(2024) One of the reasons I do this practice of revisiting past entries on this day is to be inspired. It worked today. Wow! So many projects to return to!
- from 2017: revisit the runner’s high — edit my poem about it, work on experiencing it again, gather (and tag?) old entries exploring the runner’s high
- from 2018: go back to the library!
- from 2021: return to this entry and spend more time with all of its themes
- from 2023: Reread all of Mary Rueffle’s color poems. Return to color, describe it, write more about what color means to me and how it’s connected to memories and associations!
may 24, 2017 / 5.25 miles / 51 degrees
(2024) As I continue to become more familiar with poetry, I am deepening my understandings and engagements with running and writing and the world. And poetry. Yet, there is a danger of learning too much, losing the energy of an amateur experimenting. In this entry from 2017, I experimented with how to describe the runner’s high in both scientific and mystical terms. Reading it back now, it’s too wordy, but I like the overall questions motivating it. Could I edit it into something that captured my amateur spirit? I’d like to try. But how? I’m thinking of gathering my notes from past entries and other versions of this idea of the runner’s high. Maybe I also need to try to FEEL this runner’s high again. It’s been too long.
One quick thought: too much telling, not enough showing or feeling. Not enough images and not enough room for readers to figure it out for themselves.
may 24, 2018 / bike / 87 degrees
(2024) In this entry I describe visiting the library on the U of M campus for the first time in 6 years. I miss the library and being able to spend so much time in the stacks. I’d like to try going back sometimes, even if I struggle to read. A goal for this summer!
Biked to the library at the U to skim through a few books I might want to buy. I do, at least one of them: Roger Deakin’s Water Log. Feeling ready to write more about water and my love of swimming. Strange to walk in the building. I haven’t been in it since I left the academy 6.5 years ago. Hardly anything has changed. Same steps. Same stacks. Same study tables. Different me. I miss being at the library, swimming in books. In Water Log, Deakin describes how swimming in water is an other-worldly experience. Submerged, your senses working differently in a dark, watery (almost) womb. Sitting in the middle of the library, surrounded by stacks, is not the same as swimming, but it generates similar feelings of being submerged and in a time/space that is in-between.
may 24, 2021 / 3 miles / 71 degrees
(2024) Many things to remember in this entry about things being easy, listening to the kids next door, Richard Siken’s birds, water and stone, Oliver and Siken and struggling with purpose and knowing, bewilderment, Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Renkl. So much! I need to give more time to this day than an “on this day” entry can offer! And that’s partly because it’s actually several days that I collapsed together in one entry. I combined them because I was injured and wasn’t posting on days I didn’t work out.
may 24, 2022 / 5.45 miles / 60 degrees
(2024) More fun with IT bands and a great Paul Tran poem (and reading by them of it).
may 24, 2023 / 4.5 miles / 67 degrees
(2024) This year the flowers have been blooming for weeks, but last year when I ran to Longfellow Gardens to see purple flowers, nothing yet. Too cold in April.
Some great stuff on immortal cupboards, windows, offerings, and a purple wood!