Tag: 1 day of swimming

aug 27/BIKESWIMRUN

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
64/71 degrees

Hooray for feeling comfortable on a bike! Able to see enough to not feel scared.

…sitting on the back deck to write this, a wave of ear piercing cicada buzz just passed by. Wow! What’s the decibel level of that?

Rode into the wind for a lot of the ride — and not just the wind I was making with my moving body. Wondered if it would be choppy at the lake. (it was). At one point, when the wind seemed particularly strong, I could feel how un-aerodynamic I was — an upright form fighting against air. I tried to get more aerodynamic, leaning low and over my hips, my bike as parallel to the ground as I could get it. Thought about ironman triathletes who can bike like in an even more parallel position for almost 5 hours. Wow, how many hours of training and lifting and working with a coach must you need to keep that form for so long?

The bike ride back was wonderful. What a beautiful late summer day! Sunny, warm in a way that’s welcome because it was cooler in the morning.

swim: 2 loops
56 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
66 degrees

I did it! 1440 minutes, 24 hours, one day swimming in August! Hooray for ambitious goals that push you to do a little more than you would have otherwise. Swimming a total of 24 hours (over 21 swims) was a commitment for sure, but it wasn’t an unreasonable commitment. And the biggest challenge was not getting my body to swim that many minutes — and miles, over 40 — but having clean water and an open lake. Lake Nokomis was closed for 2 weeks in August due to elevated e-coli and algae blooms.

24 hours was a good goal. Enough to challenge me and enable me to get deeper into my swimming and writing about swimming, but not too deep to sink me, to overwhelm and injure me. That’s another definition of Mary Oliver’s deepening and quieting of the spirit: deepening my commitment, steadily chipping away at the time (a quiet = still = steady approach).

The water was empty of other humans. I don’t remember seeing/hearing any ducks or geese or seagulls either. Lots of milfoil, both tethered and floating in segments on the surface. Too many milfoil vines near the white buoys. They seem to be increasing every time I swim. Boo! I went much farther out to avoid them, and when I veered closer, I could feel them wrapping around my wrists and ankles. Join us, I briefly imagined them saying. No thanks!

Yesterday while looking up recent drownings in Lake Nokomis — the ones I remember are the South High football player in 2013 and the 11 year old girl in 2023 — I discovered that someone else drowned last week. A woman who (presumably) took her own life. Rescuers were searching for more than 24 hours, looking for the body. They found it. As I swam out to the white buoys, I thought about this woman and the others that had drowned, wondered how terrified I would be to encounter their dead bodies bobbing in the water. Another meaning of deepening/quieting of the spirit.

The water shimmered in the sun, sometimes like silver, sometimes glass. There were little waves, big enough to make a noise, but not big enough for white caps. Before I got used to the rocking movement, I was slightly dizzy. I liked the chop. I was able to got faster heading north with the wind, and more powerfully heading south against it.

The sky was a deep blue with a few clouds. They were fluffy like cotton balls, some of them big, like a whole ball, some of them wispy and small, like one chunk of the ball. Noticed a plane, parallel to the water.

The water was thick with particles, impossible to see too far in front of me — only my hand and the trailing bubbles.

Heading north, following the path of an open swim loop, I looked up and imagined that the orange buoy was far off in the distance. Oh, to have it appear to be able to swim out and beyond it!

When I finished the swim, I sat on the sand, feeling the sun on my back, looking out at the water and reflecting on the season. What a summer! I hope to come back to the lake more times this week and until they remove the buoys, but whatever happens, I met my goal and have no regrets about how much I swam this summer. Good job, Sara!

today’s inspiration

One of the poems-of-the-day offers inspiration for my Swimming One Day project:

Task/ Ari Banias

There’s a poem I tried to write about
bathing you the last day you were alive.

On one of our drives home:
I want to die without shame.

You didn’t elaborate.
I described standing across from a stranger

paid to do this work, her presence
anchoring me in the task

with you between us.
From this distance I can use the word task.

Your pain the astrologer said A gift
for others

A mixing bowl
filled with warm water

we dipped washcloths into before
wringing them out

rested between your legs.
The phrase utilitarian tenderness served

some containing purpose
I needed at the time.

A great effort
to come up to the surface of yourself

to say what you said to us.
A student writes two lines

about an aging parent
they think are boring and may cut.

That poem did not belong
to language, and surpassed touch

Dough rising somewhere
under a red and white

dishtowel in that bowl

about this poem

“The task is attempting to write the poem again the task is bathing the dying the task is work done for wages the task is recognizing the encounter that refuses containment that insists on experience outside narrative time the task is to not entomb memory in language to not reduce grief to a quotable thing the task is to feel the edge of a void and keep going inside the feeling the task summons in you the task continues despite”

inspirations

  • create a set of poems — one of them is the main poem, another about it, explaining it in some way, sideways or front ways or back ways, and maybe a third one that condenses it (like Hardly Creatures and the original poem, replica, souvenir)
  • a pair of poems, the second, the reflection of the first, as if on the surface of water, and darker, like A Oswald’s line about water letting you see twice but more darkly
  • take an idea — in the poem it is “task” — and play around with a wide range of meaning. I’m thinking: “day” or “quiet/still”

run: 2.45 miles
around lake nokomis
76 degrees

Went back to the lake in the evening with Scott. He started running north, I started south around the lake. I haven’t run here at all this summer. Stopped at the little beach briefly to check out the algae. Since my swim this morning, the test results have come in and there is an blue-green algae advisory at both beaches. They tested it on Monday when it was the worst. It’s better today.

Over halfway around, I passed a young boy walking by himself. After I passed him, I heard somebody running like they were trying to catch me. I think it was him. The footsteps lasted for 30 seconds? a minute? then stopped. I kept running until I reached the overlook on the cedar bridge then briefly stopped to take in the view. I noticed waves and the silhouettes of 2 kayaks in the distance, silvery water.

10 Lake Things

  1. a guy calling out, no! drop it! drop it! no! no! — I’m assuming they were talking to their dog, but I didn’t see
  2. a kid’s loud foot strikes
  3. a group of people crossing the path, heading for the dock
  4. the soft sand of the dirt trail next to the path
  5. 2 kids climbing the leaning tree that I used to run by and think it looked like a woman arching her back
  6. an opening in the vegetation, an empty bench, a person closer to shore
  7. 2 women’s voices on the water near shore — were they in a kayak or a canoe?
  8. the bridge has lane markings for a bike path — that’s new
  9. the smell of cigarette smoke near the booth where they test for zebra mussels
  10. a woman and a man blocking part of the path — the guy practicing a stretch as the woman gave him pointers — his coach?

aug 26/BIKESWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
62/66 degrees

Feeling a bit tired and out of it this morning. Yesterday, Scott and I biked over to the State Fair and spent the entire day walking around with 145,000 other people (a record!). Wow, crowded. And fun. And great to bike there instead of driving or taking a bus. We biked 10 miles and walked almost 9.

Even with all of yesterday’s exercise, today’s bike ride wasn’t too difficult. Not easy to see with the gray sky, but not too many people around so it didn’t matter. Encountered acorns, walkers, runners, a few other bikers, and one dude on a hover board.

swim: 1 loop (6 mini loops)
30 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
65 degrees

The water looked smooth and silvery from the shore, so I was excited to get in. When I did, uh-oh, a film of green. Not quite looking like green paint, but not not looking like green paint either. Blue-green algae blooms? I got out and walked the shore, wondering what to do. Was it an isolated patch? Should I stay out of the water? I was thinking of biking over to the other beach when I saw another swimmer get in. Decided to go for it, but only a shorter swim until the testing results come out later today — they always test the water on Mondays with results on Tuesdays.

It felt great to be in the water, but I was uneasy. Would I run into slime? No, but I encountered even more milfoil than usual. So many vines reaching up to tap my foot or wrap around my wrist. No thanks.

Out, just past the white buoys, the water didn’t seem too bad — no slime, not that green. Quiet, calm. No boats or other swimmers. One seagull that was committed to their perch on a white buoy. 4 geese having a conversation on the edge of the shore. A few ducks. The water was colder. By the 6th loop, my hands and feet were getting a little numb. Time to get out!

10 Things

  1. swirls of green on the surface when looking from abover
  2. goose poop on the sand, feathers in the water
  3. thick, opaque water
  4. a silvery surface in the distance
  5. seagull on a buoy
  6. swimming directly over some clusters of milfoil, inches from my face, its sudden appearance was unsettling
  7. a feathery soft tap on my heel — swimming over milfoil
  8. a kid at the nearby playground repeating the same phrase over and over (6, 7, 8? times) it’s so quiet
  9. wading through water, a line of green at the point of contact between suit and lake
  10. clouds then, at the end, the sun breaking through

Swimming One Day

With today’s morning swim, I’m done to 56 minutes left. If it were actually a day, it would be 11:04 pm. Very close. Hopefully the lake won’t be shut down with algae blooms in a few hours! If that happens, I will still swim the 24 hours by finding water somewhere, but it will be more difficult.

hour entry: That it never/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

-That in 1751 Carolus Linneas conceived of a floral clock, a botanical garden designed with species that blossomed predictably at certain hours of day, so that walking through it, one could tell time from the petals.

That it never worked may have been critical to the pollen of future ruins and revolts, that the lily wrist opacity decided not to show itself, that 6:00 industry was lost to the ants and the nectar chambers, that I got nothing intended done all day and coworkers floated between cubicle sunbeams, that the cockle shell women and the snapdragon breaths and the pin code clues and the politicians’ shoes never quite stood to stand there in a punctuating sequence, that all sequence would stymy and revolt, that Mary mary, alarm and delay and caterpillar-staring, that the empirical battalion of the flower clock disintegrated by noon, that subsequently there would be wilderness of soon and soon and soon where the ruins of the instrument held us.

flowers:
lily / wrist, as in wrist watch?


cockle shell
snapdragons / pin flower?
politicians

Miss Mary Mary

a wilderness of soon and soon and soon!

Is this poem in the collection that mostly directly references the title, on orchid o’clock? Possibly. I love the idea of a botanical clock! And also, I don’t. What a delightful way to connect the natural world with our sense of time and what an impossible way to impose invented time on the natural world. And that wilderness of soon by noon? I love that as a description of rewilding! I want to memorize this poem for tomorrow’s swim!

An idea somehow inspired by giving attention to this poem : 24 short poems — inklings? — about swimming one day in august.

aug 23/SWIM

3 loops
54 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
62 degrees

A little colder this morning. The water was warmer than the air. Windy, too. I liked how the wind made the water choppier — another day of gentle rocking. Swam loops off of the main beach, near the 4 white cylindrical buoys. I wasn’t too close to them because of all of the milfoil just under the surface. So many vines reaching up to briefly wrap around my heels and ankles!

I was joined in the lake by the vines, a few seagulls, maybe a duck (can’t remember), a silver canoe in the wading area with at least 2 people in it, fish (I’m imagining), my sparkle friends, and, at the end, 2 cute little kids and an adult (Dad?) giving one of them a piggy back ride and singing a silly song to them. again! again! they cried.

Wow, did I feel the deepening and quieting of the spirit! Recited Oliver’s poem and thought about that quieting as a stillness in my core, and the stillness not as motionless but a steadiness — enduring, endurance, duration, drarable. I was less certain about the deepening. Not going too deep in the water; I like to be just under the surface. And not deep and thinking too much — I’m remembering Maxine Kumin’s line about the thinker as the sinker. I like deepening as commitment, a rootedness, a settling in.

I condensed the words in Oliver’s first verse:

now time said / quiet happens
now I / flux
now / I quiets / flux happens

I’m thinking of deepening and quieting as condensing. Getting to the essence of something, removing the layers, cutting through the flux of happenings to a/the core.

hour entry: it is reported/ Endi Hogue Hartigan

It is reported that 11th century Chinese peoples employed a wooden clocklike instrument that calibrated time by burning camphor, rhubarb, aromatic scents through the particular mapped incineration path of freshest ash, one could map the hour of day… it is Mountain Pear o’clock, it is Pine Ball it is Maze Petal it is Spine Curl o’clock, only part of this is imagined.

calibrate burning / mapped incineration / pine petal / spine curl / imagined mountain

aug 21/RUNSWIM

3.6 miles
locks and dam #1
74 degrees
humidity: 88% / dew point: 65

I’m trying to write this entry but I’m distracted by the little kids next door in the front yard — such cute voices. One of them was singing a song — take this grass. . .broken world. . . broken glass.

Refrain: hot, humid. Even so, a better run today than the last one I did. When was that? Tuesday (checked my log). Ran all the way to the bottom of the locks and dam #1 hill without stopping. Noticed the river. Such reflections! Clouds, trees, the bridge. Took a picture:

bridge / clouds / surface / sky

The water was smooth beneath the bridge and rippled (corrugated, as Anne Carson wrote) farther out.

Everything is still this morning, calm, quiet. Partly inspired by my 21 aug 2024 entry, I thought about being still. Not as not moving, but as a calm, steadiness. Stillness as the space between beats, when both of my feet are off the ground. Or, stillness as my strong core that floats through that space — suspended as held up in the air, not as stopped.

10 Bridge Things

  1. at the top of the hill, in-between the top and bottom of the bridge, a family was sitting on a bench
  2. the gate near the columns of the bridge was unlatched and slight ajar
  3. beyond it, hollowed out bricks with a strange pattern
  4. empty benches all the way down
  5. the reflection of the bridge on the water’s surface, upside down
  6. a car nearing the bottom, voices — couldn’t hear what they were saying but imagined it was about whether or not the locks and dam was open
  7. the echo of my footsteps under the bridge
  8. the clicking of a bike’s gear across the service road
  9. thought about what RJP told me yesterday: someone went over this locks and dam in a canoe (or was it a kayak?) yesterday
  10. at the top of the hill again, a man read the sign to a little kid who started jumping and asked him to join — by the time I reached them, they were both jumping and laughing and making goofy noises

the deepening and quieting of the spirit
among the flux of happenings

still

I thought about being quiet and calm and the opposite of restless and anxious. Then I thought about my core — literally and figuratively. Core = my core muscles, strong back, a straight spine. Core = enduring values, character. I felt the stillness within my self and my body even as the world blurred and floated and drifted around me. Then, Mary Oliver’s “deepening and quieting of the spirit” popped into my head — amongst the flux of happenings. Yes! A stillness of the spirit, where stillness is being satisfied and balanced and present in the moment, not needing to do more or feel guilt or regret for what was or wasn’t done. 

21 aug 2023 log entry

I still the clock./ Endi Bogue Hartigan

/I still the clock.

/I still the clock by holding the pendulum coin still so that
the mechanism stops
and I can sleep without the consciousness of it.

to still the clock is a ritual of the demagnification of clocks.

/it is a kind of violence of fiction for the clock to not
function as a clock while others click and breathe and blink.

the eyes blink more before they stop functioning as eyes.

/the rapid eye movement of dream frightening being pure
pulse, pure frenetic zag force

/to watch a gold-painted platinum extravagant clock you’re an excess you’re
a fire you’re in competition with the tiredness of time.
/to hold in your satiny eyelids the still unstill pendulum of
the gaudy machination you are in unison

with the aspirant expirations of the day.

still / holding / pending / stop
sleep / not function /
click / breathe / blink / dream / pulse / excess / rapid fire extravagance / tiredness / still unstill / aspire to expire

underwater the end (expiration) is the breath (expire)
the end / forced above / evicted from below / no longer water but air

In this poem, to still is to stop, to end, the deep sleep

swim: 6 loops
110 minutes
cedar lake open swim
82 degrees

The final open swim of the season. It goes so fast! Another great night for a swim. Warm, sunny. I liked that the wind made the water less smooth — not too rough, a gentle rocking. The course was set up strangely and even though I complained about it afterwards, I think I liked the challenge of it. One buoy was in the middle of the lake, the other was at the far left edge of hidden beach. At first I worried that this set-up would cause chaos with swimmers crossing over the path and running into to each other, but it was fine.

a risky moment: Because the course was so far to the left, I swam in water I haven’t before. Almost halfway across, I swam straight into a nest of vines — the biggest cluster of vines I’ve ever experienced. I didn’t panic and was able to swim out of it, but I could imagine a weaker swimmer struggling to free themselves and getting wrapped more tightly. As I swam away from it, I thought about the high school football player that drowned off of the little beach at lake nokomis about 10 years ago. That’s probably how it happened.

Some things irritated me: the swimmer that I tried to pass but sped up to prevent it, another swimmer stopped at the buoy, blocking the way, the unmoving lifeguard on his kayak too close in on the course, the bright sun making it almost impossible to see anything on the way back, the scratchy vines. But more things relaxed and delighted me: the gentle water, feeling strong and able to swim for so long, swimming past other swimmers like they were standing still, the faint clouds in the sky, the solitary orange buoy sitting on the surface of the water glowing, glimpsing other swimmers off in the distance — only inklings: the flash of a yellow or orange buoy, a bright pink cap, white foamy water.

overheard:

a mom with 2 kids, one who was around 4 or 5, the other a baby in her arms, to a lifeguard: Can he swim out to the orange pyramid?
lifeguard: (thinking she meant the baby and not the kid) alone?
mom: oh no, not the baby!

Later I heard her recounting the story to a friend. They were laughing about it.

At the end of the second to last loop, I stopped at the beach, stood in the shallow water and the sand, checked my watch, and decided to do one more loop. For the final loop, I felt Mary Oliver’s one day in August, everything calm and quiet. I thought about what a great season it has been, how grateful I am to have this time swimming, and how satisfied I am to have taken advantage of it. No open swims until next June. I thought about how no next season is guaranteed; a lot could happen between now and then. Then I remember the story of my great-grandmother Johanna standing out in the field at the farm near the end of the fall to behold the familiar view, wondering if she’d still be around the next fall.

aug 20/BIKESWIMSWIM

bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
71 degrees

Hooray for biking to a lake that is open again! Had a few (almost) moments of panic — maybe not panic, but feeling unsettled. Everything blurred or smudged. I could see enough but not as much as I wanted to. The rest of the time, the ride was more than fine.

Nearing the double bridge, I could hear a bike approaching from behind. I slowed down to let him pass and he called out, in a chill and kind voice, you’re good — it’s single file here. After making it through the bridge, as he passed me, he called, those e-bikes are scary! I agreed, but wasn’t sure why he mentioned it. Only now, writing this, did I remember that some e-bike passed me going very fast and without warning me. I suppose that was what he was referring to.

swim: 1.75 loops (6 mini loops)
45 minutes
lake nokomis main beach
72 degrees

The lake and the beach were empty. Noticed some signs near the shore — oh no, is the beach still closed? Nope. Those signs were for more information about blue-green algae and weren’t announcing that the beach was closed.

The water was great. Not too cold, clearer than cedar lake. Saw some of my sparkle friends and a lot of ducks. At least 2 different ducks crossed my path as I swam. quack quack

Forgot to count loops; counted number of strokes for one loop (250) and each of the four white cylindrical buoys as I swam past them, and my five strokes between breaths.

Encountered a lot of pale milfoil, a few paddle boarders, a canoe. No other swimmers.

Right before starting my swim, I heard a dog barking on the other side. Something about the deep sound, repeated half a dozen times, that seemed solemn or ominous.

It was wonderful to be swimming in lake nokomis all alone. So quiet! So relaxed. A definite deepening and quieting of the spirit.

For part of a loop, I recalled the woman I met who had been bit by a fish and was unsettled. Will any fish come and bite me today? Then I remembered that it annoyed her, but it didn’t seem to hurt or haunt her. Barely a nibble.

Later, I recall thinking about how my world is always underwater: distorted and approximate forms, softened features, a sense of disconnection but also a new logic of connection. Right after that thought, I noticed how underwater was green, above blue — blue sky, blue surface, green everything else

hour entry: I made a chart today a beautiful/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

I made a chart today a beautiful weekly chart for links and breakages and shoulder pulls and astronaut walks. Some items are measured in repetitions, some in minutes and I endeavor to note on which days I have devoted my body’s minutes and repeated movements through time space onto this chart. At the end I hope for late endorphin states, and an even gait, and for uncertain ailments to dissipate by my discipline.

chart / shoulders / repetitions / measured minutes / devotion to minutes to repetitions to even gaits to uncertain ailments

What does my watch watch?

minutes / loops / beats / strokes / effort / uneven gaits / balance / breath / pace / distance / errors / miscalculations / days / dates / hours / location / light / how loud that military plane flying overhead was / ambient light / laziness / discipline / dedication / obsessions / hesitations / regrets

swim: 3.25 loops
75 minutes
cedar lake open swim
81 degrees

Another beautiful night for a swim! And the buoys were back where they belong: close to point and hidden beach. I didn’t feel too sore even though I swam earlier today. My shoulders were fine the whole swim, but my right tricep started to ache on the second to last loop.

Everything was great in the water except the vines. So many vines — strands, clumps, nets of vines. I kept swimming through them and as they hit me with their sharp scratchiness, I flinched. I’m glad I didn’t pull something in my neck with all the flinching I was doing! And the vines didn’t want to leave. They wrapped around my feet, my wrists, shoulders, head. One persistent clump wrapped around my safety buoy and kept tapping me on the thigh until I finally realized what it was and ripped it off and threw it.

The sky was blue with a few fluffy clouds and an occasional soaring bird. Oh, and a dragonfly! I haven’t seen many of those this summer.

Today I noticed the spray from my arm as I lifted it out of the water. Dripping in an arc as my hand traveled from my hip to past my head and back into the water.

One more day of open swim club. How can it be over already?

aug 19/RUNSWIM

2 miles
2 trails
72 degrees
humidity: 94% / dew point: 70

Ugh — so thick! Oh well, there’s one good thing about this consistently hot and humid weather in the morning: it’s making me want to be done with summer and ready for fall and winter running. My calf almost cramped after 4 minutes of running again. I had to walk it off. I wonder what’s causing this?

Heard a lot of rowers on the river. And not just the coxswain this time; I also heard rowers cheering for each other. Was it a class? The U of M team? I stopped on the winchell trail to try and see them but I couldn’t. Too many leaves in the way.

Evidence of rain everywhere. Lots of mud, gushing and spurting sewers. The pipe that dumps neighborhood water down the ravine and into the river at 44th was loud. I decided to stop and record a video of it. In the background, you can hear the coxswain.

water falls / coxswain calls

When I wasn’t on the winchell trail, I listened to my “Doin’ Time” playlist, including Beck’s “Time Bomb.” The first time I heard that song was in the Funny or Die video with Will Ferrell and ? (can’t remember the other actor) going around Los Angeles and high-fiving everyone. Tried to find a clip of it but couldn’t.

When I looked up “time bomb beck video” a promo video for charity: water came up from 16 years ago. The organization was seeking donations to help in drilling for water in Central Africa. I don’t know enough about whether or not this is a good (effective, responding to the needs of the people by asking them what they need) organization, and I couldn’t tell from the video, partly because I couldn’t see it very well, but its reminder, at the beginning, that water is life and its emphasis on access to water offers an important link between time and water and a powerful contrast between my experience, living among so many lakes, and the experience of others without easy access to water.

I am reminded of a passage in Anne Carson’s “1=1.” After describing a scene of a train car in Europe over-stuffed with people fleeing war zones, she writes:

 a scene so much the antithesis of her own morning she cannot enter it. What sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side in the world where we live, should this be framed as a question, would not be answerable by philosophy or poetry or finance or by the shallows or the deeps of her own mind, she fears.

1=1/ Anne Carson

Impossible to answer, important to dwell within the discomfort of it.

hour entry: When John Adams wrote / Endi Bogue Hartigan

Another toll, another count of automatic weapon casualties, another occasion of America losing track of its math. I read today that when John Adams wrote “Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together,” clocks were a tolling of public event, rung, an occasion or station in sun. I slept, and woke, I slept too long and woke. I tried to count the measured world by reading. Read “Thirteen Clocks,” read the late morning sun slant, read the current count outpaces past casualty counts, read “just three percent of adults own half of America’s guns.” Something automatic in measure, too automatic. I woke out of 9.25 hours of sleep I calculated automatically upon waking. I saw a crow out the window that was the occasion of a crow pecking frozen specks. I read the headlines leaking into headlines, saw the orchid sky calculating nothing. I have an inclination to stream and I don’t what it means today. I have an inclination to lie in my husband’s shoulders crook and let the day snowdrift let the dimness become wide, so a shoulder is a kind of stream too. The argument is made that the streaming of time is a perception trick. The argument is made that we have moved past occasion to incremental measure that we are obsessed with measure and stricken. I have an inclination to obsessively stream, to arise and move not through incremental measures of occasion but through water. The early clocks were water clocks but it was shown that water was imprecise, was subject to pressure and pore—even streams of consciousness can encounter ducts and brim. I am conscious of my husband’s warmth because of more than his warmth. Do not mistake headlines for measure. We were held in God’s soft pocket. Do not mistake automatic grieving for water.

toll / automatic / occasion / track / count measures / measure counts / outpace / streaming time / from occasion to increment / obsess / to stream is to move through water not seconds or minutes or hours / water exceeds measure is imprecise is more than our grief

the imprecision of water clocks / “The history of timekeeping is the story of the search for ever more consistent actions or processes to regulate the rate of a clock.” / “Since the rate of flow of water is very difficult to control accurately, a clock based on that flow could never achieve excellent accuracy. People were naturally led to other approaches.”

source: A Walk Through Time — Early Clocks

precision / division / headline as occasion as increment as measured line between

a line to keep/to use: I have an inclination to obsessively stream, to arise and move not through incremental measures of occasion but through water.

Maybe this could be the title of a poem? Something about softness and imprecision and the inability to be contained in easily measurable ways. And how my vision loss has made for liquid looking (Alice Oswald), and a way to see the same or better than others in the water. Moving through water offers a different logic and makes the existing logic strange — distorted, weathered, unreliable, imprecise.

And now, instead of moving through water, I’m thinking of Bruce Lee’s short poem about being water:

Empty your mind. Be
formless shapeless
like water 
now you put 
water into a cup
it becomes the cup you put
water into a bottle
it becomes the bottle you put 
it into a tea pot
it becomes the tea pot
now water can flow or it can
craaaaasshh
be water my friend

Be water versus be like water. Metaphor versus simile. Metaphor removes the encounter with the other; you become the other (see Anne Carson and the anthropology of water).

people always believe that metaphor is more poetic. But I’ve always loved simile. One of the reasons is that simile keeps both worlds alive at the same time whereas metaphor changes one for another. So you get this beautiful kind of doubled feeling with the simile. 

The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself

Searching for something else, I just came across this excellent answer to the question, Do you carry a notebook?

AO: No, I don’t much. If I travel like now I do take a notebook. I find by the time I get back home I haven’t got the sort of liveliness. Mostly I try to take things into my head. I really believe in the sort of inarticulate ways of thinking. So the fact that you can read the whole day, all day long, and then when you’re composed it can come out again. I like that process of it not yet being in language, changing your mind round. And I’m more and more wary of the kind of willed and conscious act of writing. More and more I leave my mind to do it by itself. So I will, you know, go out and be kind of shocked by all the colours and pictures and smells and then purposefully not think of them linguistically. I think that the underneath mind will then do the work and that’s the mind I’m interested in. So the skill for me is then learning how to raid that underneath mind and then, when you do pick up a pen, you’re listening just hard enough so that you don’t use your surface mind. You get down to the mind that has taken everything in.

The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself

Instead of the underneath mind, the underwater mind, or the just beneath the surface mind? The water-logged mind?

swim: 3 loops (? cedar loops*)
75 minutes
cedar lake open swim
85 degrees

*a strange course set-up: the first buoy was halfway out in the lake, the second was close to shore and to the right of hidden beach, so I’m not sure of the distance. Judging my time and effort, I’m guessing that I did 3 nokomis loops.

note: I didn’t have time to write this entry right after my swim, so I’m writing it the next morning.

Another wonderful night with hardly any wind. Beautiful light. Warm water, except for when I stopped swimming to tread water and extend my feet as far below as I could. Then it was cold. Crowded tonight: the last free night of the season. The water was fast, flat, opaque. My goggles were fogged for a lap or two until I licked the inside, then they were clear. I wasn’t sure if that would work, but it did.

My favorite image: on the second half of the loop, heading back to the beginning, breathing to my right and seeing a line of swimmers in the distance heading towards hidden beach. What did I actually see? the rare flash of an arm, a pink cap, churned up water.

After 3.5 loops, I stopped to take a quick break and check my time. Oops, the workout never started. I remember pressing start on my watch, but sometimes this happens. Oh well. Even without the data, I swam for 30 minutes before turning on my workout.

After finishing the swim, drying off in the grass, I encountered another swimmer who had a strange request. A fish bit my mole, could you check to make sure it’s not bleeding? The other day, a fish bit me and when I got home I had a scab.

The fish bite? What? I can’t remember if I’ve written about it this summer, but I haven’t noticed any fish. Not one sighting of a silver flash, definitely no encounters. The other swimmer continued, I’m just so slow out there and they’re attracted to my moles. Yikes!

She joked that she was going to ask her roommate to make fish for dinner so she could get some revenge. With each bite she’d say, I’m not food, YOU’RE food!

aug 18/SWIM

5 loops (9 cedar loops)
95 minutes
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees

A fabulous evening: no wind, sun, calm water. I felt so strong and buoyant for much of the swim. High on the water, a steady kick, strong arms. The light around 7 was that great late summer evening light. The sun setting earlier than in July — a chance to see a different sort of sparkle on the surface. Point beach was shallower than usual. I was able to stand up farther out than I ever have before — or, was I just standing in a different spot? The floor of this beach is very uneven. Lots of prickly vines, single strands passing slowly over my legs, clusters or clumps or knots almost getting tangled with my kicking feet.

before the swim

Continuing to read and think about Endi Bogue Hartigan’s on orchid o’clock as I experiment with what it could mean to swim one day in august. In process note #27, Hartigan writes this about the process of working on the book:

I dove into reading about the history of horology, clock systems, and theories/philosophies of time and my mind wandered through these histories for years, clock history being an incredible palimpsest of histories: religious, industrial, scientific, astronomical, governmental, economic, natural, more. The history of clocks and time measure includes everything from the capitalist puppetry of measuring industrial time to drive efficiency, to the synchronization with atomic clocks from computers where real time headline bleed into our screens and consciousness, to medieval monks creating mechanisms to wake for morning prayers. Time itself as a concept has no one definition. And while clock measure is cultural it is also so personal, is used to keep us close to our beloved ones and moments. I wrote from this interlay, and the more I wrote the more I wrestled with how we inherit these interwoven histories and constraints, but also fight against them and can slip boundless out of them. 

The mechanization and measurement of time. I’m thinking of the second verse of Oliver’s poem:

Something had pestered me so much
I thought my heart would break.
I mean, the mechanical part.

The mechanical part. The clock! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly! Regular. Ordering disorderly life. Ordinary (Oliver, Upstream). the hours on their rounds, twelve white collar workers who manage the schedules of water (A Oswald, Dart).

Precise. Neat little boxes. Nothing approximate about it, exact. The closest I can get to precision when measuring my encounter with lake water. The next closest is arm strokes, but only because I’m steady with my strokes and rarely stop or vary it. My Apple watch records this data. It even distinguishes breast stroke from freestyle. How?

It’s 150 strokes o’clock. It’s 30 breaths o’clock.

Where does an Apple watch fit into the study of clocks? To my swimming one day in August?

Later in her process notes, Hartigan describes the three forms she uses in her book:

The forms I arrived at became a way of moving with different paces in time, moving in primarily three different forms/paces: hour entries which are prose-like and which move at a slower loosely-shadowed mental pace that allows for sentences; second entries which are like little insect legs notching forward with alliteration and gap-jumping nonlinear narratives; and a variety of lyrics that often use the slash as an entrance. They work together and of course the forms mix and disrupt their own boundaries too. The slash was important to my mental movement. 

Very cool. I’m thinking about my own forms and how to express different modes of swimming in the lake. Inklings, which is the chapbook I’m working on, are short 5 syllable, 5 line, flash encounters with the lake. Brief glimpses, approximations, things witnessed in the midst of motion. Then I have some shortened sonnets — 5 syllable 14 line poems represent more sustained encounters. What other form to use, and what does it represent?

hour entry: “calendaring” is a verb/ Endi Bouge Hartigan

“Calendaring” is a verb. You can “clock yourself in.” These terms like rows of hothouse orchids living in some God-forsaken pre-purchase interval steam. New verbs for new measures, new signs of transaction as home, this moon hour spent “off the clock,” but tracked, this noon hour packed in screen-time and foam, this stem of the orchid holding itself up as an orchid. you can even check off “orchid,” you can list for Tuesday, “unnatural hothouse mixture of purple and green.”

clock yourself in / measuring data / transactor or transacted or transaction? / tracked / tricked / off the clock / on the clock / in the clock

calendar / 7 days / every day / any day / a certain day / day after day / all day / once a day / 30 days has september

orchids in rows / hothouse / swimmers doing loops / a dredged-out lake / unnatural green / fertilizer run-off / blue-green algae o-clock / an exchange — a perfect lawn for an unswimmable lake

during the swim

Thought about days and remembered my “On This Day” practice. I should use that in my thinking and writing about one day in August. Also thought about another way, in addition to minutes, strokes, and distance, that I use to measure duration: active calories. Finally, as I counted my strokes between breaths — 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left — I thought about counting as a comforting practice and about counting and accumulation (minutes/hours accrued) versus counting as a repeating of numbers with no accumulation (1 2 3 4 5 breathe). Of course, there is accumulation with these strokes and I keep track of it on my watch: total number of strokes. But, the act of counting in the water over and over is different.

aug 17/SWIM

4 loops (8 cedar loops)
95 minutes
cedar lake open swim
69 degrees

Would it rain? Would they cancel the swim? It seemed uncertain when I woke up to gloom, but the storm stayed south and the water was great. Smooth, mostly calm, not too crowded, easy to see. The first 3 and a half loops felt so easy and fast. I stopped at hidden beach for a quick break and a chance to see the lake from above the water for more than a brief flash every 5 strokes. The beach was quiet, empty. I could hear wind in the trees, then some bugs. I think I saw a few people getting ready to do open swim. They were up in the grass putting on wetsuits. Started swimming again and did another 3 loops before taking a minute or two break at hidden beach again. swam 1.5 more loops before deciding I was done — my legs decided for us. Nearing the first buoy, my legs felt like they were about to cramp, so I stopped kicking and dragged myself in for the last 50 feet or so.

strange vision

Several times, something strange happened with my color vision. Looking up quickly to sight, I noticed the lifeguard’s kayak. Instead of red in looked white and (almost) robin’s egg blue. Later, getting closer to more than one swimmer, their swim cap was white and the same blue instead of bright pink. Both with the kayak and the caps, when I got closer they returned to normal — red and pink.

10+ Things

  1. white sky — sometimes I could see the sun through the clouds, but it never emerged
  2. a swirl of vines, passing over my head, shoulders, torso, lingering near my ankles
  3. the swimming area at hidden beach was wide and long and almost empty — at least one other open swimmer was standing in the shallow water
  4. for the first 4 loops, the water was all smooth, during loop 5 it was much choppier heading to hidden beach
  5. a bird in the air — was it big or small? I couldn’t quite tell. I’m thinking small
  6. opaque water
  7. a scratchy vine, pricking my arm
  8. noticing the surface above the water from my vantage point: submerged, only my eyes out of the water, like an alligator
  9. stopping at the little beach: a dog barking, a collar clanging
  10. making note of the procession of swimmers on the other side of the course, heading to hidden beach when I was heading from it — a slow and steady line of swimmer
  11. after the swim, walking past a big puddle on the dirt/gravel road, its surface had scales on it from the wind

I never got completely lost in the swim, although I had moments where I wasn’t thinking about my stroke or breathing or sighting.

Thinking about time, last night I started reading Endi Bogue Hartigan’s on orchid o’clock. Here’s the opening poem, which I think will be a great inspiration for me in playing around with “one day in august.”

I’m talking about the rotation/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

—The predictable commencement of annual flooding of the Nile River is said to have formed the foundation of the ancient Egyptian calendar. Calculations were made using nilometers, vertical water-measurement devices, influencing taxation, crop planning, and more.

I’m talking about the black cows in the pasture along the highway between here and the office: some days the black cows’ snouts are pointed in the same direction in the morning and the opposite direction in the evening, all 200-300 or so, parallel dipping their snouts: some days they are helter-skelter; some days the shadows are crisp some days the shadows are swallowed but they have shadows on all days; and the wet eyes of the cows have an angle with which they lean into the wet grass, so they are a kind of dials to themselves and their light, visible to themselves or not. I might be comforted driving by saying cow shadow o’clock, saying east black cow o’clock, I might be comforted by talking about their rotation.

/it is child eyelash o’clock /it is having to look o’clock it is
Nile flood o’clock /it is percolate o’clock

/it is morning birds plus socket sound of car closing / 21st century pastoral
o’clock it is flashflood fear o’clock /it is TV van at the shooting site rim

/it is miscount of the dead o’clock
/it is remember to call remember to call find a corner to make a call o’clock

/it is the blue jay screech o’clock /it is having to look o’clock
/it is innocent eyelash o’clock /it is the clock continuing despite

o’clock /people emptying from their eyes
/it is yesterday’s rose-dew o’clock

/it is tearing the work blouse off its hanger o’clock/ it is
tearing and not /it is that blouse again that headline again it is

everything I forgot creeping up in tides
/it is people split and swelled

confiding overflow o’clock /it is the shadow of a gun / the shadow of
the cow o’clock /it is what is allowed in the shadow

/it is the president’s turned up o’clock it is America’s deadliness and dailiness
o’clock /it is glued to the headline o’clock

it is lunchhour-beeline o’clock /it is it’s only Tuesday o’clock another
curbside memorial o’clock another caterpillar miracle o’clock another

people emptying from their lives o’clock or into their
lives o’clock the Nile floods every hotspell in this week

/it is child-wake, it is flood of what’s at stake o’clock,
/it is the morning rupture the American rupture that

shadow-bleeds and swells /it is the felling of the shadow o’clock
/I’m talking about the black cows.

Wow!

I found this helpful essay by Hartigan about the book and the process of creating it: process note #2: on orchid o’clock

And here’s an earlier book of hers that might be interesting to check out: Pool (5 choruses)

aug 16/RUN

3.1 miles
trestle turn around
75 degrees
humidity: 89% / dew point: 71

Ran in-between raindrops. It started raining yesterday afternoon and kept going, off and on, all morning. Then, right before my run, the sun came out. Now that I’m done, it’s dark again. More rain coming.

Everything wet. Slick, too. Mud, puddles, crushed acorns: dangerous. I slipped once but barely. So thick out there! No rowers or roller skiers or regulars. Some bikers, walkers, other runners. Stopped at the sliding bench — the only view was dark green. Then stopped north of the trestle to check out how the crack was doing. The trail is still blocked off with tape and orange cones, the crack has grass where there used to be dirt and is opening up again.

a crack in the paved path is growing grass. It stretches towards an orange cone.
the persistent crack / 16 aug 2025

Listened to my “Doin’ Time” playlist on shuffle and was inspired when “Once in a Lifetime” came on, especially this refrain about water

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.

Except, as I was running, I heard the line not as after the money’s gone but after the BODY’S gone, which really fit in with my thinking about time, water, and selfhood and started a train of thought about the I above ground returning to the not-I underground/underwater — or the not-water self above returning to the water self below.

The body’s gone also fit with a reoccurring theme in the playlist: the limits of time and death. “Out of Time” and “Closing Time.” Instead of reading death/body gone as running out of time or no longer having any time, I thought about it as something other than a possession — time flows through us and we flow through time. We don’t spend it or own it, we live in it and with it and through it.

It is time now, I said

In my “On This Day” practice this morning, I encountered a series of lines and ideas about time from 16 aug 2021. I stopped at this entry, not reading any more of the aug 16 entries, and decided that today would be about time. Later I realized how fitting it was to study time in the midst of my attempt at living within Mary Oliver’s poem, “Swimming, One Day in August.” It is time now, I said/ for the deepening and quieting of the spirit/ among the flux of happenings. It is time.

During a swim, I lose track of time, have no idea what time it is, as I swim continuously around the buoys. If time is measured at all, it is in loops. And often, I lose track of those too. Was that 3 loops or 4? I can’t recall.

Maybe time is measured in location? Near one shore or the other, one buoy or the next? Here then there then here again

If there’s something gimmicky about trying to swim the equivalent of one day in August, it’s also a great goal for me: not impossible, but requiring some commitment and swimming more than I would otherwise swim. And it’s concrete and straightforward: be in the water, moving, for a total of 24 hours. And it’s satisfying, watching the minutes increase.

And it does something strange to time and it’s passing. Technically I understand a day to be 24 hours, but I don’t usually think about (or count) some of those hours — like the ones in which I’m sleeping, or the ones in which I’m lost in writing or in reading a book. I don’t think I can quite articulate it right now, but accumulating these minutes is a different type of living in time.

It’s a delightful waste of time. No great accomplishment, just a fun experiment. Of course, it’s only a waste in terms of productive time. I am not achieving anything big here that you might put on a resume. It’s not making money, and it’s not creating a product. It is, I think, making me faster and stronger, but not in the most efficient ways.

An idea: what about a chapbook titled, Swimming One Day in August, that plays around with different understandings of a day and its relation to time? I could write about this goal, where 1 day = 24 hours. But I could also write about a day = a random day of swimming in august or a collage of days swimming in august from just 2025, or from all of the days I’ve written about since 2017?

For Mary Oliver, a day is the day before in which the narrator went in the afternoon/to the sea/which held me until I grew easy. It is also today, now — It is time now, I said. And it is tomorrow (and the tomorrow after that?) — About tomorrow, who knows anything./ Except it will be time again/for the deepening and quieting of the spirit. Here day is a daily habit. (Another approach to this challenge could be: swimming every day in august. This might be difficult, since I don’t have reliable access to water to swim in.)

I like how Oliver sets up time in this poem. She’s talking about yesterday, today, and tomorrow but without beginning or end. When did this habit start? Was it yesterday, when she was pestered, or was it some other yesterday before that? And when will it end? It is also not linear, involving progress. With its repeated habit, it’s circular, a loop, going to the same place day after day: the sea to be held. Is it the same time every afternoon, or just, vaguely, “afternoon.” And, what counts as afternoon, how late does it go? To me, afternoon is before 5, but to Scott it’s before 6.

aug 15/SWIM

4 loops (8 cedar loops)
100 minutes
cedar lake open swim
77 degrees

A great swim. I think I’ve only ever swum at cedar lake in the morning one other time, in august of 2019 when lake nokomis was closed for the rest of the season because a few kids pooped near the big beach and the e-coli was crazy high. I liked it, although it took some adjusting. In the late afternoon, the sun is always in my eyes on the back half of the loop. This time, in the morning, it was in my eyes during the front half. The first loop felt great, the second a little harder as I worked on my stroke and breathing properly, but by the third loop I had locked into a steady rhythm. I wasn’t paying attention to my stroke or breath, I was just moving through the water.

10 Things

  1. an orange glow on the water just below the orange buoy
  2. orange at the edge of my vision as I swam
  3. something big and white through the trees and on the shore. When I was swimming, it just looked white, but when I stopped to study it, I realized it was a house
  4. a vine landed on my shoulder and I was able to whip it off with my hand mid-stroke
  5. a small bird flying fast above me
  6. someone with a bright pink safety buoy, swimming wide around the course
  7. the surface of the water: blue with soft ripples
  8. only a few clouds
  9. lifeguard as landmark: on the edge of the course
  10. lifeguard as obstacle: too close to the orange buoy

In the later loops, I started reciting the Alice Oswald lines I’d memorized last month. Struggled a little, but managed to remember most of them. Even as I struggled with the lines, the act of reciting them distracted me — or, did it focus me? — and I entered the flow –everything water and motion. In my head, as I stroked 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left 1 2 3 a slight head lift to sight 4 5 breathe right, I linked this flow state with some sentences from Anne Carson’s “1=1”:

And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it. Not at all like meditation—an analogy often thoughtlessly adduced—but, rather, almost forensic, as an application of attention, while at the same time, to some degree, autonomic.

Oh yes, for much of that 100 minute swim, I was in it, in the water, in my life, in motion, where motion = the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action.

Speaking of motion, I found this from Susan Tichy this afternoon:

All I wanted for the poem was openness, a merging of muscle-memory with the skittering of words down the page, to know as a process of motion.

Susan Tichy

Does muscle-memory = those ten thousand adjustments? In the early loops, my adjustments — of my head for better breathing, elbows for better power, hips for more buoyancy — were conscious and took me out of myself, but in the later loops, I didn’t think about how I was stroking or breathing and sighting, I just did it.

In her mention of skittering of words down the page, Tichy is talking about her efforts to write about mountains. How to describe it in terms of today’s lake water? Bobbing on the page? Gliding across the page, directed by currents, re-routed by waves or lifeguards or other swimmers?