45 minutes
longfellow flats
50 degrees / feels like 39
wind: 20 mph gusts
Sore hips this morning! Is it a running injury or just a terrible mattress? We flipped the mattress yesterday, and sleeping last night was worse than ever, so I’m thinking it’s the mattress. Ascending from the river, I powered up all 112 stone steps and my legs felt great. Would I be able to do that with an injured hip? I don’t think so. I’m definitely incorporating some step work this spring!
10 Things
- a woodpecker knocking a few blocks away
- the wind was coming from the north and the east
- two iron (or wire?) cranes in a backyard — I spied them through a fence — I want a giant iron bird in my backyard!
- low notes from a wind chime in the backyard of the house where a family from New Zealand lives — not only do they fly a New Zealand flag, but I heard one of them speaking with a New Zealand accent
- on the pedestrian part of the double bridge north of the stone steps — open and blue and brown below
- also on the double bridge: a temporary section of fence — looking over the edge of the (it’s high up here), I could see part of another temporary fence halfway down the steep slope — what happened?
- the floodplain forest between the steps and the river was littered with felled trees and tangled branches and dirt and dead leaves
- creeeaak — branches rubbing against each other in the wind
- from below, looking up at the bluff — a brown slope, a wooden fence, voices
- a roller skier slowly approaching the ancient boulder
Jenny Odell and Another Kind of Time
Yesterday I started listening to a podcast with Jenny Odell about her most recent book on time and I decided that when the book was ready (I requested it from the library), I would finally dedicate some time to clocks and time and other forms of time that don’t involve clocks.
15 jan 2024
It has taken me until today to return to this podcast. Why? I’m studying time and I got a notification that it was the featured podcast on Emergence. When I got the book, in February, I had already moved onto other projects — an ekphrastic project, then wind. So now, 15 months later, I’m taking up the task I assigned myself. Ha! That’s Sara/gorge time. I briefly returned to it this January, but dropped it again, which is another example of Sara/gorge time — scattered returns and departures, loops, taking it up again and again.
Today, I look several pages of notes in my Plague Notebook. Here are some highlights:
reframing language outside of the rigid belief that time is money and time as stuff that can be measured, counted, and should be hoarded
when did time become a commodity?
And then something happened, and it seems to have to do both with technology and sort of cultural needs: like on the one hand the escapement, which is like a part of a clock that can sort of keep the mechanism going as opposed to like a guy ringing a bell at a certain time, right?
Another Kind of Time
This reminds me of my poem and the idea of person inside that bell tower tugging on the rope to make the bell ring!
That happened. And then also towns that were becoming very commercial started needing to be able to count up and measure labor hours that they were buying from people. And so some confluence of those things led to this notion of an hour: like an hour that can just exist, you know, in the imagination. And that an hour is an hour, and a labor hour is a labor hour, and it sort of doesn’t matter what season it’s happening in, what time of day. And for me, that is a really crucial separating point. That is when this idea of time as stuff started to peel away from all the things that it had been embedded in previously.
As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self. Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.
Telling time through weather and seasons, and the leaving and returning of leaves, and the certain slant of light, and the sound of the water, and the feel of the path, and the amount of view, and the ease or difficulty in breathing.
chronos (ordinary, standardized time) and kairos (the interruption of things/ordinary time, extraordinary time)
horizontal (work + leisure used to restore energy for work = work + weekend)
vertical (awe, wonder, interruption, not work, “true” leisure)
migratory time, animal time
what is time to a flower? water, temperature, sun
the 72 micro-seasons in Japanese almanac
how do I tell time when I’m by the gorge?
weather – exposing myself to the elements, running in them, noticing and feeling the effects of wind, air quality, rain, snow, ice, the cold or heat — a relationship to/conversation with the world
witnessing the nearly invisible labor — tree trimming, repaving, managing and maintaining trails, erosion, nest-building
alienation and learning to listen to the world
. . . there’s a part of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Robin Wall Kimmerer is describing—I think she’s talking about like what it would feel like to not know the names of the things that are living around you. And then she says, I imagine it must feel like showing up in a city and you can’t read any of the signs, right? Like, that’s a deeply frightening and lonely experience to have.
When I heard this bit, I raised my hand and said, “that’s me.” I can’t read signs on or inside building that often — even in Minneapolis, where I’ve lived for over 20 years. It is frightening and lonely and frustrating.