Category: Running Log

sept 6/REST

Today I was supposed to run my 18 miler, but yesterday I woke up to an angry right knee. I think my kneecap shifted and the ligaments around it are a bit inflamed. This morning, my knee is still sore, so I’m postponing the run until tomorrow. Nothing too worrisome, as long as I take it seriously and rest, which I am. Today, I RICE (rest, ice, compression, elevate). Tomorrow, an 18 mile run.

Also, today, I’m writing more poems for Girl Ghose Gorge. First up, Haunts: Lock and Dam no. 1. I decided to look up the Ford power plant because I recently hiked by it and because I’ve mentioned it in an early draft of the poem. I found this video that provides incredible footage of the interior of the steam plant. This plant shut down in 2011 and, even though it’s fenced off, urban explorers, like the creators of this video, frequently visit it.

note: skip the 1.5 min intro and the annoying voiceover

themes: abandoned industry; urban explorers (a form of ghost, often invisible/hidden, haunting certain places, dwelling in the dark edges); a river returning (flooded basements). Mentioned in the comments and a vivid image remembered by me as K and I hiked up the steep road: the vacant parking lot halfway up the road — cracked asphalt, weeds/plants growing through the cracks, several feet high).

Another element: the future of the locks and dam no. 1 (and the 2 other lock and dams in Minneapolis)– it’s currently being studied by the Army Corps of Engineers, who own it, to determine 1 of 3 futures: the Army Corps continues to own and operate it; they sell it to a local, state, or private entity; or they dismantle the lock and dam and let the river flow freely. A report will be released for public review in the spring of 2027. In July, 2026, MPR reported on the uncertain future of the locks and dams: What would removing twin cities locks and dams mean for the Mississippi River?

The report says removing the locks and dams could reshape how people experience the Mississippi in the Twin Cities, with places to explore, hike, fish and bird watch. It also could offer an opportunity to reconnect with sacred Dakota places along the river.

Federal land around the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam is being restored by a Dakota-led nonprofit, Owámniyomni Okhódayapi. The organization plans to turn the site into a place of healing, restoration and connection.

Down river, the Wakaŋ Tipi Center, a 27-acre Native-led cultural and environmental interpretive center, recently opened on the Mississippi River in St. Paul. 

What would removing twin cities locks and dams mean for the Mississippi River?

Here’s an ending line that I’d like to think about: removing the dams could take 10-20 years.

The MPR article lists ecological, recreational, economic, and cultural/spiritual reasons. I’m reminded of past park plans I’ve read and the shifting perspectives on what matters most and how to pitch decisions to the public. I’d like to think about this some more and possibly use it a poem I’m thinking of writing that uses text from different documents about managing the park (regional/national).

While exploring resources about the river, I came across a reference to PUBLIC LAW 100–696, November 18, 1988. It’s the establishing by Congress of

(1) The Mississippi River Corridor within the Saint Paul-Minneapolis Metropolitan Area represents a nationally significant historical, recreational, scenic, cultural, natural, economic, and scientific resource.

(2) TThere is a national interest in the preservation, protectionand enhancement of these resources for the benefit of the people of the United States.

source

key language:

preservation, enhancement, enjoyment, and utilization of the nationally significant resources of the Mississippi River Corridor / to protect, preserve and enhance the significant values of the waters and land / establish manage enforce

What about PUBLIC LAW 100–696 as the title of a poem?

It’s 5:31 pm: My knee seems somewhat better. I’ve iced it twice. It is still a little angry. I can’t decide if the kneecap is continuing to shift and agitate it, or if the area around the knee feels tight/inflamed because of an initial shift. My current thought is, whatever has happened, I should be okay to run tomorrow morning.

sept 4/RUN

5.7 miles
ford loop
74 degrees
humidity: 92% / dew point: 72

No sun until mile 4, humidity’s haze instead. The air, so thick! From the beginning, it felt like a steam bath and, when I reached the lake street bridge, it looked like one too. Running over it, my face was damp — was it sweat or the liquid air? I’m not sure.

Other than one longer walk break on ford bridge, I stayed steady with 3 minutes of running/1 minute of walking. Sometime during the run, it seemed to click. Even though it was uncomfortably humid, the run wasn’t that hard. A nice confidence boost.

10 Things

  1. river surface: corrugated — blue-gray, small ridges, a streak in the middle — the wake of boat?
  2. bright pink graffiti on the sidewalk on the bridge
  3. a new water fountain at the monument, with a fast-filling bottle station — excellent!
  4. shadow falls, falling, soft but insistent
  5. the jangling of a dog collar somewhere nearby
  6. feeling like fall, 1: piles of leaves on the edges of the paved trail
  7. feeling like fall, 2: even more red leaves sprinkled throughout the tree line
  8. several benches, occupied, each one with only one person
  9. sun and blue sky as I ran over ford bridge
  10. laughing kids on a school playground

On the Ford bridge, I stopped for a few minutes to admire the view upstream and to take a few pictures:

mississippi river looking north / blue sky / haze / blue water
ford bridge railing / 4 sept 2026

sept 3/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
78 degrees / dew point: 71

A recent refrain: hot, hot, so hot! I thought about running 10 miles, but when I couldn’t start my run until after 9, I decided 4+ miles would be enough. Tomorrow I’ll run to my new favorite bench which is about 7 miles there and back, so my total for this week of marathon prep will be fine. (5 on tues, 4.25 on thurs, 7+ on fri, 18 on sun). Yesterday, Scott and I spent about 8 hours at the fair — lots of time on feet. Can I count that as marathon training?

10 Things

  1. Morning Sara! / Oh, hi! good morning Dave!
  2. running beside a monarch for a few seconds — a splotch of beautiful orange at eye level — I thought about mom and how much she loved monarchs
  3. sun, then clouds, then sun again
  4. brittle, brown grass
  5. a few more red leaves, a yellowed tree — were the leaves on it changing for fall or dead?
  6. minnehaha creek above the falls looked still
  7. the creek water falling over the ledge, subdued and diminished
  8. the water at the water fountain on the edge of the park was unpleasantly warm
  9. one roller skier — click clack click clack
  10. the water at the fountain at the 36th parking lot was cool

Before I got too hot, I thought about looping around the falls an extra time or two to add distance. I made note of the distance: .7 miles. I can imagine a run where I do 1/2 mile run/.2 mile walk loops.

For the first half of my run, I didn’t listen to music, for the second half, I put in my headphones and listened to an old playlist, augustrun — “9 to 5”; “Misery Business”: “I’m Still Standing”; and “Can’t Touch This”.

Back to the fair: As we do every year, Scott and I waled around the fine arts building. And, as always, it was inspiring. There are some amazing artists in Minnesota. Scott took pictures of 2 textile/fiber art pieces that I particularly liked. One is inspiring for my HOLE project, the other for my gathering of plastic:

1 — Fireweed and Sky / Therese Zemlin / hand-cut and hand-woven digital prints o on paper (see also the description in her Instagram post)

fireweed and sky / a weaving of thin strips of paper with words printed on them

I love this idea of weaving words! It looks like something fun to try. I looked up the artist, Theresa Zemlin, and jackpot! She has a wonderful site and many more inspiring pieces in her gallery! The piece at the fair is part of a larger collection she has titled, Woven Works:

My work has evolved from weaving fabric on floor looms, to Eva Hesse-inspired mixed-media, to welding life-size steel and paper pulp sculptures, to the physical manipulation of photo-based inkjet prints on paper. Inspiration for my work has always been rooted in the tactile, the language of materials and process, and finding my way to something compelling through trial, error, and investigation. Combining photo-based inkjet prints, text from naturalists and philosophers, and traditional weaving drafts has resulted in modes of thinking, responding, and assembling that are new and familiar in terms of chance juxtapositions and relationships between pattern, structure, text, and image.

Woven Works/ Theresa Zemlin

Oh, I’m excited to give more time to her work and play around with some of the ideas!

further exploration: Listen to this podcast with Theresa Zemlin

2 — Once There Were Green Fields / Erik Jon Olson / quilted plastic waste

Once There Were Green Fields
once there were green fields, close-up

Erik Jon Olson has a wonderful website, too. Here’s what he writes on his artist statement:

My art practice exists at the intersection of material experimentation, environmental critique, and contemporary craft. Working primarily with single-use plastic waste that I layer, quilt, reconstruct and then stitch into large-scale compositions, I transform one of the main pollutants of our time into an expressive visual language. My work extends beyond the simple repurposing of found materials; it functions as an investigation into the cultural, ecological, and psychological consequences of contemporary consumption.
… The visual seduction of my compositions—their vibrant color, intricate patterning, and tactile surfaces—creates an intentional tension between attraction and repulsion. From a distance, the works evoke traditions of abstraction, quilting, and graphic design; upon closer examination, viewers encounter the unsettling reality of consumer waste embedded within the aesthetic experience. This dynamic compels viewers to confront uncomfortable truths through the language of visual pleasure.

Erik Jon Olson Artist Statement

I looked at his list of exhibits and he has a solo show going on right now at a church a few miles from my house. Nice!

David Bowie!

While writing this entry, I’ve been listening to David Bowie’s album, The Man Who Sold the World. I was struck by these lyrics from “All the Madmen”:

Day after day
They send my friends away
To mansions cold and grey
To the far side of town
Where the thin men stalk the streets
While the saints stay underground.

Wow, this song! Mansions cold and gray, the saints underground. Listening to another song on the album, “After All,” I looked it up and saw a reference to Nietzsche’s influence on Bowie, which led me to a review of a new book about Bowie and 6 key philosophers, including Nietszche: We’re Nobody’s Children. So far, I haven’t had any luck finding this book at a local library, or any samples of it online, but I’ll keep looking.

sept 1/RUN

5 miles
minnehaha falls+
70 degrees
humidity: 82%

Too warm this morning! Sun and humidity and sweat. Tried out my new Saucony Rides. No problems, so I’m optimistic they’ll be good for the marathon. Tried something new: 1 mile run/3 min walk + 2 x 1 mile/2 min walk + 3 x .5 mile/2 min walk. I liked it; I’ll have to try it again.

10 Things

  1. empty benches
  2. a recumbent bike, speeding past me — too close
  3. a few more red leaves on the bushes near the trail
  4. a large group of older, (all?) white people standing above the falls, listening to a guide tell the history of the falls
  5. the faint, fake sound of the light rail bells ringing as it neared an intersection
  6. veteran’s bridge is completely blocked with chain link
  7. a man sitting at a picnic table near John Steven’s house
  8. rushing water as it tumbled over the limestone ledge
  9. a trilling bird
  10. the sound of bike shoes clipping into pedals behind me — sharp, quick, satisfying

Randomly encountered a great interview with many wonderful passages, including this:

There’s also this pressure, I feel, and perhaps this is just an internal pressure I felt, to write about one’s grief from a cold remove. As I was writing in London, I was just telling myself, if I ever write a book about this, it must be conveyed how it is right now: the extreme absolute end of ecstasy and nothing more or less. I made it my imperative: you will be in the heart of it with me, and you, the reader, either stay or leave, and I don’t care what you do.

Interview with Temperance Aghamohammadi

And this:

For me, when we speak of divinity, it is that external sense of transit, trying to move from this realm to another, or to even peer into the other and recover something. But it’s also about puncturing something within oneself to get to that brink, look over into the chasm, and see what’s there.

Interview with Temperance Aghamohammadi

transit / move from one realm to another / look over into the chasm / a puncture

Here I’m thinking about moving around the gorge, and looking/hearing/feeling the chasm/gap between shores, between real/imagined, girl/ghost, daughter/mother, here/there (or, not here). I’m also thinking about that puncture as the wearing down/erosion/leaking/a rent in the veil (see MO Leaf and the Cloud)

Swimming One Day in August, update: Last week, after open swim season ended, I tried to continue accumulating minutes for my 24 hours of swimming, but I felt stuffed up and tired after I was done. Then I found out that the beach was being closed “due to geometric mean of E. coli exceeding 126 MPN/100 mL.” I realized that I almost certainly had swum in that water. I didn’t get sick but continued to feel congested for several days. I also realized that 24 hours was not going to happen this year; I was disappointed, but not that disappointed. I’ll try again next year. I’m sad that swimming is over (is it? will I try again before they take the buoys down?), but I’m happy to be breathing better. Besides, I have moved onto marathon training and revising and expanding my collection of gorge poems. Yesterday, I wrote a poem about The Monument and Shadow Falls that I’m particularly excited about. Today, I’ll try writing about the trestle and/or Bohemian Flats, Locks and Dam no. 1, the tunnel of trees.

aug 30/RUN

16 miles
lake harriet and back
68 degrees
humidity: 90%

16 miles! It was warm. That humidity! As I’ve heard several pro runners (on youtube or podcasts) say, humidity is the poor man’s altitude, which means I could expect to go slower — in fact, I should go slower — to account for the extra effort that hot and humid air demands. Before I started, I reminded myself that this run would be harder because of the humidity so I should take it easy. A mantra: if you’re not going slower, you’re going too fast. I also told myself that I only needed to worry about the first 8 miles to lake harriet because once I did that I was halfway and would have to run and/or walk another 8 miles back. Keeping my expectations low and being kind to myself helped.

I drank a lot of water, chewed on 6 or 7 Cliff blocks and sweat a lot. Somewhere between miles 10 and 12 I realized that my shirt was completely soaked and sticking to me. It was so wet that I was almost able to wring it out. Other than the humidity, the thing that made the run the hardest was my sore legs, especially my knees. I think that was partly due to all of the walking at the state fair we did 2 days ago. My knees felt stiff and sore even before I started!

3 things I did well: 1. even though I know I had unfinished business, it wasn’t a problem at all — no cramps, no need to stop at a port-a-potty!; 2. a steady pace for the first half + never totally going off the rails for the second half; and 3. believed I could do it the whole time and never gave into negative thoughts.

3 things to work on: 1. eat a bigger breakfast + drink more water before; 2. keep a steady pace with consistent run/walk sets when it gets tough — instead of taking a walk break, do easier run/walk sets, like 1 min run/ 1 min walk; and 3. try drinking electrolytes, and not just water, during the run.

16 Things

  1. rowers on the river! I could hear the coxswain barking out instructions at the start of my run
  2. minnehaha creek was so low, pt 1: near the duck bridge, there has hardly any water, but lots of green aquatic plants
  3. minnehaha creek was so low, pt 2: under the echo bridge, a huge sandbar (or, dirtbar?) in the middle of the creek
  4. a biker, biking slowly, and singing to herself, I am so tired
  5. minnehaha creek was so low, pt 3: mostly, the creek was quiet and still, with only the occasional whisper/babble
  6. running under the freeway, where the walking path is on the other side of the creek, I could hear something hissing and squeaking above me — bats?!
  7. thud thud –– the steady feet of a fast runner behind me, then beside me, then in front of me, then gone
  8. thwack thwack thwack pickle balls being hit hard on the pickle ball court near lake nokomis
  9. the strong gust of water coming out of the water bottle refill fountain — nice!
  10. reaching lake harriet to an empty beach with inviting water — I briefly thought about cooling off for a few minutes, but decided against it — too much sand in my shoes on the run back!
  11. lake harriet trails were crowded — lots of runners and bikers and walkers (and talkers!)
  12. a BIG peloton (30 or more riders) on the road
  13. mostly cloudy, every so often, sun
  14. orang spray paint, painted in zigzags over cracks and craters and bumps on the path that need to be fixed — there was a lot of it near the Rosie and Fletcher bridges
  15. people packing up after a church service at the falls
  16. one roller blader spotted near the beginning — I can’t remember if I heard their poles clicking, I just remember that they passed me on the trail

For the first 12 miles of the run, I listened to the world around me: hissing bats, rushing cars, a crying baby, laughter from kids somewhere beyond what I could see; moving water. For the last 4 miles, I put in my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist.

During the first few miles, I thought about part of a poem I’m working on. It begins with a quote from a PBS video about echolocation:

There’s sound and

there’s a lack
of sound, and
a lack of
sound still makes
noise. We call
it a sound
shadow.

As I ran, I thought about this pair sound/lack of sound and other pairs I encounter at the gorge, like space/lack of space, or ground/lack of ground (gap/gorge). Sound shadows are also called acoustic shadows. I looked them up and found an article about bats, accoustic shadows, and echolocation: Acoustic shadows help gleaning bats find prey

“We propose that bats perceive a change in depth profile and an ‘acoustic shadow’ cast by prey. The shadow is more salient than prey echoes and particularly strong on smooth surfaces.” Wow, I’m just thinking about how there are echoes, and there are acoustic shadows, but I’m still not sure I understand acoustic shadows.

Here’s the wikipedia definition:

“An acoustic shadow or sound shadow is an area through which sound waves fail to propagate, due to topographical obstructions or disruption of the waves via phenomena such as wind currents, buildings, or sound barriers” (source).

The deeper I dig into this, the more I think it is for a future project that explores echolocation more broadly.

Found this poem in the July/August issue of Poetry:

Not the Almost-Right Word / Jack Kirby

For Jack Gilbert

A friend tells me he was holding
his mother’s hand as she lay dying.
At the end, her final words were,
“I’ll find Dad and tell him you said hello.”
“Find,” she said. Not “I’ll see him”
or “we’ll be together again”
but “I’ll find Dad.” How astonishing
that language almost means
then frightens us when it doesn’t—
love, we say, God, we write,
and the words fall short. We dream
of  lost vocabularies, and from nowhere,
a word is worth a thousand pictures.
What you say doesn’t have to be true.
It only has to be imaginable.
Where is my friend’s father?
In the kitchen of that big house making coffee, say,
or sorting nails in the workshop.
Or in the yard, unlearning
the constellations so he can see the stars.

Notes: 
This poem includes lines from Jack Gilbert’s “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” and “Tear It Down.”

—

I like this idea of putting in two lines from these Gilbert poems for a few reasons: he doesn’t italicize which lines and it’s an invitation to find and read 2 more poems and put them into conversation with his poem. I want to try this out for my poems — the ones I’ve already written using others’ lines + the ones I’d like to write using those lines.

the bells: another meaning: the bell announcing the final lap of a track race

One of my favorite runners said the following in an interview after winning UTMB’s OCC (50k) race this past week:

The most played out race strategy of all time in the 1500. It’s like the bell rings and everybody goes with 400 to go.

I’m like this is such a predictable strategy. Everyone knows this is going to happen. But it’s kind of like what happened yesterday where it’s like something about crossing over that bridge and hitting the town and that’s like the bell ringing and something changes and your adrenaline spikes and you can actually like will the last bit of yourself.

Lauren Gregory

I wanted to archive this quotation as another meaning for bells. And here’s what she’s talking about in the race:

aug 27/RUN

9 miles
the confluence
63 degrees / humidity: 84%

9 miles! Still not easy, but I felt strong and relaxed and steady. For most of it, I ran 3 min, then walked 1. For 2 of the miles, I ran 90 sec, walked 30. Those miles were about 40 seconds faster, which might have been too fast; I think they made me more tired and increased my heart rate. When I hit mile 8, I thought, on Sunday, this will only be the halfway point of my run, but before I could dwell on it and wonder how I could run that much more on Sunday, I thought about something else, or I stopped thinking altogether.

When I was in the shade, which was about half the time, I felt cool-ish, but when I was in the sun, I was hot. So much sweat! I hope it cools down in September.

I wasn’t sure which route I would take this morning — to Lake Nokomis and back or the Confluence. I told Scott, I’m going to run south on the river road and let my body decide which one — either I’ll turn at Locks and Dam no. 1, or I’ll keep going past the falls. I’m not sure when I decided but, by the time I got to the locks and dam, there was no doubt I was turning.

11 Things

  1. looking down from the ford bridge, the water was smooth and still — I think I saw some sandbars just beneath the surface
  2. the river water was also low — I could see a long stretch of green (grass, I think) where there has been water in past years
  3. the gate that K and I had to squeeze through because it was locked a few weeks ago was open today
  4. hidden falls was quietly falling
  5. a tall man sitting on a bench, his long legs sprawled out in front of him, talking on the phone — I remember that I hear what he said, but I don’t remember what it was
  6. the click of a bikers shoes clicking into their pedals
  7. uneven brick — not broken but raised by (un) settling ground
  8. stopping at my favorite bench, which was in the shade, reading the plaque beside it as sweat dripped off of my face
  9. a lone skateboarder at the skateboard park — saw them in flash, heard the scuffing of the wheels
  10. more filled benches than empty ones
  11. almost forgot this one: everything was dry — the grass, the dirt that trickled down the bluff almost like water, the leaves, which sounded very loud in the quiet morning
Diana’s kindness warms us, her humor makes us smile, and her zest for life keeps us going.

I’ve decided to leave my shoes in the picture because I like the color of them. I just received an email that my new pair or Saucony Rides are arriving today — they are navy with aquamarine.

Looking up her name online, I found this short video that offers more images of where I was when I took this picture:

Diana Jean Jezewski was 20 when she died of cancer in 1999. So young! She was born 5 years after me. She graduated from Highland Park High School and had been captain of the volleyball team. What type of cancer did she have?

Looking at the poems-of-the-day, I found this fitting one on poets.org:

ghost ranch / kristin lueke

once again i’ve brought my dead dog to the party.
not the box of ashes, but the pen-drawn sketch
my friend lenny made six days after she died.

or five. i saw it coming, the way mimsy went. 
the hard part was saying it, so i wrote it down: 
something small i love is leaving me.

now it’s late morning in abiquiu & i’m alone 
in the courtyard, rolling around on the flagstone
breathing, a drawing of mimsy in the shade,

a mug cooling at her side. i said i don’t drink coffee
or need a week to myself but look at me now, trying 
not to lie. so i listen: a shrill of pinyon jays

in a juniper trills me from ghost to cobalt sky. all winter 
i didn’t see them, not a single thrill of murmuration 
& though it’s a hideous sound—a jay’s call, like a

small computer dying slow—to live, to move like that:
seven siblings at my side, six at each of theirs, my god! 
not thinking where’s the threat but being

more than one, not less than any . . .
the nearly-noon shadows recede & soon 
mimsy’s in full sun, where i leave her, the light

too bright to stay, the shrill too clear. i say yes,
i’ve seen a rock wren & no, that is a fishless osprey circling
the steppe & tomorrow i might make a cairn of quartz

just to knock it down, slip a stone into my pocket, 
put nine postcards in the mail, or begin another poem 
for lenny i’ll try to finish when i’m home—

                         you had a friend once.
                         now she’s different.
                         we remember what we need.

Much to think about and love in this poem. A question: does a bluejay really sound like a computer dying slowly? I guess I don’t know what a computer dying slowly sounds like. What I know is that a bluejay screech is grating and terrible — I recall thinking it sounded like (or, maybe felt like?) a dull knife hacking the silence until it ripped open.

aug 25/RUN

4 miles
trestle+ turn around
81 degrees
dew point: 67

It was overcast when I started, which made 81 degrees more manageable, but about 2.5 miles in, the clouds were gone and it was HOT. I ran a mile without stopping, then: 4 x 90s run with 30s walk in-between / 3 min walk / 3 x 90s run with 30s walk / 2 minutes walk / 5 x 90s run with 30s walk. For the runs, I ran fast-ish. It wasn’t easy, but it felt good to move faster.

For the first mile, I ran without headphones. There was a constant buzz of cars and bugs and planes, but no memorable or interesting sounds. For the sets, I put in my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist.

I don’t remember being swarmed by gnats or hearing the rowers or looking at the river. No roller skiers, but a few runners, strollers, bikers. Most of the benches were occupied. The most memorable thing: the crack north of the trestle. Approaching it from the north, which I did after turning around and heading back, the crack seemed deeper and more menacing — a maw ready to open even wider and swallow everything above it without warning. I suddenly wondered, is this why they have it barricaded off, because they are concerned it might turn into a sinkhole? Probably not. Most likely, they don’t want people tripping on it.

aug 24/BIKESWIMBIKE

bike: 8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
76 degrees

Decided to bike to the lake for a swim while I still have the chance. An easy bike ride, with no scary moments, both there and back. I was able to successfully pass several groups of people. The road that you need to cross — Nokomis Avenue — to keep going on the creek path was open again. The pickleballers were still pickleballing — thwack! thwack!

Coming out from under 28th street, I heard the whirr of their wheels before I saw them: a mini-peloton of 8 or so riders. The first one yelled, BIKE!, when he saw me to alert the riders behind him. His voice was very sharp; it didn’t startle me, but it did make me mutter, yikes!, under my breath.

Nearing the lake, I thought about how it didn’t matter what kind of swimming I did in the water; I just wanted to be in it. Mostly just because I wanted to be in it, but partly because I’m trying to get as close to swimming 24 hours total in August. Then, I had an idea: why not interview the milfoil today (I mentioned interviewing them very early in the season)? This idea was inspired by my June entry, but also by the amazing podcast I listened to yesterday, Into a Darker Wilderness1. It’s local and I love it! At the end of each episode, the poet they’re interviewing offers a writing prompt. Here’s the one from Sean Hill (he mentioned that the prompt was originally written for Poetry Daily):

I invite you to get to know a bit more about one of your nonhuman neighbors—feathered, furred, scaled, exoskeleton-held; grown from a seed, hatched from an egg, birthed from a womb; or others; or water in its various beds, the stones around our homes. Visit a nonhuman neighbor. Introduce yourself and pay attention to your neighbor’s response. Use your body and your mind, and be attentive to them with your several senses. Appreciate their story. Try to grasp how your lives align, what narratives you share. Find other resources to broaden your knowledge and appreciation of your neighbor’s narrative. Write a poem twining those narratives.

Sean Hill

What questions could I ask the milfoil, I wondered, then thought, no questions or words, more like listening and noticing what the milfoil was communicating (or, what Robin Wall Kimmerer might say, what stories it was telling) in ways beyond words — its colors, thickness, position relative to the sun, the surface, the lake bottom. This idea of non-human living things using language without words reminds me of A.R. Ammon’s and section of his collection, garbage. I’ve written about it on here; when I have more time, I’ll try to link to it.

Leaving the lake, I felt tender and grieved the end of another swim season. Because of my congestion or allergies or bacterial infection or whatever I got that is making it hard to breathe and to swim, my season seems shorter. Was it? Yes, I checked my total swimming minutes from 2024, 2025, and 2026 summers, and this year is the lowest. But, it’s not just that getting sick in August shortened the season; it was also getting sick in July (plus wildfire smoke). Usually, July is my favorite month of the year and the one where I run and swim and bike the most. I burn about 18000 active calories in July. Not this year — my swimming and running were down and I burned less than 14000 calories. So, I guess I’m grieving for July. And, I’m grieving for future Julys that I anticipate will be negatively affected by more wildfires, more bacteria in the lake, and more random sicknesses.

swim: 1/2 loop
lake nokomis main beach
30 minutes
80 degrees

The water on the edge of the lake was laced with bright green, and the water just under the surface seemed to glow green. Not quite enough to think there were blue green algae blooms present, but enough to worry while I swam. Not much deepening and quieting of the spirit in lake today. I wasn’t worried about fish or milfoil, instead I kept asking myself, will this make it hard to breathe later today?

11 Things

  1. several girls far out in the water, near the faded red buoys, laughing and yelling and singing Happy Birthday to one of them
  2. geese overhead, flying so low I could hear their wings swishing and instinctively ducked to avoid being hit by one
  3. a flock of seagulls swooping down over the water
  4. a swimmer in a bright orange hat, the only part of him out of the water was his head, almost looking like a buoy himself — luckily his cap (swim cap? baseball cap?) was brighter than the buoys
  5. marco polo / marco polo / marco polo
  6. said to a young boy: want a sandwich? a cookie? a clementine? the boy: no / no / no thanks grandma, as he gathered something, brought it to the sand, thn gathered more, and brought that to the sand. grandma: I see you’re busy
  7. 2 women standing in waist-deep water, far out near the buoys, discussing different lakes around the city and whether they were safe to swim in or not
  8. a pale blue sky with streaks of bright blue, sometimes sun, sometimes clouds
  9. the milfoil below was pale yellow or faded orange and dark green
  10. floating in the water, using my yellow buoy as a pillow, sometimes closing my eyes and seeing red from the sun, sometimes opening them and trying to look at the sky
  11. a loud snapping noise — a woman shaking the sand out of her towel
  1. from the podcast site: “Into a Darker Wilderness podcast sits at the intersection of nature and Black history, expanding our definitions and seeking new understandings of our relationships with and through time, nature, and history.”  ↩︎

aug 23/RUN

14 miles
franklin / ford / almost confluence
56 degrees

14 miles! For my route, I ran north on the river road, over the lake street bridge to north on the east river road. Took the franklin bridge back over to the west side and then south on west river road. When I reached the lake street bridge, I crossed it again and headed south on east river road until I almost but not quite reached the confluence. On the way back, I crossed over the ford bridge, ran through Wabun park, down Godrey, back under the ford bridge, down and back up the road to locks and dam no. 1, then north on the river road. The route was a variation on the franklin-ford loop — instead of a loop, a figure eight — combined with the confluence loop. Mostly, I ran 3 min, then walked 1. When it got harder, in the last few miles, I switched to 90 seconds of running, 30 seconds of walking.

For the first hour, I listened to the quiet — hardly any cars, early on a Sunday morning! — and the rowers and water seeping out of the limestone. For the rest of the run, I listened to my “Hello, Goodbye” playlist. The thing I remember most, was 867-5309 and this lyric with a double meaning:

Jenny, Jenny, you’re the girl for me
Oh, you don’t know me, but you make me so happy
I tried to call you before, but I lost my nerve
I tried my imagination, but I was disturbed.

I heard disturbed meaning 2 things at once: the more popular, interrupted, but also, unhinged. Was this double-meaning intended? Not sure, but that’s how I heard it, and I liked the multiplicity of it.

the rowers! As I crossed over the lake street bridge for the first time, I saw them. A speck, a streak, then 3 shells approaching from the south. The first coxswain had a deep voice and was explaining the order to the rowers: male single shells and female single shells together. A few minutes later a coxswain with a higher voice tried to pump up the rowers. A few times, the words became distorted as the voice got louder and more excited. I did hear something about starting at the trestle. I could see the rowers for most of my run north towards the franklin bridge. Oh — I almost forgot — when I first noticed the rowers, it was quiet enough that I could hear their oars slapping the water awkwardly. I could also hear the oars creaking as the rowers lifted them out of the water.

14 Other Things

  1. a carolina wren — cheeseburger cheese burger
  2. the gate at the entrance to the no longer used for power plant was locked again
  3. a shimmering sound — water leaking out of the limestone below me
  4. the crack in the sidewalk just north of the trestle is getting worse — tall plants are growing out of it at one end, while it grows deeper on the other*
  5. click clack click clack — a roller skier hitting, then scraping their poles
  6. the sliding bench — shaded, surrounded by green
  7. on 2 different occasions — a tall man, walking alone, talking very loudly on a phone — their voice echoing
  8. no tent near ford bridge today, but someone sitting on a tall chair, facing the road, an umbrella giving them shade
  9. click click click click a walker approaching me, striking the asphalt rhythmically with her hiking poles
  10. the sky was blue and a little hazy — was it humidity burning off or my bad vision?
  11. I stopped at a bench above hidden falls to tighten my shoe laces: it was in the sun and empty
  12. a single red leaf on an otherwise green tree — fall is coming
  13. the flat, smooth surface of the river as seen from above on the ford bridge
  14. the reflection of the bridge on the surface of the river as seen from below the ford bridge

Just remembered something else about the surface of the river below the ford bridge: it was an unnatural green on the closest edge, It reminded me of the color of algae blooms. It looked oily and smelled strange. What spilled/was spilled into the river here?

That run wasn’t easy and I am tired. My calf and knees started to hurt around mile 11. But, I did it and, an hour later, I’m already feeling better. I will be able to run 16 miles next week.

I’m not putting this in my 10 things, but I could. The grass is not really green, but brown. In some spots in the strips along the river, it is so dry, it’s yellow. I remembered these images of grass, when I read poets.org’s poem of the day by Carl Sandburg. I like his poetry — whimsical and weird.

Summer Grass/ Carl Sandburg

Summer grass aches and whispers.
It wants something; it calls and sings; it pours
       out wishes to the overhead stars.

The rain hears; the rain answers; the rain is slow 
        coming; the rain wets the face of the grass.

*Running beside the crack in the path, I decided to stop and take a few pictures of it. I wonder, are they planning to fix it, or accept defeat and reroute the walking path here?

crack north of the trestle / 23 aug 2026
split open / 23 aug 2026

aug 22/RUN

3.35
monument / loons
65 degrees

Ran with Scott through the neighborhood, over the lake street bridge, up the hill beside Shadow Falls, over to the Monument, up to Cretin, down the Marshall hill, back over the lake street bridge on the north side, to Loons Coffee.

A goal for today’s run: find the sign for Shadow Falls that tells its history. I read about it on someone’s blog yesterday. I thought it would be at the top of the hill, at the (relatively) new entrance to the ravine. It was not. Next, we thought it might be near another entrance, next to the monument overlook. It wasn’t there either. Maybe St. Paul Parks removed it since the blog entry was written in 2021? No worries; I found the text online on the very helpful Historical Marker site:

Shadow Falls are hidden in a deep ravine north of Summit Avenue, where Shadow Falls Creek flows over layers of limestone, shale, and sandstone. The layers expose the recent geological history of the Mississippi River Gorge, and are part of the story of Glacial River Warren and the retreat of St. Anthony Falls more than 11,000 years ago. Shadow Falls is one of several small waterfalls cut into ravines along the sides of the gorge. When the soft St. Peter Sandstone was eroded by the seepage of groundwater springs, the ravine and waterfall were created by collapse of the overlying layer of hard Platteville Limestone. The Decorah Shale layer contains excellent examples of Ordovician fossils deposited more than 400 million years ago, including bryozoans, crinoid columnals, brachipods, and gastropods.

Historical Marker

layers of limestone, shale, sandstone / a rare location for exposed shale / Ordovician fossils (400 millions years ago)

The Falls were a very popular destination for picnickers, hikers, and riverboat tourists. In the 1880s investors proposed to build a summer resort. Landscape designer H. W. S. Cleveland, however, encouraged the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis to preserve the forested bluffs of the gorge for public use. Early park planning focused on development of Mississippi River Boulevard from the Minneapolis border to the Fort Snelling Bridge.

a summer resort proposed in the 1880s / Horace Cleveland and his boulevard

Shadow Falls Park
In 1899, John Ireland, Archbishop of the Diocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, donated 18 acres of land to the City of St. Paul, including Shadow Falls. The parcel extended from Summit to Marshall Avenues. It was the first major acquisition for the future river boulevard. Shadow Falls Park was created in 1902. The ravine and riverbank were left in their natural state, although Shadow Falls Creek was combined with several other small streams to ensure maximum flow over the ledge. The maple-basswood forest around the falls still shelters plants such as wild ginger, Solomon’s seal, leatherwood, and smartweed. Many plants are valued by native people who use them for cooking, medicinal, and spiritual purposes.

1902 / first acquisition for boulevard / Shadow Falls Creek combined with other creeks / maple-basswood / wild ginger – Solomon’s seal – leatherwood – smartweed

Nearby, in 1923 the St. Paul Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a memorial dedicated to the soldiers and sailors of World War I at the foot of Summit Avenue. The 36-foot octagonal monument is carved in granite quarried near Cold Spring, Minnesota. It was designed by St. Paul architect Thomas Holyoke (1866-1925) of the firm Holyoke, Jemne & Davis.

So, the Monument was created out of granite? I should put that in the poem! Maybe I’ll reference EDickinson’s “granite lip”?

If I shouldn’t be alive/ Emily Dickinson

If I shouldn’t be alive
When the Robins come,
Give the one in Red Cravat,
A Memorial crumb – 
If I couldn’t thank you,
Being fast asleep,
You will know I’m trying
With my Granite lip!            
– F210 (1861)  

This is among Dickinson’s most droll poems and one of my favorites. Thinking of a grave stone as a “Granite lip” has changed the way I view cemeteries. It’s as there is a subterranean crowd all trying to speak but struggling to get the sound out (the Prowling Bee). Oh — I like this ida of imagining the monument as a granite lip, with its subterranean crowd!

It was a great, easy run. I greeted people as we passed them: good morning! a beautiful morning! morning! We ended in the middle of the bridge and stopped at the overlook to admire the rowers below. Half a dozen rowing shells congregated near the rowing club dock, while three more appeared from under the bridge. One of the shells held at least 8 rowers. Scott remarked on how wide the river is at this point and wondered how the surface area of the Mississippi River as it runs through the cities compares to the total surface area of all the cities’ lakes.

added on 23 aug 2026: While I was doing my 14 mile run today, I remembered something else Scott had talked about on the run. As we walked up the Summit Hill, was passed a rectangular block that was part of some utility thing. Scott said, let’s start running at the lego. I asked if it was actually and lego and he said no but then explained how/why it looked like one. He noticed that someone has spray painted a smiley face on it and said, If I had spray painted on that, I would have done the Lego logo, but I’m a nerd.

an hour later: a series of thoughts — I should write a poem that refers to/uses the 2002 Minneapolis Park plan for the stretch of trail that I run on the most. I should take phrases from it and turn them into a cento. I should also find phrases from the 2020s Park plan and turn that into a cento. And, I should find early text from Cleveland (and Theodore Wirth) about the planning of the river gorge park area) and turn that into a cento. A triptych cento poem!

aug 20/RUNSWIM

9 miles
the confluence
62 degrees

9 miles, and it’s not even my long run for the week. I’m deep in the marathon training. For the first half, I ran 3 minutes, then walked 1. When I reached the Confluence, I took a 3 or 4 minutes walk break, then I did 4 sets of 90sec r/30 sec w, then a mix of 2 or 3 mins of running with 1 min of walking. Finally, I ended strong, with the help of a few upbeat songs, to run/walk my fastest mile of the run. Nice!

Early on in the run, I started thinking about my poetry manuscript. In particular, I thought about the series of poems, sprinkled throughout, that feature a specific location (a few possible titles: You Are Here, Echo Locations). The current form for each of them is: a brief description of location in 3 beat lines or 3 / 2 beat lines, then ending with a rhyming verse, roughly formal, but not in any specific form. I like the rhymes, but I’m not satisfied with them. Are they too rhyme-y? As I ran, I thought about taking the feeling that the rhyme creates, but getting rid of the rhyme — could we call this an echo? — Condensing the idea, eliminating excess words. I thought about my Tunnel of Trees poem. Here’s the verse:

Oh, where is the sky?
And where is the ground?
Neither can be seen.
Moving feet strike only air,
and eyes see only green.

What about this instead:

sky ground gone
only green
green green green

Well, this is what I thought as I ran, but I don’t think it quite works. The idea that feet feel air, eyes see green is missing. I’ll work on it some more. Other related thoughts: should I make this haibun-esque, with a prose poem description poem and the condensed haiku at the end? I’ll try it. I like the condensed version of the rhyme part, because it feels more accurate to how I chant when I run — not in rhyming verses, but in single words repeated and ringing out.

I also thought about a poem I’m writing about the spot, on the edge of Wabun park and above the Locks and Dam no. 1. From it, you can see across to the abandoned ford power plant. My thought: perhaps I should add in some more details about that plant now that I’ve hiked among its ruins?

11 Things

  1. passed a regular: shorts with sandals
  2. view of river, ford bridge: a flat, smooth surface reflecting pale clouds and abruptly ending at the edge of the dam, looking like an infinity pool
  3. a tent set up on the grassy hill next to the ford bridge — a wheelchair in front of the tent’s entrance — the tent wasn’t hidden, but it was mostly sheltered and obscured by its position on the hill
  4. a VW van, almost looking like the Mystery Machine: green! A guy sitting in it, taking out some stuff — parked near the tent — is he sleeping in the tent?
  5. one skate boarder at the skate park — he was skilled — as I ran by, I admired his grace as he went up a ramp
  6. the gate that was closed and that trapped me and my friend 2 weeks ago, was wide open today — I wondered if it’s usually open on weekdays and closed only on weekends? I’ll try to remember to check next time I run by it
  7. the soft falling of water at Hidden Falls1
  8. my new favorite bench: empty and in the shade
  9. just before I reached my bench, I heard a dog bark at the off-leash park on the other side of the river
  10. there were no stones stacked on the top of the ancient boulder, but little pebbles piled in several indentations on the boulder’s side
  11. walking through the alley, almost home, I could hear acorns hitting garage roofs and see little leaves falling — fall is coming

see footnote below: I thought I had written about the history of Shadow Falls before on this log, but I can’t find anything. So, I googled it. First, I found this, about a nearby and now gone falls:

Kavanagh Falls were a cascade over several steps of rough limestone ledges named after the former owner of the land these falls were once on, the land today is now in the grounds of the Town and Country Club. In an 1891 article, a columnist wrote of Kavanagh Falls, “The plateau falls abruptly away to a picturesque glen or gorge, through which a brook purls to the level of the lawn, and then leaps laughingly to the river below. To make travel in the area easier, a bridge once spanned the Kavanagh Gorge. The spring that once fed Kavanagh falls remains on the grounds of the Town and Country Club. However, the bridge and gorge that these falls once tumbled into has since been filled to provide additional parking spaces for the Town and Country Club members. 

The Cascades of Minneapolis and St. Paul

Then I found another source, Equatorial Minnesota, which I’m pretty sure I read before. Among other interesting things, including a reference to “goat trails on the bluff”!?, they refer to Shadow Falls Creek. They also write this, “Today if you stop by, though, there is a panel of information detailing its history and geology (source).” I’ve never seen this info! I wonder if it’s at the entrance at the top of Summit Hill? I’ll have to look next time I run there! I’ll have to return to this blog; it’s a great resource.

swim: 2 loops
lake nokomis open swim
48 minutes
79 degrees

The final open swim, and I was able to do it! Sara-from-a-week-ago would have liked to swim for the full 2 hours, but after my congestions or bacterial infection or whatever it was, I am very excited that I was able to swim 2 loops. The water was some of the choppiest I’ve ever swum in, which was fun. Only a few waves crashing directly into me, mostly water pushing me around and rocking me back and forth. I liked it!

Only 3 buoys today, so had to swim straight across and back. I think that swimming to the little beach and back is actually longer than the typical 5 buoy triangle. How is that possible? I’m not quite sure. But, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed it.

Oh, how can open swim be over already? In a better world, I’d be able to swim every day of the year, or at least more than just 10 weeks in the lake. Will I join the Y this winter? Wouldn’t that be wonderful.

lifeguards on kayaks / 2 buoys

Sitting at Painted Turtle and drinking a beer after I was done, Scott took a picture of the lake. He had to zoom in a lot. It’s funny how the water doesn’t look nearly as choppy as it felt.

  1. As I listened to Hidden Falls Creek fall over the ledge, I wondered if the water at Shadow Falls, which is the subject of one of the poems I was thinking about, was called Shadow Falls creek. I’ve looked it up before, but I can’t remember; I’ll have to find the entry in which I wrote about it….I looked, but couldn’t find anything. Did I write about the history? ↩︎

aug 19/SWIM

1 loop (2 mini loops)
cedar lake open swim
30 minutes
80 degrees

The final cedar lake open swim of the season. A beautiful night! Calm water, not too crowded. Since I’m still dealing with congestion, I decided to be cautious and only swim 2 loops. When I was done, I stayed in the water for a few minutes, first squatting, then floating, using my buoy as a pillow.

As I walked to the beach, I recited MO’s poem in my head. I thought again about her wording — it is TIME NOW and it will be TIME AGAIN. Among other things, this wording makes it easier for me to remember the poem. I tried to go deeper and quieter in the water, but I was worried about whether or not the water would make me more congested, so it was hard.

10 Things

  1. overheard — 2 swimmers talking, one had already finished, the other about to start — the one starting: I’m a teacher and tonight is my last chance to chill out before the craziness of the year
  2. a blue sky with streaks of clouds
  3. pale, yellow vines reaching up from way below
  4. bubbles, 1 — the ones my hand made as they pierced the water
  5. bubbles, 2 — in front of me — a warning that I was about the run into another swimmer — much smaller and lower in the water than the ones my hands make
  6. the buoy at hidden beach was almost on the beach — so close to shore!
  7. last year, some of the trees on the edge of the lake looked like they were changing colors, but not this year — everything is still green
  8. nearing the beach before the swim, a little girl to her dad: Daddy, can you see the moon? The moon the moon the moon is here! Can you see it, Daddy — the moon?
  9. floating in the water, hearing another swimmer coming in from a loop, breathing heavily
  10. an almost empty beach

Another great season. I feel strong and satisfied — although, like always, I wish I could swim every day of the year. I also feel deep gratitude for open swim — that it exists, that I can participate in it, that the water is still (mostly) clean enough for open swim to happen at all.

aug 18/RUNSWIM

4.1 miles
wabun / edge of falls / river road, north
67 degrees / humidity: 90%

Something different today: a little more speed. 2 miles steady at a moderate pace / 5 min walk / 1-2 minutes fast run, 1 min walk (5xs). It felt good to move faster — more like flying and with better form.

For the first 2 miles, I (almost) finished my Hello, Goodbye playlist. The most memorable songs: the beginning of “Never Can Say Goodbye” when it sounds like Michael Jackson says, Never can STAY goodbye — at least to me; and the slow and long wind-up of Barbara Streisand’s “Hello Dolly.” After the 5 minute walk, I switched to my “Wheelin’ Life” playlist. My favorite fast song on that playlist was: “Proud Mary”/ Ike and Tina Turner. It’s really fun to sprint to.

10 Things

  1. buzzzzzzz of cicadas
  2. a faint voie down below — the coxswain instructing the rowers
  3. waving to Santa Claus and to Mr. Morning!
  4. 2 different birds — one was a bluejay, I think — squawking at each other: what? / WHAT!
  5. puddles on the trail from last night’s rain
  6. empty benches
  7. park workers mowing a stretch of grass near the road
  8. some faint moaning sounds coming from a house near 7 oaks — was it a dog, or a person?
  9. my shirt, soaked with sweat — not sticking to me1, but saturated, making the color of it a deeper blue
  10. the pulp of all the acorns that have fallen in the alley and been crushed by car wheels — turned into paste from last night’s rain — in a thick layer on the asphalt

lake water congestion update: My sinus are no longer inflamed, my throat doesn’t hurt, and I can breathe easily through my nose. Hooray! But, I am full of snot, I have crud in my chest, and my cough sounds scary. Boo. Open Swim ends on Thursday. Will I feel good enough to go for a swim before it ends? I hope so, but I’m not sure.

echo locations

Fall has started early, I guess. At least for me and Scott. Last night he said, let’s make today the official start of Halloween season? Yes! To mark the occasion, we watched, “Thriller” and I attempted (badly, I’m sure) the zombie dance near the end. Another marker of fall: working on my river running manuscript. Its first name — Haunts, then, Girl Ghost Gorge, then, Echolocate || Echolocated, now, Echo Locations. I decided to look up “echo” on Poetry Daily. I found this wonderful poem from A.E. Stallings:

Echo/ A.E. Stallings

What tales we tell what tales
About the girls gone quiet
The story-telling ones
Who entertained the heart
Till suddenly they ceased.
What makes the tongue inert?
What turns the voice to swords
Cutting the throat? What takes,
The name from the alibi
Of the body? We were stern:
Stories, we said, are lies,
We told her, don’t repeat them.

What ails?
Yet
once
art
eased
hurt.
Words,
aches,
I
turn
ice
eat them.

I love the different echoes in this poem! Some rhyme, some almost rhyme, some almost sound the same, and some are almost, but not quite, the same. Fun!

Looking through my tags, I noticed several for “echolocation” and one for “echoes.” When I clicked on the echo entry (from 1 sept 2025), I discovered these wonderful ideas about echoing a favorite poet:

The Poetry Daily’s poem-of-the-day is I, Lorine Niedecker. Very cool and difficult for my cone-compromised eyes to read, I’m glad they included an essay by the author about the process of writing the poem. 

Surely, the finest way to appreciate Niedecker would be to read her well. And then repeated reading, reading aloud, transcribing the vibrant phrases on to paper, oh and even framing then. But how to linger in the presence of this voice, and let it echo within oneself, make her a part of oneself? Perhaps by applying Niedecker to Niedecker, I would arrive at a new condensary. De- and re- constructing her poems, deleting words, conflating words, writing through her writing.  

Mani Rao on Writing

After their explanation, Rao offers a writing prompt: 

Pick a poet who moves you, isolate their characteristics, and apply this to their work. Using words from within their own work, write the narrative of their poetics or/and biography. Example: Get romantic and didactic with Wordsworth, apply surrealism on André Breton … 

Imitation is the best form of flattery, but also of ridicule—so this kind of repetition can function as a spotlight or a spoof. I suggest choosing a poet you absolutely adore, as it’s better to have such a voice under your skin.

Mani Rao on Writing

I’m not sure if I want to follow this prompt, but her suggestions about echoing a favorite poet have me thinking, and wanting to experiment more with how I can create echoes out of my favorite poems, poets, words. Last fall, I tried “quarrying” 2 favorite Emily Dickinson poems, “Before I Got My Eye Put Out” (13 dec) and “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” (14 dec) —

An experiment with quarrying words. Find all of the one, two, and three syllable words in a favorite poem. Turn them into a new poem that offers echoes of the original (13 dec 2025).

Maybe I should try one with “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain”?

swim: 1 loop
lake nokomis open swim
23 minutes
80 degrees

Open swim! After all of my congestion and having trouble breathing and coughing, I wasn’t sure if I would feel okay enough to swim across the lake another time. But, I’m feeling better today and when I saw the forecast for the last open swim on Thursday — 40% chance of thunderstorms — I decided I better go tonight and say goodbye to the lake. Maybe I’ll be able to swim again on Thursday, but if not, I did it tonight, and that’s enough. I was a little scared, worried that I might trigger my congestion, but I decided it was important to risk it. As I swam across the lake, I tried hard not to swallow any water and wore my nose plug (which I’ve been doing for at least 10 years). The course was short because many of the college aged lifeguards were already back at school, so there were only 3 buoys. No triangle, just a straight line with the buoys always on your left. There was wind, so the water was choppy. I tried to think about MO and “Swimming, One Day in August,” but I was distracted by my effort to not swallow water. When I returned to the big beach, I floated on my back, using my yellow buoy as a pillow, and recited the poem in my head.

After exiting the water, I met up with Scott and had a beer. We talked about marathon training and how much we love running. Then we walked over to a bench and looked out at the sailboats on the lake — very Sailboat (as in, the Platonic form of a sailboat). I told Scott about how happy I am to live in the midst of water — a mighty river, a creek, this wonderful lake.

It was a wonderful night — a reminder of how great it is to live where we do.

  1. Yesterday, while reviewing “circumambulation entries”, I reread my discussion of a Forrest Gander poem in which the narrator is running with a sweaty shirt that clings to his torso. I mentioned that, even as I sweat a lot, my shirt rarely clings to me. ↩︎

aug 17/BIKE

7.5 miles
the bench above the dog park and back
72 degrees

A bike ride! I haven’t been on my bike that much this summer. Too busy swimming and running. Since it was a beautiful morning, I decided to bike to my new favorite bench to sit and write and read for a few minutes. One small motivation: I wanted to find out how far it is to the bench and back because I’d like to make it a regular running route. It’s 7.5 miles, which is a great mid to longish distance for the fall, especially post marathon.

While I’ve run on this trail several times, I rarely ever bike it, so it was more uncertain than my usual bike route to the lake. A few notes:

  • the entrance to the trail turning on Godfrey up to Wabun park and the Ford Bridge were very difficult to see — I hit the curb twice. I recall that happening before, so there must be something about these curbs that makes it harder — are they narrower?
  • the new stretch, next to the highland bridge park, is smooth and wide and fast — no obstacles or big cracks or parts where the path cuts in sharply
  • the trail slopes down to the right, with tons of cracks, between hidden falls and the bench — when I run there, I should try to memorize the trickiest parts
  • there are bike lanes on both sides of the road — should I try them, or are they really cracked? again, when I’m running, I should check it out

There was no real danger, at least I didn’t feel that there was; just feeling unsettled and uncertain for long stretches of the ride.

When I reached the bench, it was in the sun, and the sun was warm. Not yet hot, but getting there. I sat down anyway. I heard a few barks from the dog park, which was below me and on the other shore. A few ruffs and a constant and loud noise by one dog — was it baying or bellowing or what? Looked it up and found something about beagles and how they bark, bay, and howl:

Beagles’ iconic baying sound is a prolonged howl-bark hybrid historically used to guide hunters through forests and is deeply rooted in their breeding as pack hounds.

Beagle howling and baying are natural breed behaviors driven by scent instincts, pack mentality, and responses to triggers like sirens or loneliness rather than behavioral problems.

source

Was it a beagle I was hearing? side note: I’m glad Delia is not a beagle. I don’t know if I could handle that noise often, although, I do wish she would make some noise. The only times she barks is at the mailman.

I saw some long birds flying over the gorge. One was flapping its wings so frantically that I could hear the wings — no elegant swish, more like the awkward thwack of those plastic hands that you can clap by shaking them (thanks to the Kalahari waterpark and skeeball tickets, we own a giant pair that have been relegated to the garage). Speaking of birds, as I got my bike out of the garage, I heard a cacophony overhead — honk honk honk — a V of geese high above me, using their honks to stay in formation!

While I sat on the bench, I wrote about echo locations and locating/being located at the gorge. And I read “Paean to Place” by Lorine Niedecker. Such a wonderful poem!

aug 16/RUN

12 miles
confluence + falls
66 degrees / humidity: 86%

12 miles! I’m running today instead of swimming because I am sick or have a sinus infection or my allergies are acting up because of the lake water (the e coli is very high at lake nokomis — over 1000). Since Friday, I’ve felt out of it. It started with a sore throat in the morning. I hoped it was just because I slept with the window open, but it wasn’t going away and I started feeling sinus pressure and stuffiness. Saturday was unpleasant (not quite miserable, but close, and I was whiny about it). I really dislike when my sinuses close up and I can’t breathe through my nose. Not being able to breathe is one of my big fears. If the stuffiness is due to the lake water, I might have to end my season early. If it’s because I’m sick, I might be able to swim again next week. As much as I love swimming, I hate being stuffed up and having a lot of trouble breathing. I’ll be bummed if I have to stop swimming already, but not too bummed: I’ve swum a lot this summer, and I need to prioritize marathon training.

But, back to today. 12 miles! I knew I would do 12 miles but, because I’m still stuffed up, I wondered how much of it would be walking. I surprised myself by feeling pretty good for a lot of it. I took one 5 minute walk break in the middle, but otherwise I mostly stuck to a plan: 3 mins run / 1 min walk. I wonder if I would go slower or faster if I switched up the ration to 90 sec run/ 30 sec walk. I’ll have to try that in this upcoming week.

Even though I made a playlist — Hello, Goodbye — for the entire run, I didn’t begin listening to it until my 5 minute walk break after the confluence. Before that, I listened to my key jingling in my pocket, a souped-up car going too fast on the east river road, blue jays screeching, hidden water falling, the clicking and clacking of roller skier’s poles. When I finally put in the playlist, I remember feeling nostalgic while listening to Lionel Richie’s “Hello” — oh, 10 year old Sara watching the video with the blind girl and the creepy, stalker professor! 1984 and 85 were some wonderful years for watching movies and music videos. I also remember feeling tender when Adele sang, “Hello from the other side.” I thought about my mom. She’s been dead for almost 17 years. How is that possible? Running by the falls, the telephone section of the playlist started. I got a boost with Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and ran too fast for a few minutes. Down by the locks and dam no. 1, I heard Lady Gaga sing, “Out in the club and I’m sipping that bubb” in her song “Telephone” — I’m assuming she means bubbly/champagne?

10 Things

  1. running over the lake street bridge, looking down at the river — blue, scaled, the wake of some small boat streaked across the surface
  2. the steps on the lake street bridge that lead down to the trail: clothes were strewn all over the steps — what happened? I decided to take the road over to the trail instead
  3. running parallel to another runner — first on opposite sides of the trail then, when she crossed the road, opposite sides of the road — I think I was slightly faster than her, so I was creeping up. If I wasn’t running 12 miles, I might have sped up to pass her faster, but I think that would have burned too many matches (or spent too many pennies) and I would have suffered later in the run because of it
  4. noticing all of the dirt trails leading up from the river on the way to hidden falls, remembering my hike with my college friend last week, wondering if we could have taken any of them
  5. a new regular? a short (4.5 feet tall, maybe) older woman who I also saw here last time. She was walking, I was running. Both times she was wearing shorts. should I call her short shorts?
  6. the view from the confluence overlook: a parking lot below — will the view be better once the leaves are off of the trees?
  7. stopping at a “good” water fountain near the skate park, where good = designed for water bottles, so it’s easy to fill them up — most of the water fountains are old school and curves, making it almost impossible to fill up a water bottle
  8. hearing the roar of the water rushing over the concrete dam at locks and dam no. 1
  9. waving a thanks to a guy who moved out of the way as I ran by the parking kiosk
  10. my new favorite bench — somewhere between the 2 entrances to Hidden Falls park, perched on a stretch of the bluff that’s wide open, with a beautiful view of the river below — was empty1

It was supposed to be partly or mostly cloudy today, but I don’t recall see any clouds. So much bright sun! I didn’t hear any rowers or chiming bells, no fragments of conversation. No geese or turkeys.

Memorable haunts I encountered: lake street bridge; above shadow falls; the monument; the ford overlook; hidden falls; my new favorite bench; the confluence; ford bridge; wabun disc golf course; the falls; the bottom of locks and dam no. 1, then the top; the double bridge; the oak savanna; the ancient boulder; the welcoming oaks; the tunnel of trees.

  1. I’d like to do a run that turns around at this bench. I’m thinking it would be between 7 and 8 miles long ↩︎

aug 14/SWIM

before the swim: Tired this morning. My throat is sore, not from sickness (I hope) but from keeping the window just above my head open all night. Reviewed yesterday’s entry and thought more about a place-based MO swimming poem: Swimming in One Place in August or Swimming in Place in August. Swimming in place is about repetition and loops and returning again and again to here. Not accumulating time but becoming more and more aware of the world around me — the flashes and flickers, the color of the water, the sounds underwater, the bubbles just below the surface.

About time in the water: While I’m swimming, I have very little idea of what time it is. I know that a loop is about 20 minutes, so I can figure it out, but I can’t read my watch when I’m constantly stroking 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left.

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
81.5 minutes
72 degrees

Before the swim I reminded myself of how much I love swimming across the lake and how much I’ll miss it when it’s over in a week. Another season almost over. As always, it has gone by too fast!

The first loop was very relaxed — my stroke, my breathing, the water. A steady rhythm and hardly any waves. Between buoys 3 and 4, a V of geese flew low over the water. They felt so close, but probably weren’t that close; swimming in the water distorts your perceptions of distance and size. Buoy 5 was almost as far as it’s been to the left. So far, that I thought the course/the triangles the buoys make was bigger than usual. Nope. I’m not sure how this is possible, but the course was actually a little shorter this morning.

As I swam, I thought about place — swimming in place, returning to a place, becoming familiar with a place. I know I had more interesting thoughts, but now I can’t remember them. Oh well, if they were important, I’ll remember them.

10 Things

  1. a vee of geese, flying low
  2. a seagull flying/floating in the wind
  3. a place, parallel to the water, also flying low
  4. my sparkle friends — most of them swimming straight at me
  5. glitter paths! the rough surface of the water, glittering in the sun
  6. a big splash off to my left — another swimmer who is not that efficient with their stroke/kick
  7. the green buoy, way off in the distance, becoming lost among the white sailboats
  8. clouds then sun then clouds then sun then all sun
  9. a haze in the air — not smoke but humidity
  10. swimming from buoys 1 to 2 on loop 3 when the water was choppier — even harder to sight the buoys, imagining lifeguards on kayaks were right in front of me when it was just the strange effect of waves and trees on the shore

When I finished, Scott was still running, so I took my towel and sat on the beach. What a morning! two moms and 2 kids.

overheard/witnessed after the swim

Mom 1, carrying a small kid out of the water: let’s get you into your robe, it’s cold!
Mom 2, also carrying a small kid: I really wish I would have thought to bring a cover-up for her! I bet a cover-up would feed nice and warm. Mom 1: a towel should work.

(a few minutes later, after Mom and kid 1 left): Mom 2 to her kid, okay, let’s get you in this warm towel! LOUD SHRIEKS Fine, no towel it is. Let’s walk to the bathroom. Kid 2 makes noises like they’re very cold. I bet a towel would really warm you up right now, but you made it very clear that you didn’t want one.

At some point during the swim, I had an idea for my long (12+ mile) run tomorrow: a Hello Goodbye playlist. I brainstormed songs as I stroked: Hello/Lionel Richie; Hello/Adele; Hello it’s Me/Todd Rundgren.

Hello Goodbye Playlist

  1. Hello, goodbye/ Beatles
  2. Hello/ Lionel Richie
  3. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road/ Elton John
  4. Hello/ Adele
  5. Goodbye Stranger / Supertramp
  6. Hello it’s Me/ Todd Rundgren
  7. Goodbye to You/ Scandal
  8. Operator/ Jim Croce
  9. Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares/ Travis Tritt
  10. Call Me Maybe/ Carly Rae Jepsen
  11. Call Me/ Blondie
  12. Telephone ft. Beyonce/ Lady Gaga
  13. Where the hell is my phone?/ Lizzo
  14. Telephone Line/ ELO
  15. Mr. Telephone Man/ New Edition
  16. 867-5309/ Tommy Tutone
  17. Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You/ Sugarloaf
  18. Hello / The Book of Morman
  19. Bye Bye Bye/ N’Sync
  20. Hello I Love You/ the Doors
  21. So long, Farewell/ The Sound of Music
  22. Hello 12, Hello 13, Hello Love/ a Chorus Line
  23. Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee (Goodbye to Sandra Dee)/ Olivia Newton John
  24. Scenes from an Italian Restaurant/ Billy Joel
  25. I’ll Be Seeing You/ Billie Holiday
  26. Hi Hi Hi/ Paul McCartney and Wings
  27. Because I Got High / Afroman
  28. Why’d You Only Call Me when You’re High?/ Arctic Monkeys
  29. Rocky Mountain High/ John Denver
  30. Hey Good Lookin’/ Hank Williams
  31. Never Can Say Goodbye/ Jackson 5
  32. Welcome to the Jungle/ Guns n’ Roses
  33. You’re Outta Here/ Lorraine Feather
  34. The First Goodbye / 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
  35. The Second Goodbye / 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
  36. The Final Goodbye / 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
  37. Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye / Roberta Flack
  38. Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye / Steam
  39. The Goodbye Look/ Donald Fagan
  40. Goodbye Blue Sky/ Pink Floyd

I had wanted to make this playlist 2.5 hours, but I couldn’t quite get there. It’s 2 hrs and 23 minutes.

aug 13/SWIM

4 loops
lake nokomis open swim
81 minutes
79 degrees

Wow, 79 degrees felt cool — at least, the air, when we got there. The water was fine — not too warm or too cold. The lifeguards claimed the triangle was shorter because of staffing issues, but it seemed about the same size to me. I counted strokes from buoys 4 to 5: 250. My goggles kept fogging up and the milfoil was thick, but the rest of the swim was great. Steady strokes, buoys sighted, collisions with other swimmers narrowly avoided. The water was the same pale green it has been all summer. I don’t remember any of my sparkle friends — probably because there was no sun, which was covered by a thick blanket of white. Today the sky is heavy. Me to Scott: This sky is unsettling, like something is about to happen but isn’t, or like it’s later in the day than it is.

10 Things

  1. Arriving at the lake, I heard a few ducks furiously quacking
  2. After the swim, I noticed two ducks rooting around in different clusters of towels that had been temporarily abandoned by their swimming owners
  3. even without the sun, the orange buoy left an orange reflection on the flat and mostly still water
  4. lots of stray vines, floating through the water, 1: making my skin itch briefly
  5. lots of stray vines, floating through the water, 2: one long strand got stuck on my head — as I stroked, I flung it off
  6. a sailboat, moving on the edge of the course
  7. overheard one swimmer to another: I know the milfoil is there and it still makes me panic every time I swim into it
  8. swimming over the top of a thick thatch of miloil, swinging my arms wide, trying to keep them as close to the surface as possible so they wouldn’t get wrapped around a vine
  9. finishing the swim, hearing some kids playing Marco / Polo / Marco / Polo
  10. stopping in the middle of the lake, overhearing 2 swimmers chatting — were they treading water? using kickboards? I couldn’t see, partly because I didn’t look

before the swim

At the end of yesterday’s entry, I wondered what “Swimming, One Day in August” would be if Mary Oliver had centered place instead of time. That question was inspired by listening to the New Yorker Poetry podcast with Richard Siken as he discusses Jorie Graham’s poem, “I Catch Sight of the Now” with the host, Kevin Young. Here’s what Siken says:

Some poets build out of space, and some poets build out of time. And this (I Catch Sight of the Now/ Jorie Graham) is definitely built out of time. It moves through considerations of always and never and now and then. And these choices are able to point to the inevitable and the timeless while still pulling in to be absolutely timed locked….She’s playing with temporality rather than geography.

New Yorker Poetry Podcast, Richard Siken reads Jorie Graham

Here’s some of that beautiful poem. Click on the title to listen to Graham read the poem. Wow!

excerpt from I Catch Sight of the Now/ Jorie Graham

unforgettable though then hardly noticed green
tiled ledge
just up to my right in the glistening shower stall, slightly above my open
eyes, square window in it, & slender citrine
lip onto which I place, gently, this first handful of hair—always I see it—the window-
pane up there letting anything in and out that
wishes to pass
thru—so freely—drops from the steam of the shower
on it, the slipping of forever & for-
ever all down the
pane, where, beyond the still-wet clump, all seems to shine and
murmur it’s just day, just this day, another day, filled with the only
of this minute, this split minute, in which if I
reach now I can feel
the years, the fissure in them,
these fractions here inside the
instant—

Her mention of the window reminds me of a favorite poems of hers that I’ve memorized, Still Life with Window and Fish. In her introduction to that poem, she mentions being stuck inside with an extended illness.

it’s just day, just this day, another day, filled with the only
of this minute, this split minute, in which if I
reach now I can feel

Back to my earlier question, how does MO’s poem — both the written one and my echoing/embodying/re-writing of it with my August swimming practice — change when I center place instead of time? Swimming, One Lake in Minneapolis? Or, two lakes — Nokomis and Cedar? What words/images are used in a poem about geography and not temporality? For someone else, perhaps this is an easy question, but for me, it requires more pondering. Is that because I am so much more rooted in time words/imagery than in place ones? hmm. . .

during the swim

As I looped the buoys, I thought about place and swimming in one place1 in August — this lake, here. Then: here and here and here. This is the place here where we sink and settle . . . . No — I don’t want to sink to or settle at the bottom of the lake; I want to be just above and under its surface — that between, threshold space. I didn’t come up with any other words to describe what a quieting of the spirit might look like in terms of locating/grounding yourself in a place? Submerging? On land, it’s rooting; what is it in water? Fixing your position? The coordinates. I thought about how locating/orienting myself in a place seems much more important than fixing myself in time. Then I thought about the geometry of water and angles and points/coordinates.

  1. Rereading this entry the next morning to make sure I don’t have too many typos, I thought, swimming in place, looping again and again, going nowhere or to the same heres again and again. ↩︎

aug 12/RUNSWIM

8.5 miles
franklin + ford loop
70 degrees / humidity: 70%

That was hard! I had barely started and I already felt too hot, my legs too sore. By the time I reached 3 miles, I abandoned my system of run 3 mins, walk 1 min and the doubt started creeping in — how can I possibly run a marathon in less than 2 months? The pressure and worry too — I have to run more this week or I’ll get too off track!

a brief flash: this run is a failure / you can’t do the marathon

The flash passed and I simply kept going. I walked when I needed to — which seemed often — and ran when I could. I drank water and ate an energy chew. And I kept going. One foot in front of the other. A step then another step then another. Sometimes running, often walking.

heart broken: I noticed the gentle and labored whirr of a bike wheel — deep, quiet, singular — and thought about how, in my state of struggle, I was tender and open to the world and its different sounds. Every sensation — a man’s disembodied voice high on a hill, a bird calling from the gorge, a cool-ish breeze on my sweat-soaked face, the strong smell of weed near the overlook — was clear, acute. Not irritating or overwhelming, like sensations can be when I’m anxious, but calling to me, like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –over and over announcing my place
in the family of things.

10 Things

  1. a carolina wren calling out cheeseburger cheeseburger cheeseburger
  2. a loud sound — is that a radio on a bike? no, a kid shrieking in a bike trailer, then the adult biking calling out sternly, what’s going on back there?
  3. a single canoe on the river with at least 3 people in it, hugging the west side of the shore
  4. a coxswain’s voice, giving instructions, his voice distorted by a bullhorn
  5. Mr. Morning! — morning! / good morning!
  6. a spring gushing through the rock on the east side of the river — not seen, only heard
  7. footsteps behind me, never gaining, just hovering in the air
  8. playing chicken with a woman walking with ski poles on the bridge — I won because I wasn’t going to move and I was on the proper side
  9. a man in the grass, near the locks and dam no. 1 parking lot lifting one heavy barbell — squatting and thrusting with it — his movement reminded me of a shot putter preparing to hurl the shotput
  10. more than half a dozen roller skiers, going fast up the hill, their poles clicking on the asphalt, several of them continuing past me, 4 of them turning around in front of me — sharply, quickly — the last one misjudging the turn and stumbling, then apologizing to me for almost getting in my way

I reflected on the run, which was both a failure and a success — a failure because I had to walk much more than I planned, a success because I didn’t give up and wasn’t nearly as slow as I thought I would be.

I heard Des Linden’s words in my head, you can do hard things. Yes. Most of the point of running another marathon is to give me the opportunity to prove that to myself — I can do hard things. There is something satisfying about facing a difficult/overwhelming task that you can’t imagine being able to do, and just starting to do it and never stopping until it’s done. To a lesser degree that happened at my swim last night. On loop 1 of 4, I felt tired and awkward, my body heavy in the water. A brief thought — can I really do this for an hour and a half? Then I stroke and kicked and breathed until I finished loop 4. Never quite believing or not believing; just doing and not thinking.

A deepening and quieting of the spirit = a deepening of the resolve, a quieting of the voices that encourage you to quit / a muting of an ego/I that believes going slow or walking or straying from an exact plan = failing, a digging into the depths for new forms of belief

breaking news: an audiobook I requested from the library just became available! I Contain Multitudes / Ed Yong.

Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Ed Yong prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light — less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are.

from the “about this title” blurb in Libby

I’ve tried reading or listening to a more recent book by Yong. I can’t remember what about it made me stop. It would be wonderful if I liked this book and could listen to it on my long run (at least 12 miles) on Saturday.

Back to hearts breaking apart. I looked up, “breaking apart” and Poetry Daily (poems.com) and found this excellent poem. I’m thinking of it less in terms of my 1 day in august project and more in terms of my Holes/How I Read project.

A Seam of Electricity [an excerpt] / Ian U Lockaby

Language is breaking apart in our hands. In the darkness, we can only make out
the shapes of letters on the pages. We’ve been reading like this for hours, or forever,
it seems, but now the sun fades out our windows and particles of darkness block
the white bays the letters gather in their limbs— the blank spaces that make them
legible, where the illuminate of the pale page makes shape.

Each word, suddenly the shape of a small animal. Lines of small animals creating a
blurred grid on the page.

A moment longer and the darkening brings out the beady eyes, glowing, reflecting
the light from the headlight of our eyes.

(An inherent light inside the eye— who had that idea, that I feel now in my sockets?)                                                                                                                           

In the neighboring darkyards 
not cherryglow but
a single candle left flickering out

I want to return to this poem, later, when I’m working on Holes again. There is some great ways of describing reading in low light and with limited vision!

swim: 3 loops (6 mini)
cedar lake open swim
71 minutes
86 degrees

The past two cedar lake swims were cancelled because of blue-green algae. Today it was open and almost empty and wonderful. There were lifeguards and more than a dozen open swimmers, but hardly anyone else. Was it because they just opened the beach at 3pm today?

Hardly any wind and only a few waves. Lots of floating strands of milfoil. I was subject to at least one full body scan as I passed over a vine. A few kayaks and canoes. I saw bubbles but now sparkle friends. No flashes of fish either.

The air was hazy. I kept thinking my goggles were fogged, but it looked as fuzzy with or without the goggles. Difficult to see, but just enough for me to navigate. Other swimmers weren’t able to navigate in the haze and sinking light. Or, they didn’t care whether they were swimming on course or not. I noticed several swimmers swimming way over on the wrong side. Cedar vibes.

Before leaving home for the swim, I thought about how MO’s poem would change if you focused on space instead of time — There is space here for the sinking and settling of the spirit? Every so often, I thought about space and here in relation to my swimming, but I don’t remember what I thought. A task for tomorrow?

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.