march 21, 2020 / 3.4 miles / 25 degrees
When and if I decide to try this fun form again, here are some handy words to use in a double abecedarian:
Speaking of double abecedarians that begin and end with the same letter, here’s a list of words that begin and end with the same letter:
- aqua
- bib
- caustic
- dead
- eye
- fief or fluff
- gig
- hush
- intermezzi (plural of intermezzo: brief piece of music between acts)
- JJ (a name, or an abbreviation of judges or justices)
- kink
- lull (or lol)
- Mom
- northern
- onto
- plump
- QQ (an instant messaging service in China)
- rear
- sass
- tyrant
- ubuntu (operating system for PCs)
- verv (does this work?)
- wow
- xerox
- yellowy (didn’t think this was a word, but it is!)
- zzzzzzzz (when sleeping)
I only had to look a few of these up. Fascinating to learn new words, abbreviations, like JJ for judges.
march 21, 2021 / 4.7 miles / 43 degrees
I remember this conversation! I even remember where I was — almost to the franklin bridge, up on the hill (Seabury) — when I mentioned academic street fights.
Scott and I ran the franklin loop this morning. First, we talked about The Dukes of Hazard and how Uncle Jessie was related to Beau and Luke, if at all, and how Daisy fit into it (Scott brought it up). Then we talked about realism and truth and postmodernism and academic street fights and the scientific method (my topic).
Robin Wall Kimmerer is amazing. I’d like to do something more with this bit from her:
I just started Braiding Sweetgrass. Wow! Love it. Only a few pages in, and I already found this great bit about the Original Instructions:
These are not “instructions” like commandments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself.
Braiding Sweetgrass/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
march 21, 2022 / 6 miles / 52 degrees
I (2024 Sara) should write more about the river!
Right before I started my run, I typed this here: A few lines from the poem to remember as I run:
have you forgotten the force that orders the world’s
fields
and sets all cities in their sites, this nomad
pulling the sun and moon, placeless in all places,
born with her stones, with her circular bird-voice,
carrying everywhere her quarters?
I decided to try and keep remembering (and noticing and studying) the river as I ran. Often, even as I know it’s there, I forget to notice it. Today, it was pale blue and mostly calm. I saw a reflection of the lake street bridge as I ran on the east side, but it wasn’t completely smooth — not the perfect, inverted bridge from another world I sometimes see. The banks were mostly brown, although there were a few white spots. Just past Meeker Island Dam, I heard a small waterfall. No boats or rowers. No ducks. Running above the river, I never got close enough to hear it. All I could hear were the cars driving by — on the river road, a bridge, the distant freeway. To me, it seemed as if they were trying to sound like a rushing river. I thought about how important the river is to Minneapolis and St. Paul, how roads, buildings, neighborhoods, industry are arranged around it and because of it (ordering the world, setting cities in its sites). I love how Oswald offered this wonderful description of the organizing/ordering force of the river, wedged between these two passages from the dairy worker.
Alice Oswald and the labor noticing and smashing nostalgia:
This idea of not looking at the landscape in a baffled, longing way fits with some more of her words, in an interview: Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River. In this podcast she discusses her resistance to the romanticizing of landscapes:
I’m just continually smashing down the nostalgia in my head. And trying to inquire of the landscape itself what it feels about itself. Rather than bringing my advertising skills — getting rid of words like picturesque…there’s a whole range of words that people like to use about landscape, like pastoral, idyll. I quite like taking the names away from things and seeing what they are behind their names. I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.
…more interested in the democratic stories…the hardship of laboring, looking for food…the struggle of a tree trying to grow out of stone…always looking for that struggle. I’m allergic to peace. I like this restless landscape. I like that it won’t let you sit back and say, “what a beautiful place I’ve arrived to.” You’ve never arrived. It’s moving past you all the time.
It’s a day long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well.Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River
I’m thinking about this effort as a form of labor, done in tandem with other forms of labor, like using the land, walking through the land, working on the land.
added 21 march 2025: Also thinking about names. This passage from Alice Oswald came up a few days ago in an entry from 21 march 2022:
Taking the names away from things and seeing what they are behind their names. I’ve given a lot of attention to the idea of naming in my practice. Here are some passages I gathered for a class I taught at The Loft:
Find its Name.
“Start small. Find something you are utterly besotted with from the outdoors. Something that you love. Find out its name. Learn everything you can about it. Once you have named it, it’s hard to not want to fight for it.”
Find something you love — anything, Aimee Nezhukumatathil starts with a firefly — then find its name. In the last part of this lecture, I’ll explore some ideas around the value of getting to know the world by learning the names of the various creatures that inhabit it. First, I’ll read a few passages on the importance of names, then I’ll recite a few poems that are about naming.
These poems and passages aren’t all in agreement about what it means to name something, or why it’s important. I’m putting them beside each other as a way to end this lecture with curiosity and more questions: what does it mean to have a name? who does the naming? what does naming do to a sense of mystery and wonder?
passages
from Robin Wall Kimmerer: Knowing the name is a form of respect.
Deep attention calls us inevitably into deep relationship, as information and energy are exchanged between the observer and the observed, and neither partner in the exchange can be anonymous. They are known; they have names. There was a time, not so long ago, when to be human meant knowing the names of the beings with whom we cohabit the world. Knowing a name is the way we humans build relationship. It is a sign of respect to call a being by its name, and a sign of disrespect to ignore it.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil: What is lost when you grow up not knowing the names of fireflies?
What is lost when you grow up not knowing the names for different varieties of fireflies? When you don’t have these words ready to pop on your tongue: Shadow Ghost, Sidewinder, the Florida Sprite, Mr. Mac, Little Gray, Murky Flash-train, the Texas Tinies, the Single Snappy, the Treetop Flashers, a July Comet, the Tropic Traveler, Christmas Lights, a Slow Blue, a Tiny Lucy, the mischievous Marsh Imp, the Sneaky Elves, and — in a tie for my personal favorites — the Heebie Jeebies and the Wiggle Dancer?
J Drew Lanham: The birds know who they are. They don’t you need to tell them.
There’s no shame in not knowing the name of a bird. If it’s a redbird to you, it’s a redbird to you. At some point, as a scientist, it’s important for me to be able to identify birds by accepted common names and Latin names and those things. But then I revert frequently to what my grandmother taught me, because, I say, the birds know who they are. They don’t need you to tell them that.
But over time, when we relax into a thing and maybe just being with a bird, then your brain kind of relaxes, it loosens, and things soak in. And I think that’s the key with a lot of learning. But not getting the name right immediately does not in any way diminish their ability to appreciate “the pretty,” as Aldo Leopold talks about. And so seeing that bird and saying, “Oh my God, what is that? Look at it,” and you’re looking at it, and you can see all of these hues, and you can watch its behavior, and you may hear it sing — well, in that moment, it’s a beautiful thing, no matter what its name is.
Sometimes, what I try to get people to do is to disconnect for a moment from that absolute need to list and name, and just see the bird. Just see that bird. And you begin to absorb it, in a way, in a part of your brain that I don’t know the name of, but I think it’s a part of your brain that’s also got some heart in it. And then, guess what? The name, when you do learn it, it sticks in a different way.”
And, I’ll add JJJJJerome Ellis and their “Liturgy of the Name,” to this list.
In a section on the stonewaller, Oswald offers this great line:
…which is how everything goes
Dart / Alice Oswald
with me, because you see I’m a gatherer, an amateur, a
scavenger, a comber, my whole style’s a stone wall, just
wedging together what happens to be lying about at the time.page 33
There are so many great lines in this poem!