march 16, 2017 / REST
2026: Strengthening and deepening my relationship with my body is a key part of this RUN project and my noticing/writing practice. I don’t totally agree with his assessment of alcohol and what seems to be a complete dismissal of medication, but I get his point and I have been having a “reset” with alcohol for the past month.
While I was walking to the studio, I listened to Krista Tippet’s On Being. This episode, How Trauma Lodges in the Body, featured an interview with the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. He’s particularly interested in bodywork and how it can help people with trauma recover. I was struck by his discussion of the disconnect between mind and body in the West.
the mind/body split
DR. VAN DER KOLK: But it’s true. Western culture is astoundingly disembodied and uniquely so. Because of my work, I’ve been to South Africa quite a few times and China and Japan and India. You see that we are much more disembodied. And the way I like to say is that we basically come from a post-alcoholic culture. People whose origins are in Northern Europe had only one way of treating distress. That’s namely with a bottle of alcohol.
North American culture continues to continue that notion. If you feel bad, just take a swig or take a pill. And the notion that you can do things to change the harmony inside of yourself is just not something that we teach in schools and in our culture, in our churches, in our religious practices. And of course, if you look at religions around the world, they always start with dancing, moving, singing…
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. Crying, laughing.
DR. VAN DER KOLK: Physical experiences. And then the more respectable people become, the more stiff they become somehow.
Part of this running project and the development of one of my key running stories is the split between mind and body and how it works in my running, writing, thinking and being. I’m trying to develop a relationship between mind and body that doesn’t prioritize one over the other or understand them to be wholly separate and disconnected things. What could that relationship look like?
2026: Instead of stiff I anticipated another word: still.
march 16, 2020 / 4.25 miles / 35 degrees
2026: Is this the beginning of my love for Emily Dickinson?!
I really love Emily Dickinson’s poetry–her phrasing, the rhymes, the rhythm, the ideas. I think (I don’t know that much about Emily Dickinson right now–maybe I should learn?) this is one of her more famous poems, especially the idea of telling the truth slant. I like it because of how it fits with my vision. I read that Dickinson became blind temporarily for a few years and that she wrote about it in her poetry. With my cone dystrophy, I rely much more on my peripheral (sideways, slantways?) vision to see. And, while I need bright light to see and read things, if the light is too bright it makes it almost impossible to see. Also, my unfocused, fuzzy vision is softer and less harsh, which sometimes results in kinder, more gentle visions–things that might look ugly in sharp edges and lines, appear beautiful in the soft, fuzzy, absence of detail (one example: gnarled, bare branches in the winter).
march 16, 2024/ 2.2 miles / 39 degrees
2026: In this entry, I explore how LN took her extensive notes and condensed them into a wonderful poem, Lake Superior. I’ve been experimenting with how to take my research and almost 10 years of documenting my runs by the gorge and condense it into a poem/poems. I continue to look to more models for inspiration. I should put together a section somewhere with examples from other poets + a description of my process.
I love how LN took all of her notes and ideas about rock and language and culture and commerce and turned them into this small chunk of the poem. So much said, with so little words! And then to end it with: you have been in my mind/between my toes/agate Wow!
2026: As mentioned just below in my 2025 version of march 16, I am reminded of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s description of wind:
Searched “wind” on poems.com and found this amazing poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer“:
High up a plane droned, drone of the cold, and behind us the flag
In front of the Bank of Hope’s branch trailer snapped and popped in the wind.
It sounded like a boy whipping a wet towel against a thigh
Or like the stiff beating of a swan’s wings as it takes off
From the lake, a flat drumming sound, the sound of something
Being pounded until it softens, and then—as the wind lowered
And the flag ran out wide—there was a second sound, the sound of running fire.
And there was the scraping, too, the sad knife-against-skin scraping
Of the acres of field corn strung out in straggling rows
Around the branch trailer that had been, the winter before, our town’s claim to fame
When, in the space of two weeks, it was successfully robbed twice.
The same man did it both times, in the same manner.
This whole poem is amazing, but too long to post here. What a storyteller BPK is! I should read her collection, Song.
march 16, 2025 / bike, basement / 35 degrees
2026: The idea of the seizure, stutter, hesitation, pause, suspension is one I think about a lot — it’s my space between beats when I’m flying during my run and the moment between looking and seeing. I’d like to dedicate a series of poems/ a collection to it.
Also, Dove’s mention of the flagpole alive in the wind returns me to march 16 2024 and BPK’s mention of the wind in a poem. I’ll add it in above!
Then is it poetry if it’s confined? Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention — Over here! It’s me! — while the white spaces (air, field, early morning silence before the school bell) shape themselves around that one bright seizure . . . and if that’s so what do we have here, a dream or three paragraphs? We have white space too; is this music? As for all the words left out, banging at the gates . . . we could let them in, but where would we go with our orders, our stuttering pride?
I like her “About this Poem” description. Especially this line:
What began as a continuation of our good-natured ripostes went from anti-ars poetica to lyric reverie to—surprise—a praise song to the prose poem!
Should I try writing a praise song to the gorge or to writing while running and running while writing or to my strange vision or to poetry?
That line about the one bright seizure made me think of poetry as an explosion of the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary, or of the Stutter, or a pause, or an interruption.