Category: Running Log

march 8/BIKEWALK

40 minutes
basement

Good job Sara! You wanted to run outside even though you should give it at least another day for your back to recover, and you didn’t. You biked instead. And you biked for 5 more minutes today, which was the plan. I felt stronger than yesterday. Could this be the spring/summer I bike more?

Watched more of Fame. Somehow I missed the screen that read, Junior Year. Did they have one? They didn’t have a great speech by the acting teacher, describing the focus of the year. Bummer.

I watched the rest of sophomore and all of junior year. Doris and Ralph get together, Irene Cara sings “Out Here On My Own,” Leroy hooks up with the waspy ballerina. The Rocky Horror Picture Show — a cool documenting of the history of it. As I listened to “Time Warp” I thought about creating a Time playlist — “Too Much Time On Hands,” “Time Warp,” “Summertime,” Hazy Shade of Winter,” “Seasons of Love,” “Time After Time.” I think this interest in time is always there, simmering beneath the surface, but today it’s here for two other reasons: 1. talking to my older sister recently and hearing about her latest work on time travel and 2. the lines/ideas I gathered about time in past entries and just reread — 6 march 2024, 8 march 2024.

Time. Moments. Minutes. Pace. Linear, circular, looping. Dragging. Flying. Seasons. Beats — foot strikes, heart rate. Inside Outside On the Edge of. Too much. Too little.

If nothing else, it’s time to gather together my discussions of time and post them on unDISCIPLINED.

more OR

Yesterday afternoon Scott and I went to Arbeiter Tap Room to write and drink beer. I picked out some favorites from my “or” list:

At Any Given Moment You Might Feel This or This or This, but Rarely at the Same Time

Ardor arbor or
forest fortitude
or sorrow’s origins or
porphyrion interiors
or befores or
no mores or
mortal organs
or distorted mirrors’
evaporating forms
or spores adored or
dictators abhorred
or terror ignored
or

walk: 40 minutes
neighborhood
45 degrees

A blue sky, empty, at the start. A blue sky, mixed with fluffy and streaky clouds, halfway through. Bright, warmer, breezy. The snow on the streets is almost all melted. Only a few streaks. The field at Cooper has a flat layer of snow but no mini-mountains this year. This is the field where the plows dump the snow. Usually by March it has transformed into the badlands, with lumps and hills and jagged craters of dirty snow. Not much snow to plow or dump in the winter of 2024-25.

added, 9 march 2025: This morning, as I read past 9 march entries, I remembered a few more things from the walk:

  • the wind passing through the brittle leaves on a tree, sounding like water falling — not like rain, but like a cataract
  • the wind passing through a giant cottonwood causes it to sing like a door creaking open — creeeaaak
  • a white plastic bag stuck high in the tree — the quick flash of white reminded me of the moon

peripheral vision

I’m reading Peter Swanson’s book The Kind Worth Killing and this reference to peripheral vision came up:

A few years earlier I’d gone out fishing with a colleague, a fellow dot-com speculator who was the best open water fisherman I’d ever known. He could stare out at the surface of the ocean and know exactly where the fish were. He told me that his trick was to unfocus his eyes, to take in everything in his visual range all at once, and by doing that he could catch flickers of movement, disturbances in the water. . . . I decided to use this same trick on my own house. I let everything sort of blur in front of my eyes, waiting for any motion to draw attention to itself, and after I’d been staring at the house for less than a minute I caught some movement through the high window. . . .

My eyes are always mostly out of focus and I often see flashes of movement. In fact, it can be very distracting and irritating how my eyes, without wanting to, are drawn to the movement. One particularly form of movement I can’t not see: someone’s twitching legs, especially out of the corner of my eye at a band concert.

march 7/BIKEWALK

bike: 35 minutes
basement
outside temp: 34 degrees

It would be wonderful to be outside running, but my lower back is still a bit sore and I’m trying to be careful. Ugh — it’s hard to be disciplined, to not do something you want to because you know you shouldn’t. Oh well, the bike felt good. And I was able to watch more of Fame. And my back doesn’t hurt. And my legs feel good.

Anything in particular I remember from Fame? Mrs. Sherwood was being terrible to Leroy again — very old school in her efforts to be tough. Lisa, the dancer who never tries, was finally kicked out and almost jumped in front of a train in despair. At the last minute she stopped herself and said, Fuck it. If I can’t dance, I’ll change to the drama department. Another character’s response (Irene Cara): I tell you, you’re a fucking good actress. Bruno’s dad parked his cab and blasted Bruno’s music — the theme song. All the students poured out of the school and danced in the street, on the sidewalk, on the top of a cab. Bruno’s dad yelled out, This is my son’s music! Bruno Martelli!

A theme for their sophomore year: time to grow up and be honest with yourself and others. Dig deep, turn inward, expose your truths to others:

Last year we worked on simple observation. This year we’re going to turn that observation inward — work on recreating emotional states: fear, joy, sorrow, anger. And it will be more difficult, because you have to expose more of you, what’s on the inside of you.

Fame, sophomore year acting class (1980)

Yesterday I described the teacher’s description of freshman year acting class: to study your own mechanicalness. Then I thought about it in relation to running:

I could also imagine using this exercise while running or walking as a way to achieve “extreme presence” (from CAConrad). Focusing on breathing or the lifting of the foot or the swinging of the arms, etc.

While scrolling through instagram a few minutes ago, I found some running advice that fits with this. Focus on the elbow and think up up up as you run.

OR

Also yesterday I wrote about the poem “And” and an exercise inspired by it — pick another conjunction and turn it into a poem. I picked OR. Yesterday I wrote a list of words that had “or” in them. So much fun! This morning, I began picking out particular ones and trying to put them together. This is fun! I like it as an opportunity to open up more and become untethered from a particular outcome and idea of what I think my OR poem should be about. I wrote the list in my plague notebook. Note how I repeated some words. Also, if you look closely, you can see instances of words too crowded together or crossed out. Those are vision errors, when I didn’t see the words already written — they were in my blind spot.

from my Plague Notebook, Vol. 24

Here are some word combinations/fragments I’ve come up with so far:

  • author arbor ardor
  • orchard porphyrion interiors
  • enforce forest fortitude
  • orphan sorrow’s origins
  • distort mirrors
  • orchestrate forms for dishonored categories
  • forgive mortal organs
  • support porch organizing
  • reorganize ordinary colors
  • mentor porous discord
  • savor tomorrow’s flora encore
  • scorch rigor
  • torch dictators
  • foreswear ordinary pinafores
  • favor befores. adore no mores
  • record evaporated forms
  • flavor labor for transformation
  • endorse Morris choreography
  • reforest former ford factories
  • sponsor spores
  • border shores
  • orbit remorse
  • forge lorikeet collaborations
  • forgive french horns, former neighbors, candy corn for horrible flavor
  • forget hornet porn
  • humor minor opportunities

Almost all of these (or, is it all?) begin with a verb and seem to issue a command. Where are my nouns?

  • neighborhood semaphore
  • oracle oration
  • orange dictators
  • scored arrows
  • ornamental meteorology
  • adorable albacore
  • torrential labor
  • stork storms
  • born bored
  • enormous unicorn orchestra
  • pork-belly pallor
  • factory folklore

So much fun!

walk: 20 minutes
neighborhood
41 degrees

An afternoon walk with Delia-the-dog. Everything melting in the warm sun. Drip drip drip! Gushing gutters, sloppy sewers. Bare pavement except where the plow or shovel missed. I’ll take it!

popped into my head: fORtune favORs fORgetful sailORs

Fortune favors affordable tailors
Fortune savors forceful flavors

I read these to RJP and she wanted to join in the fun:

Dolores ordered hors d’oeuvres
Fortuna major

march 6/WALKBIKE

walk: 25 minutes
neighborhood
27 degrees / patches of slippery ice

Where people shoveled yesterday, the path is mostly bare with a few streaks of slippery ice, but where they didn’t it is not. Slabs of thick, untouched snow. The slick spots were the most unwelcome, especially with my tight lower back. Aside from the ice, it was wonderful to be outside. Bright blue sky, chirping birds, warm sun. So warm that I took off my hat.

At one point Scott mentioned how the strip of grass between the sidewalk and road is not called a boulevard everywhere. It’s a regional thing. He couldn’t remember what else it was called and where he heard about it, but I did — at least where he heard about it; I couldn’t remember what else it was called. He heard about it from me, during one of our runs together. I couldn’t remember much else, so I had to look it up. Yep — here it is:

I described a New Yorker article I was reading before we left about forensic linguistics. My description included misplaced apostrophes, devil strips, and Sha Na Na. 

log entry on 8 april 2024

A linguist solved a crime in which someone left ransom notes that read, “Put it [the money] in the green trash kan on the devil strip at the corner 18th and Carlson.” Here’s the important part in the article:

And he knew from his research that the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street—sometimes known as the “tree belt,” “tree lawn,” or “sidewalk buffer”—is called the “devil’s strip” only in Akron, Ohio.

Wow, I’ve amassed a lot of information on this blog. Some of it I always remember, and some of it comes back when my memory is triggered, like today.

bike: 30 minutes
basement

I wanted to move my legs and get my heart rate up today so I biked. Watched part of Fame — the end of freshman year and the beginning of sophmore year. Two scenes I especially recall: 1. when Mrs. Sherwood shames Leroy for not being able to read in class — terrible and 2. when the acting teacher instructs the students to pay attention to the details — chewing, talking — of their life:

I want you to observe yourself doing ordinary everyday things. You’ll be asked to duplicate those here in class. An actor must develop an acute sense memory so concentrate on how you deal with things in your world. How you wash your face or hold your fork or lift your cup or comb your hair. Observe and study your own mechanicalness. See if you can catch yourself in the very act of doing something or saying something. See if your actions and reactions fall into patterns and what those patterns are. And in particular, pay close attention to the physical world. Isolate and concentrate on the details.

from Fame –first year (1980)

I’ve been doing this with my vision for several years now, partly because I’m curious and partly because I think it’s necessary for me to function. To isolate and understand and work around the strange and unexpected ways my eyes work (or don’t work).

I could also imagine using this exercise while running or walking as a way to achieve “extreme presence” (from CAConrad). Focusing on breathing or the lifting of the foot or the swinging of the arms, etc.

It felt good to bike. My back didn’t hurt at all. Only my left knee, a little, which is normal. Maybe I’ll do a week of biking. Could I work my way up to an hour on the bike?

conjunction junction, what’s your function?

In late fall or early winter, I wrote a haunts poem about all that the gorge could hold. I named it And. This morning, I found another poem with that title:

And/ Nicole Sealey (click link for audio)

Withstand pandemonium

and scandalous

nightstands

commanding candlelight

         and

         quicksand

and zinfandel

clandestine landmines

candy handfuls

and contraband

         and

         handmade

commandments

and merchandise

secondhand husbands

philandering

         and

         landless

and vandal

bandwagons slandered

and branded

handwritten reprimands

         and

         meander

on an island

landscaped with chandeliers

abandon handcuffs

standstills

         and

         backhands

notwithstanding

thousands of oleanders

and dandelions

handpicked

         and

         sandalwood

and mandrake

and random demands

the bystander

wanders

         in

         wonderland.

Along with the poem, there was a link to a writing exercise inspired it: Conjunctions/Connections, After Nicole Sealey by Maggie Queeney

  1. Read the poem “And” and listen to it several times. Jot down some notes.
  2. Pick a conjunction other than and — or, but, for, nor, yet, so. Make a list of words that contain your chosen conjunction.
  3. Turn your list of words into a poem. “Keep the sound of the word in the air as long as possible through rhyme and repetition.”

I think I’ll choose “or.” When I was writing my and poem in November, I told Scott about it on one of our runs. He mentioned how “and” and “or” work in his coding of web databases:

A mile later, Scott described how you code and in css (where and means both this and that must exist to make a statement true) and how you code or(where or means either this or that can exist to make a statement true). I was fascinated by how and was restrictive and narrowing in the code while orwas expansive. In my poem, I’m understanding and as generous and open and allowing for more possibilities not less. I told Scott that I might need to write an or poem now. And is accumulation, more layers while or is a stripping down. 

And = all these things can be true, and moreOr = at any give time, any one of these things could be true

log entry on 24 nov 2024

There’s also a great “or” poem in this entry.

march 5/SHOVEL

32 minutes
about 8 inches
26 degrees

The biggest snowfall of the season. Of course it happened on the day that FWA and his college friends were taking the train to Chicago. Last year, when FWA and RJP were flying to Chicago: a big snow storm all day.

The snow is the worst kind for shoveling — heavy, wet, deep. It will probably melt by the end of the week.

The view from my desk: a man walking his dog in the street wearing snowshoes — the man, not the dog! Will I get to see any skiers too? I hope so.

Today is my mom’s birthday. She would have been 83. She’s been dead for 15.5 years. Last night at community band rehearsal I laughed at something my friend Amanda said — I can’t remember what. And my laugh was my mother’s, at least it sounded like it to me. Sometimes I hear her in my laugh, and sometimes one of my older sisters. I can’t describe the laugh — it’s been too long since I heard it — but I felt it and her last night. That’s how my memories of her work now; they are faint and fleeting and difficult to put into words.

The president’s address to congress was last night. Neither of us talked about it until it was over, but then Scott and I admitted to each other that we had been a little worried he might do something extreme, like declaring the dissolving of congress or pronouncing himself king for life. Thankfully, no. What a world.

circumambulation

In the fall of 2023, when I first started thinking about Gary Snyder and circumambulation, I printed out the Mt. Tamalpais poem, along with a related one my Forrest Gander, and put them under the glass on my desk. They have been there, beneath my fingers, ever since. Today, I reread them and was inspired. I’m thinking about creating another National Park-like unigrid pamphlet for the Franklin-Ford loop. Like the Mt. Tamalpais poem, it would have particular spots on the loop (the poem has 10) where you stop and chant. In the poem, you chant Buddhist prayers, but in my pamphlet, I’m tentatively thinking you will chant some of my favorite poetry lines — or lines I write (inspired by JJJJJerome Ellis and their prayers to their Stutter in Aster of Ceremonies). My lines would be about my blind spot.

I’m also thinking about creating somatic rituals related to these spaces — I’m using CA Conrad as inspiration for them. Yesterday I requested their book, Ecodeviance: (soma) tics for the future wilderness from my local library.

In the introduction to Ecodeviance, also posted here, Conrad describes how their (soma) tics are designed to fight the factory approach to writing poetry they had been using by creating rituals “where being anything but present was next to impossible.” For Conrad, these rituals create an

“extreme present” where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens.

intro to ecodeviance / CA Conrad

While Conrad identifies the factory model as the source of their key problem of not being aware of place in the present, the model that I’m trying to fight in my writing/creating is the academic one, which shares some similarities with the factory.

Am I brave enough to try any of Conrad’s rituals? For one of them, they fully immersed themselves in the color red for the day —

When I say fully immerse myself in the colors I mean ONLY eating foods of the color of the day, as well as wearing something or keeping something of that color on or around me at all times.

The red experiment is part of a 7 poem sequence, (soma) tic MIDGE. For more on it, see: You write what you eat. This essay describes the poems and has links to audio recordings of Conrad reading them. Very cool.

In their introduction, Conrad describes purple in this way:

Purple being the natural transformative pivotal color which is born only when the starting color red (fire) and the last color blue (water) bleed together.

Introduction / CAConrad

And here is their poem inspired by a day immersed in purple: smells of summer crotch smells of new car’s purple MAjestY (2:05): MP3

More mentions of purple!

march 3/RUN

3.3 miles
2 trails+
51 degrees

51 degrees! Sun! Less layers — instead of 2 pairs of tights only 1 with shorts, no jacket or gloves or hat covering my ears. Before I started, as I walked towards the river, the birds were noisy. I imagined them calling out, spring spring spring. Since it was so nice, I decided to run on the winchell trail on the way back. The first part of the trail was all mud. Remembering how I fell last week, I carefully walked today. The rest of the path was dry.

I chanted in triple berries — strawberry/blueberry/raspberry

10 Things

  1. the soft knocking of at least 1 woodpecker
  2. 2 people on the edge of the trail, looking out at the river
  3. 2 big black forms coming out of the Winchell Trail — turkeys? No, 2 humans
  4. a brief glimpse of my shadow off to the side, looking strong, straight
  5. a view of the river — pale blue with silver, snowy edges
  6. thick, wet mud — brown, uneven
  7. a small black something on the side of the path — a hat? a bag? a bag.
  8. voices above me — one high, one low
  9. 2 people standing by the fence near the 38th street steps looking out at the river
  10. 2 walkers bundled up — winter coats zipped, stocking caps, gloves

This morning, I made an appointment to be evaluated for a vision study at the U of M. They’re developing virtual reading glasses that can move words out of a person’s blind spot. Will I qualify? Is my central vision too bad, my blind spot too big? Or, is it not big enough? Whatever happens, part of the evaluation is a vision assessment, which I’m hoping will give me more information about the status of my central vision. Talking with the scheduler, I recall her saying, there are no cures for many of the central vision diseases so we’re focusing on developing helpful tools instead. I like that approach.

My motivations for signing up for this study are (in order of importance):

free eye exam — free, as opposed to $500-$`1000 exam
connecting with people working on vision loss
curiosity about new technologies

It’s great that these selfish motivations could also lead to the development of a tool for enabling people to read with their eyes (as opposed to with their ears).

I’d like for reading to be easier, but I’m adjusting to and enjoying audio books, so I’m not devastated by this aspect of my vision loss.

I just came across this old Twilight Zone episode — I had saved it in my reading list. It seems fitting to add it to this conversation about reading and vision, as an example of how fully sighted people imagine vision loss as a nightmare.

march 2/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
26 degrees

Hooray for being outside and on the walking trail! Hooray for not much wind! Hooray for running up the Franklin hill! My back was a little tight, but not too bad. My legs felt fine.

The river was open; the only ice was on the edges. The sky was a mix of clouds and bright sun. Before the run I heard some geese — did I hear any during? I don’t think so. Also heard before the run: some kids having fun inside a house — laughing and yelling through the closed windows.

At some point, I had an idea for my monthly challenge: the run as ceremony. Inspired by Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies, I want to return to Gary Snyder, Mount Tamalpais, and circumambulation. What sort of ceremonies can I make out of my run that brings together my blind spot and the gorge?

10 Things

  1. bright pink graffiti on a foot of the 1-94 bridge
  2. the top of one section of the wooden fence on the edge above Longfellow Flats is missing
  3. the chain across the old stone steps has been removed
  4. the path was almost completely clear — the only bit of snow I recall seeing was under the lake street bridge: a low and narrow ridge — just remembered one other bit of snow: just past the franklin bridge
  5. a full-length mirror left by the trashcan
  6. disembodied voices — coming from inside houses, below in the gorge, far behind me on the trail
  7. sh sh sh — my feet striking the grit on the asphalt
  8. my shadow briefly appeared – not sharp but soft, faint
  9. at least 2 trios of runners, some pairs, several runners on their own
  10. my friend, the limestone slabs propped up and looking like a person sitting against the underside of Franklin, is still there. I’d like to name them and add them to my list of regulars: Lenny the limestone?

lower back pain

My lower back has been sore lately. Sore enough that I took 5 days off of running. Not sure why I’ve waiting this long, but i decided today to look up lower back stretches for runners. I found this video and its 4 helpful stretches — the video claims to have 5 stretches, but they are only 4. I wonder what the missing one was?

The stretches: pretzel, thread the needle, plank to lunge, hip sweep

I’ll see how it feels in a few hours, but right now, having just stretched, it feels good!

a purple spill from march 1

I wrote this yesterday, but didn’t have a chance to post it.

It’s March and the purple hour is over, but in true purple fashion, the color can’t be contained to one month. Always it oversteps its boundaries. Reading the poem of the day, “Fog” by Emma Lazarus, purple appeared:

Swift, snowy-breasted sandbirds twittering glance 
Through crystal air. On the horizon’s marge, 
                Like a huge purple wraith, 
                The dusky fog retreats.

wraith

1
a: the exact likeness of a living person seen usually just before death as an apparition

b: GHOST, SPECTER

2

: an insubstantial form or semblance : SHADOW

3

: a barely visible gaseous or vaporous column

f you see your own double, you’re in trouble, at least if you believe old superstitions. The belief that a ghostly twin’s appearance portends death is one common to many cultures. In German folklore, such an apparition is called a Doppelgänger (literally, “double goer”); in Scottish lore, they are wraiths. The exact origin of the word wraith is misty, however, and etymologists can only trace it back to the early 16th century—in particular to a 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid by Gavin Douglas (the Scotsman used wraith to name apparitions of both the dead and the living). In current English, wraith has taken on additional, less spooky, meanings; it now often suggests a shadowy—but not necessarily scary—lack of substance.

Merriam-Webster entry

marge = margin = edge

Wraith — I like that word and what it conjures. And to make it purple? Good job, Emma! I’m not sure about the middle section where she imagines the “orient town,” but I like “Fog,” especially this:

for on the rim of the globed world 
I seem to stand and stare at nothingness. 
                But songs of unseen birds 
                And tranquil roll of waves

Bring sweet assurance of continuous life 
Beyond this silvery cloud. Fantastic dreams, 
                Of tissue subtler still 
                Than the wreathed fog, arise,

And cheat my brain with airy vanishings 
And mystic glories of the world beyond. 

Returning to the purple — I like how she imagines the lifting fog as purple. Back in November of 2022 (how has it been that long?!) when I studied gray, I devoted a day to fog and mist: 23 nov 2022. Last month, purple — especially lavender and lilac or eggplant and dark purple — replaced gray. Where I used to see gray everywhere, now I see purple, or imagine purple.

feb 28/WALKBIKERUN

am walk: 20 minutes
neighborhood
wind: 20 mph / 42 mph gusts

Sitting at my desk in the front room before heading out for a walk, I could hear the wind howling. I wrote in my Plague Notebook, Vol. 24, the wind purpled the sky. Later, walking with Scott and Delia, feeling and hearing and seeing the wind, I said it again and explained it to Scott: the blustery wind, like someone mad and full of bluster, their face turning purple with outrage. I had been planning to try running outside today, but after being pushed around by the wind, I decided I’d prefer to be in the basement.

My favorite things about the wind: the way it swirled the leaves on the sidewalk; turning the corner and feeling the wind on my back, seeing the leaves flying ahead of me.

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement

Watched part of S2: episode 1 of Sprint on Netflix while I biked. I’m so glad I put on the audio descriptions! I could never read the big block text they used for identifying people and locations. It’s pretty good, even though they’re using a worn storyline: rival sprinters, one is flashy and talks a lot, the other is quiet and avoids the spotlight.

Listened to a running podcast for the first 10 minutes, then an energy playlist for the rest. I didn’t want to do much in case my back or hips flared up. They both seem fine — not completely pain free, but not painful either. It felt good to get my heart rate up for the first time since Saturday.

Writing this part of the entry at 11:45 am, it’s even windier with 47 mph gusts! Very glad I didn’t go outside to run!

the purple hour

The final purple hour. I’ve enjoyed devoting time to this color. Today’s goal: to write some lines inspired by my exploration.*

2:06 am / dining room

  • thick, heavy stillness
  • the clicking keys echoing in the silence
  • a soft, high ringing in my ears
  • bouncing my legs vigorously
  • “lavender gray: a widow’s shroud” from The Nomenclature of Color/ Richard Jones
  • lavender is the new gray

rituals/ceremonies for each of my main colors? see CA Conrad on red

2 shadows, cast on the closed curtain, light source: a neighbor’s security light
shadow 1 = a thick smear of bird poop on the glass turned into a small form on the curtain
shadow 2 = the thin branches of the serviceberry bush, shimmering in the wind, thin shadows vibrate on the curtain

The wild/ing in this girl is purple, I think, A deep and dark purple.

Wilding/ Shara McCallum

Machetazo!, Bony Ramírez & Blonde Dreams, Alison Saar

you can take the girl out of the wilderness
you can strand her bewilder her for a time
you can even hang her upside down
in your rickety attempt to shake loose
the source of her power but you won’t ever
disentangle the wilding from her
the force of a thousand suns unfurling
and hurling her toward the ground
you won’t be able to erase the traces
of salt lacing her ravenous dreams
oh you can try unwebbing her feet
but the lizard in her will keep sunning
itself as the day is long and at nightfall
will crawl up your walls lurking
at the corners of your vision
goading you on while she thwarts
your every endeavor abandoning
her tail anything required of her
to keep eluding your capture

*Here’s a first draft of something about purple:

Purple Things

a wind-stirred sky / the space between your eye and the object you’re looking at / agitation / the light from a full moon filtered through the blinds / the square shadow it casts on the carpet / deep inside the beat a thought a dream / darkened doorways / a bruise / mold / mist / a sunset after a volcano / a fashion craze / a widow’s shroud / fibs / a house, settling / the beginning / the end / interiors / oxygen-starved extremities / ornamental grass / asters / tantrums / restlessness / the buzz beneath / impending thunderstorms / ink / iodine / inheritance: a mother’s jacket, a daughter’s despair / fake fruit flavor / static / the only color I see when I wake up in the middle of the night

feb 27/WALK

am: 25 minutes
neighborhood
40 degrees

One more day to rest my back. It only feels a little sore, so I think it’s okay, but I’m trying to be cautious. This is the longest break (5 days) I’ve taken in a year? I’m not sure. Another morning walk with Scott and Delia. Sunny and spring-like. All the snow has melted, almost all of the puddles have evaporated.

Picked up a new pair of Brooks’ Ghosts in the early afternoon. I’ll save them for after late April/early May, once sloppy season is done . Black with white and gray. On my walk I wore my bright yellow Saucony’s — the ones that hurt my feet last year. I’m going to give them another chance. Maybe they’ll work this time?! Forgive me, future Sara.

the purple hour

No purple hour last night. I slept straight through, only waking up briefly at 5:30 when Delia jumped on the bed. This sleeping straight through only happens a couple times a month.

In non-purple hour purple thoughts, yesterday afternoon I finished listening to/reading along with JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremonies. So good! The connection to purple is: purple asters, a big chunk of the book is printed in purple ink, I envision the Stutter/pause as purple. Here are some passages I want to remember:

Dr. Bejoian, a speech therapist I worked with from 2012-2013, taught me a technique called soft contact. “If you’re struggling to say a word that starts with p, b, or m, try starting the word as softly as possible.,” she said. Sometimes this made the syllable hard to hear. “Pause” could sound like “awes”; “brain” like “rain”; “master” like “Aster.” I want to follow this softness offered by the Stutter. Thank you, Dr. Bejoian.

For most of my life, my relationship to my stutter was rooted in shame, anger, and despair. I responded to these emotions by trying, and failing, to master my stutter through various means: undergoing hypnosis; making a fist while I stuttered, opening the first to release the work; talking in singsong; expanding my diaphragm while speaking; saying my name is “John”(my middle name) or “Shawn.” Failure has led me to a grove of unknowing. If I can’t master the Stutter, what can I do? What might it mean to try to Aster my stutter?

Aster of Ceremonies (123) / JJJJJerome Ellis

Follow the softness. I love this idea and generosity (to Self and Stutter) it offers. My vision gives softness too, not in sound, but in image. Things that are never in sharp focus are never harsh or exact, but fuzzy and gentle.

Teach me to Aster You. Teach me to treat You as an Elder that has so much to teach me. I will surrender and attend to Your ensemble of blossoms. Your Dandelion Clock* will be my timekeeper. I will seek not to overcome You but to come with You; not to pray to be rid of You, but to pray for your continued presence in my life. To stay with the mystery You steward.

What might it mean to Aster You? To pray that You Aster me? Instead of “I speak with a stutter,” what if I “advertised” to someone by saying: “I speak with an Aster. My speech is home to a hundred blooms. These silences you may hear hold more than I could ever know. Thank you for your patience as I pause to admire their beauty.”

Aster of Ceremonies (124) / JJJJJerome Ellis

I was incredibly lucky to find, a few years into my diagnosis, Georgina Kleege’s book, Sight Unseen. Her generous approach to her own central vision loss — including not understanding it to be a death sentence and giving attention to how her seeing works and to challenging assumptions about the infallibility of vision — helped me to be curious about how seeing works and to develop my own relationship with both being without seeing and seeing in new ways. Even as I struggle with not being able to see that well, I also welcome the new knowledge my strange seeing/ not-seeing is giving me. I imagine Ellis’s “astering the Stutter” to share some similarities.

Ellis connects their Stutter to the Aster and to the many plants (he names them Elders) that their ancestors relied on. They feel a strong connection to these Elders. Such a powerful idea to bring all of this things — ancestors, plants, a glottal Stutter — together. Wow! Inspired by this approach, I’m thinking about how I experience my central vision loss in relation/beside the gorge and the eroding rocks and relentless, remembering river. What ceremonies could I create to honor the different layers of rock? The seeps and springs and floodplains? How does the wearing away of stone, the persistence of water, and my eroding cone cells open a door to a new space in which to dwell to explore to learn from? ooo — I like this idea. I want to give a little more time to thinking through how Ellis makes their connections, and how I can make mine.

feb 26/WALK (x2)

am: 20 minutes
neighborhood
45 degrees

Sun! Birds! Puddles and earthy smells.

pm: 45 minutes
cooper school / 7 oaks / edmund
51 degrees

More sun and birds and warm air. Lots of people and dogs also walking, runners too. A woman running in bright pink shorts. A woodpecker softly knocking, or knocking loudly but at a distance. A biker whizzing by then turning into an alley in front of us. A man coughing thickly. We talked about our kids and their futures, a possible spring break trip, Scott’s plug-in, the Brooks Ghost 16s I’m thinking of buying with our REI refund.

My back is feeling better, but is still sore. I probably won’t run again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll bike on the bike stand?

excerpts from Indigo Insomnia/ Monica Ong

Indigo insomnia is the great waking, this birthing of the world anew. From the indigo, an even deeper blue, is it said.

This line reminds me of a Maggie Smith poem, How Dark the Beginning:

We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf 
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark 
the beginning of a day is.

. . .The mouth holds many things except the language of the new, still forming between the lungs. The spoken vow we breathe, but don’t yet know how to defend.

. . .Wondering if your voice is in the wrong chord, the wrong song, the wrong language, or just a painting of the ocean, its roar muted by a gilded gaze that see but doesn’t listen.

Indigo insomnia is diving into the deepest waters of memory to uncover the bodies hidden by our bad inheritance.

Thinking about traumas we inherit, despite others’ best intentions. I was pregnant with RJP when I learned my mom was dying. What impact did my overwhelming grief have on RJP and her mental health?

—

Reading about indigo in On Color, here’s something I’d like to remember about the difference between dyes and pigments:

Technically, a dye is a coloring agent that bonds with the molecules of the material to be colored. Pigments are also coloring agents, but they differ from dyes in that they don’t bond with the material; they are small particles of color held in some suspension, forming a film that attaches itself to the surface of the substance to be colored. Pigments, one might say, are applied to materials; dyes are absorbed by them.

On Color / David Kastan

Another important thing to remember:

. . . the slaves who worked on the indigo plantations in the Americas really were dying. A soldier who had served under George Washington in the Revolution afterward wrote about the “effects of the indigo upon the lungs of laborers, that they never live over seven years.”

Nonetheless, the worldwide desire for the remarkable blue dye allowed indigo plantations to thrive anywhere the conditions of climate and soil permitted indigo-­bearing plants to grow. In the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies the plantations of the New World satisfied most of the world’s desire for natural indigo.

feb 25/WALK (x2)

25 minutes
neighborhood
37 degrees
morning

Sun and no wind and barely any snow + chirping birds + barely iced puddles + mud and grit = the feeling of spring. I’m excited for warmer weather, although I’m also disappointed we didn’t get more snow. I suppose we still have March and April for that.

Walked with Scott and Delia. Scott and I talked a little about the U.S. and politics and how getting outside makes it a little (just enough) easier to endure all of this terribleness.

10 Things

  1. a black standard poodle stopped in the road, its human patiently waiting for it to move
  2. boulevards that are more mud than grass
  3. a thin, almost invisible sheen of ice on the shaded side of the sidewalk
  4. noticed for the first time, even though we’ve walked past them dozens of times: a kid’s footprints embedded in a stretch of old sidewalk
  5. chirp chirp
  6. the warm sun on my face
  7. near the end of the block: someone repairing or adding to a front porch
  8. heading south: a cool breeze
  9. blue sky
  10. the alley: mud, grit, puddles, ice

70 minutes
to the library and back
45 degrees
afternoon

Another chance to be outside! A wonderful afternoon for a walk. Sun, no wind, clear paths. Books to pick up at the library: Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color and Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. Noticed a dark bluish purple fence that clashed with a dark blue house and a house painted plum.

the purple hour

I did wake up a few times last night, but I didn’t take any notes about it. This morning, I’m finishing the violet chapter in On Color.

What color are the haystacks really? What color is the cathedral at Rouen? Monet’s answer is that the haystacks and cathedral are the color (or colors) they seem to be at the moment of looking (147).

“ocular realism” = a commitment to the illusionistic rendering, not of the world, but of visual experience (147).

1:30 pm / neighborhood walk

As I walked to the library and then back from it, I tried to think about violet and purple and images the evoke my feelings of restlessness and uncertainty and not-quite-formed. A hummingbird, mid-air — moving too fast to see the motion, or a spinning top, constantly whirring but looking solid and still. Carbonated water, something fizzy and bubbling — small little bouncing balls or shimmering bubbles. An insistent, soft whisper. Soft, unstable.