may 27, 2017 / 10 miles / 63 degrees
(2024) Sure, these little rhythms aren’t much, but they’re fun and help to distract me, to lock in a rhythm while I’m running, and to ensure that I don’t take myself too seriously. I need to do more rhythms/chants — as ridiculous and whimsical as possible! — this summer.
In honor of open swim and to keep a steady rhythm, I created a few running rhythms while I was running at the lake:
Open Swim
Open Swim
starts next month
starts next month
I will swim
I will swim
across the lake
across the lake
I will see
I will see
the orange buoy
the orange buoy
may 27, 2020 / 3 miles / 64 degrees
(2024) What a hard summer 2020 was!
Another sticky morning. Rained all last night. About a mile from my house, people protested the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police. I’ve been sitting here for a few minutes trying to think of what to write after that last sentence. I have no words, or too many words about structural racism and white supremacy and the urgent need to confront it and how to hold a deep love for a place beside a recognition of how racist and unjust it has been and continues to be.
may 27, 2022 / 2.5 miles / 68 degrees
I love the title of this poem as a way into words. A fun exercise to try?! Somewhere, I have written about the idea of taking a phrase like this and turning it into a title for a new poem. I should edit my ongoing list of experiments for myself and my own writing practice: a list of experiments I want to try this summer.
I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won’t/ Traci Brimhall
may 27, 2023 / 4.5 miles / 69 degrees
(2024) My discussion of black sadness and dark things in this entry is great and is a reminder, yet again, that I should work on color this summer! I want to reread/use this entire post, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll just include this bit:
10 Black/Dark Thoughts or Ideas or Images
- no Black smells — that is, I don’t recall smelling coffee or the wonderful smells-better-than-it-tastes waffle smell from the coffee and waffle bar
- today, with the bright, warm sun, I wanted the cooling darkness of shadows. My run was always felt better out of the bright light. Half the run was in shadows, half in bright light
- so many pleasing shadows! Mine, sprawling trees, lamp posts, buildings
- I didn’t hear the St. Thomas bells and, as I was nearing campus, I wondered if it was because something — the wind? — was absorbing their sound. Black bells ringing with a black, echo-less sound?
- the dark/black mystery of deep trails down into the gorge
- I saw a few waves on the river, but no sparkles. Thought about Homer’s wine dark and the idea of water as deep and dark and endless
- my running shorts are at least 10 years old and were, at one time, black. Now, faded by the sun, they’re still black but barely, almost a very dark gray
- running down the summit hill to the river road trail, thought about light as knowledge, liberated from Plato’s dark cave of shadows, then the dark womb and women’s ways of knowing and how light (and scrutiny and classifying — dissecting) are masculine, patriarchal and privileged over other ways of knowing, which are often read as feminine and less than, or to be overcome
- if light = certainty (but does it?) and knowing for sure, what happens when we are finally certain? What ends when the darkness is over?
- thought about the idea of black hearts and then what a literal black heart might look like or why someone might have it and then wondered if a literal white heart might not be just as disturbing*