april 24, 2021 / 4.35 miles / 36 degrees
Lots of great stuff in this entry that I’d like to remember! Like this insight on Mary Oliver and the repetition in her poetry:
Here’s a MO poem I found last night. It’s very much like all the others, which used to bother me–why say the same thing over and over again?–but I see it (and her work) differently now. The repetition of the words–the habit of repeating this process of noticing, then being astonished, then telling about it–are needed. Practice is necessary because we always need to remember to remember.
I’d like to memorize her poem, Such Singing in the Wild Branches. If not the whole thing, which is a bit long, these lines as a way to begin my run:
Listen, everyone has a chance.
Is it spring, is it morning?
Are there trees near you,
and does your own soul need comforting?
Quick, then—open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song
may already be drifting away.
If there was a theme for this entry, it was remembering to remembering, like in this excerpt from Oliver’s The Leaf and the Cloud:
the way a flower
in a jar of water
remembers . . .
itself
long ago
the plunging roots
the gravel the rain
the glossy stem
the wings of the leaves
the swords of the leaves
rising and clashing
for the rose of the sun
the salt of the stars
the crown of the wind
the beds of the clouds . . .
Reading this poem, I immediately thought of these lines from Marie Howe in “The Meadow”:
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
I also thought of this:
I will not tell you anything today that you don’t already know, but we forget, we human people, and our elders have told us that our job is to remember to remember. And that’s where the stories come in.
Braiding Sweetgrass/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
april 24, 2021 / 6 miles / 40 degrees
Just last night, while listening to the South Community Jazz Band rehearse, I remembered Dorothy Wordsworth and her journal. What luck that it happened to be on this day last year that I discovered it! So many things to study, so little time! One day soon, I hope to revisit her journal and how it inspired her brother:
This Nest, Swift Passerine / Dan Beachy-Quick
But how find how as it flew onward
& the mountains gave back the sound
to say what I mean the call of the bird
& the echoe after to say I’ve seen?
Raven hungers and calls and the mountain
Hungers back and calls
The whole range of peaks in the bird’s beak.
Raven lonely and the mountain rings
Loneliness & the echoe after we could see
him no longer
The echo after we could see Light in echo the eye sees
also through the ear a double infinity
The italicized line in the first stanza is a reference to a journal entry from Dorothy Wordsworth that William used in a poem.