominator—the basis of everything, to build on together. You understand, but you’re deeply ambivalent about the abstraction of water. Water like a banner quivering in place, placeless. You fear placelessness. It’s why you are addicted to Google Maps. Isn’t everybody? Totalizing specificity, proper naming, sublime order, knowable space.

Yet, like many, you try and reject colonial hegemony. You can’t help but revere Indigeneity. But water flows one way at divides—you’re either duped by western science water as inanimate substance, or you’re co-opting animist beliefs about water. You don’t think of water as alive, nor of it as just a resource. Is there no other way?

Moheb Soliman on “on the water”

The line, You don’t think of water as alive reminded me that I have Is a River Alive? on my Libby audiobook shelf. TIme to start listening/reading, I think!

Perhaps a question to pursue this summer: (how) is a lake alive?

  1. Writing this, I was thinking about the moment before she/we grows accustomed to the Dark and can only see the whites of her eyes, but now I’m also thinking about the moment before that when we see her from the perspective of her cat Dinah as she call out, with delight, Goodbye Dinah! Goodbyyyyyyyeeee! How could I imagine that on a page? ↩︎

june 19/SWIM

3 loops / 1733 strokes
lake nokomis open swim
65 degrees / drizzle
water temp: < 70 degrees

Cold water! I might need to wear my wetsuit for the next swim. I can handle feeling cold at the beginning; it’s the deep cold that I feel in my hands and feet after an hour of swimming that I don’t like. Is it that I have poor circulation? Whatever it is, my right middle finger was starting to go number halfway in. I didn’t want to stop swimming, so I kept wriggling it mid-stroke and trying to punch the water extra hard with that hand. I wonder if it would help if I ran a mile or 2 as a warm-up before the swim?

Cold water aside, it was a great swim. A little drizzle, overcast. Not too many people or boats. Only a few swan boats and one paddle boarder.

I decided to try swimming through the milfoil again at the start. It was still there, but not too bad. The trick: don’t try to swim freestyle through it; don’t try to swim at all. Just glide over it with the occasional breaststroke kick.

I saw a few silver flashes under me near the first orange buoy and one small dead fish, belly-up near the beach. No minnows, but a few bubbles and my sparkle friends — sediment particles coming at me as I swam towards the big beach.

I followed a swimmer — I think it was a woman, but why do I think that? Did I see something other than their orange buoy for a second? — for at least 2 of the loops. I wasn’t trying to follow them — I didn’t want to follow them — but we were going almost the same speed and taking the same trajectory from buoy to buoy. In addition to their orange buoy, I noticed some pink and yellow safety buoys, too. Also noticed at least two people swimming the wrong direction. You are supposed to always keep the buoys to your right, but they had them to their left.

There weren’t any waves, but sometimes the water was choppy, and sometimes it felt like it was being sucked from under me, which makes it harder to feel any power or control in your stroke. Swimming back to the big beach, I often had to breathe every 2 or 4 — always breathing to my right, because the water was high on the left side.

Right before I left for the swim, I reread one of Alice Oswald’s description of swimming in Dart. So good!

Here’s what I read:

Then I jumped in a rush of gold to the head,
through black and cold, red and cold, brown and warm,
giving water the weight and size of myself in order to imagine it,
water with my bones, water with my mouth and my understanding
where my body was in some way a wave to swim in,
one continuous fin from head to tail
I steered through rapids like a canoe,
digging my hands in keeping just ahead of the pace of the river

—

He dives, he shuts himself in a deep soft-bottomed silence
which underwater is all nectarine, nacreous. He lifts
the lid and shuts and lifts and shuts and the sky
jumps in and out of the world he loafs in.
Far off and orange in the glow of it he drifts

What I remembered (but slightly wrong) was this:

open the lid and shut, open the lid and shut

I recited it for a few minutes as I punched through the chop, lifting my head to breathe, then dropping it again to avoid a face full of water.

I heard then saw some military planes taking off. The water was blue-ish gray, the visibility low. At one point, I had a moment of panic when I was so used to the safety buoy belt around my waist that it felt like it wasn’t there. Oh no, did I lose my phone? Nope. I checked and it was still there.

It was a good swim. Again, I swam straight to the buoys even when I didn’t think they were there. I had the occasional flash of panic when I suddenly though, what if I got a cramp or felt faint here, in the middle of the lake?, but those flashes didn’t last long.

june 18/RUNSWIM

9.15 miles
lake nokomis and back
57 degrees / humidity: 87%

My longest run in more than a year. It is humbling to feel like 9 miles was the most I could do (at least today) when I ran a marathon just 2 years ago. Of course, thanks to perimenopausal anxiety, I have flashes of worrying that it’s not being out of shape but something physically wrong with me. A few days ago, Scott and I had a discussion — which is worse: peri/menopausal anxiety or peri/menopausal irritability? I guess, being irritable is a drag for everyone around you, but it seems less draining than worrying that every small ache or pain means you might have a terminal illness. I am rarely irritated, but I am often anxious.

I ran the first mile without stopping, then moved into my 90 seconds of running, 30 seconds of walking. I like this method, although I was a little disappointed that my heart rate was still higher. Was it the humidity? Is that just how my heart rate works when I’m running? Is it a bigger concern — some heart problem? Or was it because I ran the first mile without stopping instead of doing the 90/30 from the beginning? I imagine it was mostly the humidity and doing a continuous first mile. At the halfway point, I experimented with the ratio: 3 min run/1 min walk and 2 min run/1 min walk.

assessment: I feel pretty good now, and I definitely had more energy at the end of the run. My feet hurt — not as much as they have in past runs, but the ball of both feet still ached at the end. Also: my ankles were a little sore, too.

Even though it was humid, and I wished I had worn my tank top instead of a short-sleeved shirt, I didn’t feel too hot. Lots of shade, a cool-ish breeze. I heard at least one woodpecker, laughing; the babbling creek; a dog losing its mind — bark bark bark bark — across the creek. I greeted several walkers and runners, stopped at the park bathroom right before reaching mile 8. I ran past some guy watching a pickleball match; counted several kayaks out on the water; encountered a biggish group of runners ahead of me — would I get tangled up with them? No, thankfully they stopped at the playground to do some exercises and to pair up. As I passed them, I could hear someone calling out, okay, now find someone with about your same pace.

For 8 of the miles, I listened to the world around me. Cars streaming past on the parkway; the hum of a hoverboard on the bike path; kids calling out to each other at the creek; and the thwack of the ball on the pickle ball court. For mile 9, I put in my “windows” playlist. The song I most remember was one I’m almost skipped, Pete Seeger’s “Fly through my window” — little bird little bird fly through my window

random bummer news: The Minneapolis Park Board voted to close the dog park and one of the most decorated American female mid-distance runners, Jenny Simpson, had a medical emergency while pacing a mile race on Monday night: her heart stopped and they gave her CPR for 20 minutes before it restarted. She’s in the hospital now, recovering. She is 39 and just retired from running a few years ago.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
70 degrees

Brrrrr. I’m not sure what the water temperature was, but it felt cold. Probably 70 degrees. The water was a bit choppy today and full of menacing swan boats and a few clueless kayaks. I couldn’t always tell if the kayak was a lifeguard moving across the course or some random kayaker not paying attention to the course — or maybe not realizing there was a course. I wouldn’t be surprised if no one told them what was going on.

I took RJP’s advice and started at the far edge of the beach, in line with the last green buoy, to avoid the tangles of milfoil at the other end of the beach. It helped a lot. The only milfoil I encountered was a few stray vines in the middle of the lake. One wrapped around my head and I had to fling it off, mid-stroke.

10 Things

  1. clear bubbles, made by my piercing hands
  2. a strange squeaking, rubbing noise as a swan boat neared
  3. often the orange buoys look white, the green ones too
  4. again, I swam straight to the buoys even when I couldn’t see them — only them when I was about 15 feet away from them
  5. the rope tethering the last green buoy to the lake bottom was at a sharp angle
  6. entering the water, I walked past 3 guys skipping rocks at the edge of the water
  7. a few silver flashes
  8. almost ran into another swimmer — I didn’t see them until they were right there
  9. sighting a green buoy, swimming towards it, seeing a sailboat near it and wondering if I had seen the buoy at all or just a boat — always, the buoy was there
  10. my first few steps in the water: brrrrr! very cold — I warmed up but felt very cold by the end, after sitting at Painted Turtle for a half an hour, my heels were numb

june 16/RUNSWIM

3.1 miles
2 trails
69 degrees

A sunny afternoon. Warmer than I thought it would be. Not an easy run, but I did it, and I got to travel on the winchell trail, which was shaded. Mostly the trail was in complete shade, but occasionally some sun came through. In a few spots it glowed so much that I wondered if it was white paint. Nope — I double-checked, just sun. I heard some kids above, then a person sitting on the 38th street steps having a disturbing conversation about someone being shot in the head. I hope they were talking about a movie or a tv show.

5 Run and 5 Swim Things

  1. the path was thick with bikers
  2. the road was crowded with cars
  3. the two benches that I recall noticing were occupied
  4. puddles on the trail from last night’s rain
  5. 2 kids on the dirt part of the winchell trail — the younger kid to the older one: do it! the older kid’s response: that’s mean!s
  6. several military jets flying above the lake
  7. water color: a pale blue-green
  8. little spirits at my feet! (minnows near the shore)
  9. a few friends: sediment and bubbles
  10. the water was so low — near the shore, it was far from the lifeguard stands and there was a little drop-off near the water

swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
70 degrees

A great swim! Again, I swam straight to the buoys without seeing them. And when I couldn’t see anything but water and trees and sky, I didn’t panic at all.

A few silver flashes below. 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left. Sometimes, 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right. Steady strokes. Sometimes I was sore, sometimes I was worried about my heart rate1, and all of time I was deeply grateful to be swimming in this lake with my strong shoulders and back.

Some dog updates

First, on Saturday, Delia the dog started limping and not putting any weight on her back left leg. On Monday the vet delivered the bad news: a torn ACL. Major bummer! Delia is in good spirits. In fact, she’s managed to figure out how to hop on that leg pretty effectively. It’s hard having to stop her. Currently we’re trying to decide between surgery or not. If she were a bigger dog, there would be no question: surgery. But, with smaller dogs, taking it easy and rehabbing might be enough. Surgery is expensive and traumatic, but so is not being able to run and jump and do much of anything for many months.

Second, it is seeming more likely that the off leash dog park will be closing by the end of 2026. It is on sacred Dakota land, I support the returning of this land (see this article for more info). At first, I was sad about losing it, but then Delia tore her ACL and we think it might have been at least partly due to an aggressive and unsupervised dog at the park. Many dog owners are great with their dogs at the park, but some use it as daycare, ignoring the rules of keeping your dog within sight. Even if the dog park stayed open, I don’t think we would taking Delia back there.

  1. last night at cedar lake, my average heart rate for the swim was 160, which was alarming. Usually it’s under 130. Combine that with my anxiety over any anomaly in my watch data, and I was a little worried. Checked my heart rate after I was done: 126. Phew. Back to normal. ↩︎

june 15/SWIM

2.76 degre5 loops (5 cedar loops)
cedar lake open swim
76 degrees

The first open swim at cedar lake. It was great. I swam for (almost) an hour. The water was cold, but not too choppy or fishy or full of vegetation. Only 2 or 3 big vines wrapped around my head or shoulder. My hands were cold by the fourth loop and my neck was sore.

10 Things

  1. big white clouds up above as I swam
  2. dark purple-ish clouds hovering as we drove away
  3. the vine that wrapped around my shoulders was scratchy and sharp, the one that wrapped around my head was not
  4. a new lifeguard — he was very enthusiastic and earnest about giving people information about open swim
  5. a small bird or a dragonfly zoomed in front of me once as I lifted my head
  6. successful sighting heading towards hidden beach — after a few years of trying, I think I’ve cracked the code!
  7. bright pink and yellow buoys
  8. bright green caps
  9. bubbles — made as my hand pierced the water
  10. clear enough to see my hand and my watch and the bottom right near shore but not much else

spider web

I’m stepping back from devoting all of my attention to the holes and lines and spiders and webs (at least I think I am), but I wanted to try out a web over one of my four panel found poems. So far, I’ve created a basic web over the unmarked text. Next, I might figure out how to mark the text and/or create a distorted (NASA drugged-out) web. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m slow in figuring out how to make things, but eventually I get there. Today I learned that for strength purposes, I should create the outer rings of the web first. Also learned that passing the thread over then under when looping makes it tighter. I think I’d like to study how the spider makes the orb web some more for ideas.

spider web / 15 june / hole 6