Tag: 10 things

april 1/RUN

3.5 miles
2 trails
39 degrees / wind: 27 mph gusts

Windy and cold. Cold enough to bust out my black vest, but not cold enough for the purple jacket. Lots of swirling and floating leaves. Did I hear any birds? Not that I remember, but I did hear voices — kids on the playground and a squeal near longfellow flats that I think was an excited little kid but could have also been a hurt animal. Saw one roller skier twice, or 2 different roller skiers once.

My back was stiff this morning, but didn’t hurt at all while I was running. The run was relaxed — I stopped several times to look for rusty things – and felt good. The wind didn’t bother me while I was running, but now, sitting at my desk, my ears are burning.

Also, sitting at my desk, looking out my window, a runner that often see is running by. This is the first time I’ve seen her at home, the other times have been near the ravine at 36th. I suppose I should include her as one of the regulars. The distinctive thing about her, the thing that makes it possible for me notice and remember her even with my bad vision, is her strange gait. She runs with a hitch in her step. I marvel at it: how can she keep running with that hitch? how does she not get injured? does she feel the hitch, or is she unaware of it? Tentatively, I’ll call her, Miss Hirple Hip because I learned last month, while looking for a word that rhymes with purple, that hirple means limp and because her limp starts in her hip.

Before the run I wrote about my chosen challenge for the month: steps (see below). I made a list of things I want to explore. After that, I briefly wrote about 2 poems that I re-memorized this morning, which brought me to color and rust. I thought about the process (the steps) of rusting — oxidation — and decided to search for rusty things while I ran. Has my plan for the month already derailed? Instead of steps, will I fixate on rust? Future Sara will find out!

10 Rusty Things

  1. the bolts on a bench at 42nd street
  2. the metal plates at the entrance to the sidewalk on the next block
  3. almost every chain link fence
  4. the sound of the st. thomas bells ringing from across the river
  5. wind chimes in a yard
  6. the bottom of a lamp post on the edge of the trail
  7. just above the wheel well of a car
  8. a metal pole that used to hold a sign but no longer does
  9. a cover for the wires stretching up from the ground to a power line pole
  10. the sound of the dead leaves as they rustle in the wind

Some general thoughts I had about rust as I ran: rust is an edge dweller / while there are lots of edges around here, there isn’t that much rust, at least where I was looking

Steps

Last month, I came up with my challenge for this month. Steps. Will I stick with it? I can’t ever be sure, but it is a very promising theme. So many things I can do with it. Here are just a few:

  1. identify and list all of the steps on the franklin/ford loop
  2. take them, describe them, count them
  3. explore the history of these steps
  4. explore the public staircases of St. Paul
  5. incorporate stair climbing into marathon/strength training
  6. explore the history of step as a concept — a measurement
  7. how are steps designed — what regulations exist around steps, best practices, etc.
  8. steps and low vision, steps and accessibility
  9. step-by-step instructions + how to manuals
  10. activities that require a certain sequence, activities that do not
  11. ladders
  12. memorable steps in literature and poetry
  13. step counters and 10,000 steps
  14. feet — it begin here: feet first, following

Refreshing My Memory

It’s been almost a year (I think?) since I checked that I can still recite the poems in my 100 list, so during April — for National Poetry Month! — I’m revisiting my poems and refreshing my memory. I’m working in reverse order:

Crumbling is not an instant’s Act — / Emily Dickinson — I decided to memorize this poem because of its description of erosion — all of it, but specifically the line, An Elemental Rust. Erosion — as evidenced by the gorge and in my dying cone cells, is a key theme for me right now. Also: rust as a process, a color. I want to add to my collection of color poems with one about rust.

Tattoo/ Wallace Stevens — I first read this poem in a dissertation about Lorine Niedecker and her nystagmus. Immediately I thought of Alice Oswald and Dante and insects that travel from your eye to the world and back again to deliver data so you can see. I love this idea and have been playing around with it in terms of color vision while I’m swimming — I imagine light as the fish in me escaping to determine the color of the water/waves, and then reporting back to me. Another mention of color — I think I should return to my color poems!

march 31/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

Yesterday afternoon we got 2 or 3 inches of snow. By the time I went out for my run in the late morning, much of it had melted, even on the grass. Excellent. It’s the warmer ground and the bright sun that did it. I was over-dressed in my purple jacket with a stocking cap. Halfway through the run, I took off the cap and held it in my hands.

As I ran south to the falls I chanted in triples. Lots of berries and sweet things (hot fudge sauce, fresh whipped cream), histories and mysteries and possibles, both muddy trail and mud on trail, and metronomes. On the way back, I put in my “doin’ time” playlist for the last day of my time month. I was planning to not stop to walk for the second half, but when a runner who was running the same speed or just a little slower than me joined the path in front of me, I decided to stop a few times to get some distance from them. One of the places I stopped was the bench above the edge of the world. I don’t remember what the river looked liked, all I remember was that looking at it made me feel calm and content and vast.

overheard while running by the falls: one person to a group of others, he should do it, his arms are the longest. Were they taking a group selfie?

10 Things

  1. water falling, 1: a steady gush out of a gutter
  2. water falling, 2: trickling from the sewer pipe at the ravine
  3. water falling, 3: gushing at the falls — mostly white foam
  4. shadow, 1: the small shadow of a bird crossing my path
  5. shadow, 2: the sprawled, gnarled, twisted, softened shadows of oak trees on the road
  6. shadow, 3: the sharp circle of the lamp part of the lamp post
  7. missing: the top railing of a wood fence on the edge of the trail
  8. several people in the falls parking lot, waiting to pay for parking
  9. empty benches
  10. a thin layer of snow on a leaning branch in the ravine

Found this poem the other day:

Color Keeps Time / Patrycja Humienik

or it rides us
like a torrent. Blurs
and fastens, flesh

to seconds. Just look
at your veins.
In vespertine woods,
I tried to read moss
by hand. There’s
something laconic
about green that I need.

Lover, let the morning slow
time through the branches.

vespertine: relating to, occurring, or active in the evening
laconic: using few words, concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious

What kind of time are different colors? What sort of time is orange, for example? If purple is twilight, orange is late afternoon or early summer evenings.

I tried to read moss/by hand. This line reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her suggestion that “Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember” (Ancient Green/RWK).

“Color Keeps Time” is from the collection, We Contain Landscapes.

march 28/RUNWALK

5.3 miles
ford loop
53 degrees

Spring! High in the 70s today. Tomorrow, in the 40s. When I started, I felt very sluggish and I wondered if I would be able to do the entire loop. I suppose it got a little easier, but I think it was more that I just kept putting one foot in the front of the other. I stopped to walk when I thought I needed to and kept running when I knew I could. There was one moment when I was just about to stop and walk but then I didn’t. I want to do that more often.

“10 Things

  1. the waves on the water from the ford bridge, looking like little scales — the wind pushing the water upstream
  2. reaching the top of the summit hill, hearing several dogs non-stop barking in a fenced-in backyard. I looked over and saw one of them up on something, their head higher than the fence
  3. a man exiting a port-a-potty at the Monument parking lot, ready to begin running again
  4. the cross on top of the monument — big and made out of stone — have I ever noticed it before?
  5. the feel of the sandy dirt on the edge of the paved path on the st. paul side: soft, fast, gentle, singing
  6. the bells from St. Thomas ringing quietly
  7. empty benches everywhere
  8. the faint knocking of a woodpecker high up in a tree
  9. no eagle perched on the dead limb of the tree near the lake/marshall bridge
  10. something floating in the water — I couldn’t tell if it was a buoy or an ugly 80s purse

Waters of March (Águas de Março) / Antonio Carlos Jobim

This song, which I’ve heard many times but never really listened to, came up on a mood playlist yesterday. I looked up the lyrics, and here’s the first part:

A stick, a stone
It’s the end of the road
It’s the rest of a stump
It’s a little alone

It’s a sliver of glass
It is life, it’s the sun
It is night, it is death
It’s a trap, it’s a gun

The oak when it blooms
A fox in the brush
A knot in the wood
The song of a thrush

The wood of the wind
A cliff, a fall
A scratch, a lump
It is nothing at all

It’s the wind blowing free
It’s the end of the slope
It’s a beam, it’s a void
It’s a hunch, it’s a hope

And the river bank talks
Of the waters of March
It’s the end of the strain
The joy in your heart

The song is originally in Portuguese and from 1972; Jobim created an English version later. I like the list of images — a list poem!

As the story goes, Jobim wrote the song in his country house, close to Rio de Janeiro. He was growing impatient with all the rain and mud that kept delaying some work he wanted done on the property and started the song as a way to distract himself from the constant downpour, creating a simple tune to go with the lyrics. His intention was to rewrite the melody later, though he soon realized that the downward spiral progression he had accidentally created fit the song—and the weather—perfectly.

The lyrics of “Águas de Março” tell of the constant rain that falls in Rio during the month of March, at the close of the summer (in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are opposite to those in the Northern). It is a common occurrence for excessive rain to cause floods and landslides. It washes away houses and streets, taking everything it clashes with in its current.

The Waters of March

And here’s a delightful poem I discovered on Instagram last night:

Lately,/ Laure-Anne Bosselaar

when a branch pulls at my sleeve
like a child’s tug, or the fog, reticent & thick,
lifts, & strands of it still hang like spun sugar
between branches & twigs, or when a phoebe
trills from the hackberry,
I believe such luck
is meant only for me. Does this happen to you?
Do you believe at times that a moment chooses
you to remember it entirely & tell about it —
so that it may live again?

ritual / ceremony / chant / movement

Reading through past entires for this month, I came across an idea from Cole Swenson:

as you move
through a

place, it moves
through you

OR

move through a
place and

it moves through
you too

I like the second one. I can imagine chanting it as I run and thinking about what I’m moving through and what’s moving through me. What is moving through me?

Here’s one answer, in a poem — Running Sentences — from a poet I just discovered on 26 march:

a The chorus is making sentences now: look,

b A cloud of gnats through which the body like a hailstorm blew,

c Here in the pockets of the path, there a heaven I avoid,

b Runners move through gnats, whole bodies move, disrupting,
(Running Sentences/ Endi Bogue Hartigan)

walk: 35 minutes
edmund
67 degrees

It almost feels like summer — wow. Trees and birds and a steady stream of cars on the river road enjoying the nice weather. Bikes, kids, the smell of dead leaves baking in the sun. My favorite thing: 2 people ahead of me on the sidewalk, one of them was wearing cool, baggy pants with a tank top and I thought that I’d like to have something like that to wear. Later a car drove by, the people inside scream-singing along to “Like a Prayer.” The person in the baggy pants called out and they stopped to let them get in. Then laughing and gleeful shouting and more scream-singing. I almost wrote, oh, to be that young again, but I don’t want to that young again. Instead, I’d like to be that delighted and joyful again.

march 26/RUNWALK

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin and back
46 degrees

More excellent running weather. Sunny and calm and warm(er). Birds singing and swooping and perching on tree branches right in front of me. I felt relaxed and strong and my back only hurt once, when I stood up after re-tying my shoe. I ran without stopping to walk to the bottom of the hill and right next to the river. It was swirling foam on the edges. Ran back up to under the franklin bridge then stopped to walk the rest of the hill. I noticed a sign — Trail closed starting March 31st — uh oh. Just looked it up; it’s only for 2 weeks:

Bike and walk trails along West River Parkway will close between the I-94 Bridge and Franklin Avenue for up to two weeks beginning Monday, March 31, 2025.

The closure is necessary for contractors hired by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to install a safe span system that will protect trail users during repairs to the bridge this year.

Trail users will be detoured to the upper West River Parkway roadway between the I-94 Bridge and Franklin Avenue. This same closure will be repeated in August so that workers can remove the safe span system after repairs are complete.

Listened to a mood playlist: energy for the rest of the run. The best (or worst?) song on the playlist was “Hocus Pocus” by Focus. I love the song, but it was too fast to try and run to!I had to increase my cadence to 200 bpm to match it! The song also does not have a steady rhythm; it just keeps getting faster and faster, probably because they were on cocaine while they recorded it.

10 Things

  1. the water was a brownish greenish blue
  2. in the flats I leaned over the ledge and watched the swirling foam slowly travel down stream
  3. workers on the road above the tunnel of trees, doing something to sewer which released a sour smell
  4. the workers were wearing bright yellow vests
  5. passed a walker who refused to move over — they were walking right next to the line. I suddenly wondered, are they neuro-divergent? then, maybe I should chill out about people needing to follow the accepted rules about where and how to walk on the trail
  6. stopped at the sliding bench, 1: heard a cardinal — it was somewhere nearby — looked up and saw that it was on a branch close to me. Was it red? I couldn’t tell, but I did noticed how its tail quivered slightly all the time — I’m assuming it was keeping its balance. Do birds have to constantly adjust while perched?
  7. stopped by the sliding bench, 2: looking down at the white sands beach, hoping for movement. Yes, there, deep in — a walker moving through the trees
  8. the small shadow of a bird crossing my path, flying fast!
  9. my sharp shadow in front of me, crossing over the softer shadows of tree branches
  10. the shadow of a tree with dead leaves on it — looking almost like a messed-up pom pom

At the end of the run, as I was walking home, I had a thought about CA Conrad’s and their idea of the “extreme present,” which I wrote about on here earlier this month on march 5th:

“extreme present” where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens.

intro to ecodeviance / CA Conrad

Conrad creates their soma(tic) rituals to make being anything but present is nearly impossible. Running by the gorge can put/force me into the extreme present. This sense of the extreme present doesn’t happen for the entire run, but I can achieve it in moments. In their lengthy, day-long rituals — wear a red wig, eat only red food — is Conrad able to achieve this extreme present for longer?

birdsong!

This morning Scott heard the cardinals outside his window and because he wanted to use some birdsong in his latest music project, he placed his phone on a chair on the deck and recorded some. I liked how he described it: I left the phone out on the deck then returned inside and went quietly about my business. When he told me about how similar each wave of sound looked, I asked if he could screen shot it and send me the sound file so I could post it here:

cardinal song, an image of sound waves
cardinal song / 26 march 2025

Wow! So uniform.

Happy 151st Birthday Robert Frost!

When the poem of the day on poetry foundation was a Robert Frost one, I figured it must be his birthday. Yep — 26 march 1874.

For Once, Then Something/ Robert Frost

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

A beautiful sonnet — 14 lines, 11 beats per line, almost iambic pentameter. Is that right? I always struggle to hear meter properly.

Love the description of a reflection: Me myself in the summer heaven godlike/Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs

And that something white, uncertain, seen briefly then lost to a ripple. Yesterday I posted some lyrics from “The Windmills of Your Mind” about the ripples from a pebble. Ripple is a great word.

Seeing this sonnet is making me think I should try that form for my color poems. I could study a few different ways of doing the sonnet — Diane Seuss, Terence Hayes, William Shakespeare. Any others?

oh orchid o’clock

A good morning on the poetry sites. Not only did I find Robert Frost’s poem, but I found a cool collection that fits in with my study of time: Oh Orchid O’Clock by Endi Bogue Hartigan. (note: I just emailed Moon Palace Books about ordering it! update: I ordered it!)

/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 the Nile floods every hotspell in this week

I discovered this book through poems.com, which had one of its poems posted today:

hour entry: I fall asleep with a rain sound/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

I fall asleep with the rain sound app of my cellphone, the app includes distant thunderclap sounds and there are people who recorded or simulated these sounds, and it istime to disagree and thank the dawn. I disagree with this rain, I feel absurd for thesimulation of it and yet my brain waves have come to depend on it, depend onsimulated porous points between the raindrops. Always the porous dream, always theneural authority, the reaction meme, always the authority of always, the puncture ofalways, time spent saying always, the spider legs of always, the sleep command, thewake spindles, the spider leg threatening to break from the spider.

So cool! Encountering Hartigan’s work, I was inspired to think about time in relation to my blind spot and the practice of running beside the gorge that has happened beside (and because of?) my vision loss. I wrote the following in my Plague Notebook:

my blind spot
breaks open seconds
pries apart the hard edges of
a beat invites me
to dwell inside

I am suspended between
beats as time slows
but never stops
with moves so slight it takes
a practiced eye to see
their soft shimmering
embrace what is not seen but felt —
wind
the rotation of the earth
a bench sliding into the gorge
rock crumbling
cone cells collapsing
a blind spot expanding

walk: 40 minutes
neighborhood / winchell trail / oak savanna
54 degrees

What a great afternoon walk with Delia the dog! No coat. No mud. Walked to the Winchell Trail then down beside the chain link fence. Drip Drip Drip — the sewer pipe in the ravine. Everything washed out — light brown, tan, yellowed. Up on the mesa in the savanna, a great view of the river. Was able to walk on the dirt path between the savanna and the 38th street stairs. They’ve put down some mulch, so it’s not as muddy. As I neared the entrance to the Winchell Trail, I passed the spot where I fell in the mud, straight on my tailbone. No mud now, only memories and a still-sore back.

On the way to the river, I noticed something interesting hidden on the tree trunk while Delia sniffed around. I took a picture of it:

= > ÷

When I was looking at it in person, I thought someone had carved the message in the tree, but studying it now, it looks like it’s a rock wedged in a crack. I probably should have taken another picture that wasn’t quite as close-up for scale. That is one tiny rock.

I had to look up how to type the division sign on a mac. Hold down option and /

march 25/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
39 degrees

It felt much warmer than 39. Another great late morning for a run. My back seems to be getting better. Still sore, but not when I’m running. Felt compelled to walk a few more times than usual, but otherwise a good run.

10 Things

  1. a small bird’s shadow crossing the path
  2. a glimpse of silver, then the outline of a metal cart, a fold-up canvas chai with someone sitting in it, facing the river, the radio
  3. below the edge of the world: a steep trail tight against the bluff, going somewhere under the trail and over to the jagged ledges of a ravine
  4. drip drip drip the sewer pipe near the curved retaining wall dripping water
  5. empty benches
  6. hollowed out trunks on the Winchell Trail — empty circles
  7. a person climbing up the steep slope below the winchell trail on the other side of wrought iron fence
  8. the falls: white foam
  9. the edges of the river, slabs of ice/snow then sparkle
  10. the crooked shadows on the paved path, near the edge, cast by sections of a leaning wooden fence

Created another time playlist, this one all about loops and seasons and time as a circle called “The Wheeling Life.” Favorite song to listen to today: “Windmills of Your Mind”/ Mel Torm´e, which is inspired by hearing it in the season finale of Severance.

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it’s own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half-forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream

march 21/RUN

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
43 degrees

Wow, what a morning! Birds! Sun! Calm air! Everything quiet, relaxed. I felt fast and free. less tightness in my neck and hip. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks and Dave, the Daily Walker.

10 Things

  1. a runner with BRIGHT orange shoes
  2. a shining white form in the distance, through the trees: the river
  3. the strong smell of weed somewhere below me
  4. stopping at the sliding bench — movement below, in the trees just before white sands beach: a runner on the winchell trail — should I try that?
  5. the soft knocking of a woodpecker in a nearby tree
  6. stepping off onto the dirt trail for a brief stretch: soft and springy
  7. someone sitting on a bench near the trestle
  8. the river: open and blue
  9. a big branch sticking out of the trashcan — a discarded walking stick?
  10. 3? stones stacked on the ancient boulder

I decided to try an experiment with beats.

First mile: chanting in triples
Second mile: metronome at 170 bpm
Third mile: “Doin’ Time” playlist

mile 1: strawberry/blueberry/raspberry — (to the welcoming oaks) Hello friend! Hello friend! Hello friend!/ old oak tree / stacking stones / stack the stones / intellect / mystery / (noticing a crack in the asphalt) breaking up / cracking up / bright yellow / woodpecker

I found that bright yellow was especially good for locking into a rhythm — BRIGHT yellow

mile 2: 170 was hard. I think it was too slow. I probably should have tried 175 or 180. I think I’ve done 175 before. I only locked into this beat a few times. Was my inability to lock in also because I started with triples?

mile 3: I put in my playlist. The first song was “About Damn Time” by Lizzo. It was great for getting into a groove. Next up, “9 to 5.” As I started to listen to it, I realized the metronome was still on and the beats of the song and it didn’t match up. I decided to leave it going and see what happens when I’m dealing with competing rhythms. I can’t quite remember, but I feel like I didn’t lock into either rhythm; I just created my own, and it didn’t bother/unsettle me.

Later I thought about how the “9 to 5” rhythm represents the relentless drudgery of working within capitalism. Resisting that rhythm, and what it does to you, is important. The final song I heard was “Too Much Time on My Hands” by Styx. I listened to the lyrics and was reminded that it was about a guy who wants a job, a way to feel useful, something to do, but he can’t get one. While he doesn’t mention in the lyrics why he can’t get a job, I thought of the larger context and the conditions (economic, political, social/cultural) that make it difficult for people/communities to find work.

Reading the lyrics — without hearing the music or singing — I was struck by this line:

And I don’t know what to do with myself

So dark. Heard with the music it just seems like a light lyric from a pop song.

This was a fun experiment that yielded some surprising results. I liked the accident of the competing rhythms and the juxtaposition of 9 to 5 with Too Much Time on My Hands. For future attempts, I’ll increase the metronome speed and mix up the order. Maybe I should try to write something, too, at the end of each segment? Speak a poem into my phone?

march 19/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
38 degrees
wind: 18 mph / 37 mph gusts

Ran south and had the wind at my back for the first half, which was nice but it meant that I’d be running straight into it on the home. Not as difficult as I thought, but still draining. Wore the bright yellow shoes I bought last year and promised myself I’d never wear again because they make my feet hurt and calves cramp. They’ve been sitting in the rack all year, and looked so spring-y today that I couldn’t resist trying them again. Will I regret it? Probably. I should donate them instead of trying to make them happen.

10 Things

  1. little kid voices somewhere down in the savanna
  2. empty benches
  3. something glittering through the trees, up ahead — car headlights through the trees at the bend in the road
  4. a faster runner in a white shirt off to the side, heading down to the Winchell Trail — I followed above, watching as they slowly inched out of sight
  5. I don’t remember hearing the falls, just seeing them at a distance, from my favorite spot — white foam, moving rapidly at the corner of my central vision
  6. pale blue water, soft brown trees
  7. dead leaves on the ground — feeling orange to me
  8. the bluff on the other side was mostly brown with a few slashes of white — frozen seeps
  9. branches rubbing and creaking in the wind, sounding less like rusty door hinges and more like whimpering kids: soft, insistent, whiny
  10. running on the winchell trail, about to head up the 38th steps, I looked back and thought I saw someone approaching — nope, just the wrought iron fence

before the run: my blind spot

Yesterday, I read an interview with JJJJJerome Ellis and was inspired by their renaming of their Stutter as clearing:

Ellis’s glottal block stutter—which manifests as intervals of silence in his speech flow—is represented in this interview with the word clearing. Ellis offers this term as an alternative to words like stutter or stammer. Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering between Ellis and the people he is communicating with.

Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis

After a little digging, I found out more about the clearing and how it works for Ellis in their work:

Stuttering (especially in the form I present with, the glottal block) creates unpredictable, silent gaps in speech. I call these gaps ‘clearings’. Slaves sang in the fields, and whites heard them; but they also sang (and danced) in the woods at night, out of earshot. Undergirding the clearing created by my stutter is that other clearing, in the woods, where my enslaved ancestors stole away to keep healing, resisting and liberating through music – work that I continue today.

The Clearing/ JJJJJerome Ellis

Wow! What an amazing way to think about the stutter. In their follow-up book, the one that introduced me to Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, they connect the Stutter explicitly with plants and place. I want to connect my blind spot — that growing lack of functioning cone cells in my macula — with water and stone and the gorge. As I try to explain this more, I have so many thoughts, too many words!

Just looked up blind spot and found these exciting definitions:

an area in which one fails to exercise judgment or discrimination

Merriam-Webster online

In this definition, a lack of judgment is a failure. And it is sometimes. But refusing to judge, keeping a space open for listening and beholding and bearing witness without judgment or the reduction of someone or something to a category (discrimination) is also essential.

Another helpful definition:

a portion of a field that cannot be seen or inspected with available equipment

Merriam-Webster online

during the run: my blind spot

I thought about my blind spot every so often as I ran, especially the idea of how it softens and fuzzes my vision. It’s difficult to see with precision, to scrutinize or make detailed observations that encourage me to identify and classify things. As a result, I devote less time to trying to name them, and more time to being with them. Here I’m thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer and J. Drew Lanham.

I’m sure I had more thoughts, but I didn’t record them. If I had, would I even be able to hear them over the howling wind in any recording I would make today?

after the run: my blind spot

A space without judgment. Back when I was a scholar and teaching queer ethics, I was exploring what an ethics without judgement might look like, one that emphasized room to breathe and, as Judith Butler puts it, good air. I often invoked a quotation from Michel Foucault:

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep.

The Masked Philosopher/ Michel Foucault

A few days ago, I read something else about not judging from Cole Swensen:

. . . an instance of witness, with witness defined as the act of being present to something, whether it’s an event, a situation, a person, a view. To be present to is to present yourself, to offer yourself, to attend without judgment, opinion, intervention, appropriation or even evaluation, and yet to be present to is not to be passive; it is an act, the act of anchoring the witnessed in history, confirming it, acting as the “second” that fixes it . . . . It is the ear that turns the falling tree to sound.

Walk/ Cole Swensen

Witnessing, being with, beholding. The gorge — a widening gap, a broad space where fires are lit, the grass grows, the wind howls, and river foam scatters. A generous place for holding all of the messy, entangled, conflicting, complicated stories of a place: of preserving and maintaining it, of stealing it, of losing it, of dead mothers who disowned it, of daughters who are attempting to reclaim it, of erosion and transformation and haunting, of a girl losing her central vision and searching for somewhere to be — to feel less alienation and more connection. There’s a lot here!

For the first half of the run, I listened to kids’ voices, for the second half, my “Doin’ Time” playlist. Speaking of time, here’s something great I read by Hanif Abdurraqib about nostalgia:

Another question I was asked about There’s Always This Year was about the use of nostalgia in my work, and the function of it, and I had this long answer I was going to give, but I look back on recent moments, and I realize that a major function of my relationship with nostalgia is actually tied to a committed and principled relationship with my present life. I am in pursuit, often, of a moment I will live and miss before it’s even gone. And the awareness of the longing to come offers me an opportunity to slow down time, to pay closer attention, to say I know something will end, but I would like a vivid catalog of its existence. My favorite Robert Hayden poem is “Double Feature,” which opens its final stanza with “Oh how we cheered to see the good we were / destroy the bad we’d never be.” I love that line. There’s a lot of bad to dismantle, and only some of it is housed within. The world houses the rest, and it is abundant. I require whatever good I can steal and then hoard. It fuels me to the fight(s,) which isn’t the same as a kind of whimsical nostalgia, but it is me saying that I remember there are things I love enough to fight for, even when it doesn’t feel like it. There are things I miss that I haven’t even experienced yet, and I want to get to them, eventually. And then get to what’s next.

instagram post

added later: I want to add these thoughts from an Alice Oswald interview about erosion here, too:

DN: I wanted to switch to another topic that infuses your work, and that is the process of erosion—erosion by water, erosion by wind, erosion by light—the topic of your first Oxford lecture but also, something that feels very present to Nobody. You said in one interview that the anonymity you were striving after for this book was inspired by eroded Cycladic sculptures, sculptures where the features had been nearly washed away. I was hoping you could talk about erosion in relationship to this and to the text.

AO: I suppose that comes back to your question about thinking. The poem conveys a kind of eroded thinking. It’s as if the thoughts have had reality washing away at them; a sentence sets out then gets blown in another direction. Erosion is important to me in that I think poetry has a particular duty and relationship towards time. Poems are miniature human clots I think, they’re full of time keeping in the way that a piece of music is full of timekeeping. In some way, they set their own time but they need to be awake to actual time moving around them. A poem has to offer itself up to the erosion that’s going on in the world. Nobody, more than any of my poems, I think gives in completely to that force of erosion where I would normally try to maintain some human presence in the face of it. I think Nobody allows itself to get weathered to a Cycladic blankness.

This idea of a poem offering itself up to erosion and to being within time, reminds me of something I heard from Jenny Odell the other day in “Another Kind of Time.” She’s talking about how being part of time, having a past, present, and future — and not just being timeless — makes something/someone a subject/actor instead of thing to be commodified/exploited. To be timeless/without time is to lack a context and a life. I’m also thinking about how preventing erosion often requires a sealing up and away from oxygen, water, wind. Erosion and decay are a necessary part of life.

DN: This talk of erosion and time makes me think of that famous Marguerite Yourcenar essay, That Mighty Sculptor, Time. I’m just going to read a couple of lines from it, “On the day when a statue is finished, its life, in a certain sense, begins. The first phase, in which it has been brought, by means of the sculptor’s efforts, out of the block of stone into human shape, is over; a second phase, stretching across the course of centuries, through alternations of adoration, admiration, love, hatred, and indifference, and successive degrees of erosion and attrition, will bit by bit return it to the state of unformed mineral mass out of which its sculptor had taken it.” I was thinking of this when I encountered your interview with Claire Armitstead where you said you think of your poems less as poems than as sound carvings which made me think that the sound these poems were making is eating away at something which then by extension suggests that both the blank page and silence are not really absences in this framing at all but presences.

AO: Yeah, I like that. I’ve always felt that in some way, a poem is really a framing of its silences, that the musical art poetry is all about leading you to those silences in a way that you hear them where normally one doesn’t necessarily hear a silence or an absence, both the sound is eating away that silence but then also, the sounds are, in their own way, erosions made so I let my voice get blown around by the information it’s taken in if you like. The feeling of not quite holding your own. . . .

DN: Let me ask you something about Homer’s syntax that you’ve said in light of sound carvings being a description of your poems. You said about Homer’s syntax, “The tendency of his grammar is therefore cumulative, like a cairn. Each clause is a separable unit. It might be placed loosely on another and held there with a quick connective, but it never loses its essential singleness; which is why you often find that one end of his sentence turns away from the other.” On the one hand, this feels like a process of accretion rather than erosion, an accumulation, but the singleness and the separateness of each component, and that each is surrounded by silence of the white page made me wonder if perhaps, this accumulation is the product of erosion like I imagine the scree that builds at the at the bottom of a cliffside of all the piles of rocks that are single but also part of this erosive process.

I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else (source).

march 18/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
50 degrees / feels like 39
wind: 20 mph gusts

Sore hips this morning! Is it a running injury or just a terrible mattress? We flipped the mattress yesterday, and sleeping last night was worse than ever, so I’m thinking it’s the mattress. Ascending from the river, I powered up all 112 stone steps and my legs felt great. Would I be able to do that with an injured hip? I don’t think so. I’m definitely incorporating some step work this spring!

10 Things

  1. a woodpecker knocking a few blocks away
  2. the wind was coming from the north and the east
  3. two iron (or wire?) cranes in a backyard — I spied them through a fence — I want a giant iron bird in my backyard!
  4. low notes from a wind chime in the backyard of the house where a family from New Zealand lives — not only do they fly a New Zealand flag, but I heard one of them speaking with a New Zealand accent
  5. on the pedestrian part of the double bridge north of the stone steps — open and blue and brown below
  6. also on the double bridge: a temporary section of fence — looking over the edge of the (it’s high up here), I could see part of another temporary fence halfway down the steep slope — what happened?
  7. the floodplain forest between the steps and the river was littered with felled trees and tangled branches and dirt and dead leaves
  8. creeeaak — branches rubbing against each other in the wind
  9. from below, looking up at the bluff — a brown slope, a wooden fence, voices
  10. a roller skier slowly approaching the ancient boulder

Jenny Odell and Another Kind of Time

Yesterday I started listening to a podcast with Jenny Odell about her most recent book on time and I decided that when the book was ready (I requested it from the library), I would finally dedicate some time to clocks and time and other forms of time that don’t involve clocks.

15 jan 2024

It has taken me until today to return to this podcast. Why? I’m studying time and I got a notification that it was the featured podcast on Emergence. When I got the book, in February, I had already moved onto other projects — an ekphrastic project, then wind. So now, 15 months later, I’m taking up the task I assigned myself. Ha! That’s Sara/gorge time. I briefly returned to it this January, but dropped it again, which is another example of Sara/gorge time — scattered returns and departures, loops, taking it up again and again.

Today, I look several pages of notes in my Plague Notebook. Here are some highlights:

reframing language outside of the rigid belief that time is money and time as stuff that can be measured, counted, and should be hoarded

when did time become a commodity?

And then something happened, and it seems to have to do both with technology and sort of cultural needs: like on the one hand the escapement, which is like a part of a clock that can sort of keep the mechanism going as opposed to like a guy ringing a bell at a certain time, right?

Another Kind of Time

This reminds me of my poem and the idea of person inside that bell tower tugging on the rope to make the bell ring!

That happened. And then also towns that were becoming very commercial started needing to be able to count up and measure labor hours that they were buying from people. And so some confluence of those things led to this notion of an hour: like an hour that can just exist, you know, in the imagination. And that an hour is an hour, and a labor hour is a labor hour, and it sort of doesn’t matter what season it’s happening in, what time of day. And for me, that is a really crucial separating point. That is when this idea of time as stuff started to peel away from all the things that it had been embedded in previously.

As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self. Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.

Telling time through weather and seasons, and the leaving and returning of leaves, and the certain slant of light, and the sound of the water, and the feel of the path, and the amount of view, and the ease or difficulty in breathing.

chronos (ordinary, standardized time) and kairos (the interruption of things/ordinary time, extraordinary time)

horizontal (work + leisure used to restore energy for work = work + weekend)
vertical (awe, wonder, interruption, not work, “true” leisure)

migratory time, animal time

what is time to a flower? water, temperature, sun

the 72 micro-seasons in Japanese almanac

how do I tell time when I’m by the gorge?

weather – exposing myself to the elements, running in them, noticing and feeling the effects of wind, air quality, rain, snow, ice, the cold or heat — a relationship to/conversation with the world

witnessing the nearly invisible labor — tree trimming, repaving, managing and maintaining trails, erosion, nest-building

alienation and learning to listen to the world

. . . there’s a part of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Robin Wall Kimmerer is describing—I think she’s talking about like what it would feel like to not know the names of the things that are living around you. And then she says, I imagine it must feel like showing up in a city and you can’t read any of the signs, right? Like, that’s a deeply frightening and lonely experience to have. 

When I heard this bit, I raised my hand and said, “that’s me.” I can’t read signs on or inside building that often — even in Minneapolis, where I’ve lived for over 20 years. It is frightening and lonely and frustrating.

march 17/RUN

4.25 miles
locks and dam no.1 hill and back
50 degrees
wind: 13 mph/ 25 mph gusts

Warmer, windier. Ran straight into it heading south towards the falls. It didn’t howl or swirl the leaves but once it almost took off my hat. And it pushed against me, making it harder to run. I didn’t mind. At the start of the run, I felt a little stiff — especially my neck — but by the halfway point I had loosened up.

I noticed the river several times: Sometimes it was silver sparkle, other times tin or pewter, and it was ridged or scaled from the wind. I decided to run down the hill at the locks and dam no. 1 to get closer to the water. Inspired by AO’s Dart (see below), I wanted to hear the trails of scales and the bells just a level under listening. Did it sound like anything? If it did, the sounds were forgotten as I turned around and climbed the hill. A few steps in I stopped to take in the wide blue view of the river from this angle. It took up almost all of my sight: blue undulations

11 Things

  1. the long shadow of a slender tree cast across the part of the path that dips below the road
  2. an orange sweatshirt on a walker emerging from the winchell trail
  3. squaring my shoulders and running into a stiff wind
  4. 2 people under the ford bridge near the locks and dam no. 1, about to climb up somewhere
  5. the bright white base of the locks and dam no. 1 sign — they must use reflective paint
  6. the benches above the edge of the world and near folwell were empty
  7. the low hum of playing kids on the school playground
  8. the flat top of a recently made stump: orange
  9. a white patch in the river near the shore — was it a chunk of ice? a sandbar?
  10. a tailwind as I returned north — not feeling the wind but its absence and that everything was easier
  11. added a few hours later: a creaking above from one tree branch rubbing another in the wind

Listened to leaves shimmering in the trees as I ran south, my “Doin’ Time” playlist as I ran back north. Most memorable song, “Once in a Lifetime”:

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Water dissolving and water removing

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground

I never realized before how much water is used in this song. Very cool! The same as it ever was is an interesting contrast to what I was reading earlier this morning: Heraclitus and his idea of never stepping into the same river twice — see 17 march 2023

possible lines to recite/chant

Rereading my 17 march 2022 entry, I encountered these wonderful lines from Dart about how the river sounds:

will you swim down and attend to this foundry for
sounds

this jabber of pidgin-river
drilling these rhythmic cells and trails of scales,
will you translate for me blunt blink glint.

the way I talk in my many-headed turbulence
among these modulations, this nimbus of words kept in
motion
sing-calling something definitely human,

will somebody sing this riffle perfectly as the invisible
river
sings it

can you hear them at all,
muted and plucked,
muttering something that can only be expressed as
hitting a series of small bells just under the level of your
listening?

The bells!

High Above on the Ford Bridge Looking Down at the River

O, can you hear them
at all, these riffle-
perfect rhythmic cells
and trails of scales, plucked,
muted, muttering
below — a string of
small bells just under
the level of your
listening?

on moving — Alice Oswald and Cole Swensen

More words rediscovered while reading past entries in my “On This Day” practice:

I found this great quote from Oswald in her introduction to the poetry anthology, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet:

Raking, like any outdoor work, is a more mobile, more many-sided way of knowing a place than looking. When you rake leaves for a couple of hours, you can hear right into the non-human world, it’s as if you and the trees had found a meeting point in the sound of the rake. (ix)

Mobile and many-sided, more than looking from a distance.

From Cole Swensen:

Then sitting still, we occupy a place; when moving through it, we displace place, putting it into motion and creating a symbiotic kinetic event in which place moves through us as well. 

Walk/ Cole Swensen

march 15/RUN

4.1 miles
river road north/south
38 degrees / humidity: 84%

Colder today. Back to winter layers: long-sleeved green shirt, orange sweatshirt, black vest, black tights, gray buff, black gloves, purple/pink baseball cap, bright pink headband

A gray sky and a slight drizzle. Bright headlights through the trees where the road curves. Grit. Wet leaves on the trail. Pairs of fast runners approaching.

Listened to other runners’ voices, the sandy grit under my feet, car wheels as I ran north, put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist heading south, including Good Times by Chic. My favorite lines:

I want to live the sporty life

and

Clams on the half shell, and roller skates, roller skates — here’s the full verse:

A rumor has it that it’s getting late
Time marches on, just can’t wait
The clock keeps turning, why hesitate?
You silly fool; you can’t change your fate
Let’s cut the rug, a little jive and jitterbug
We want the best, we won’t settle for less
Don’t be a drag; participate
Clams on the half shell, and roller skates, roller skates

Good Times was released in June of 1979. The clam shells and roller skates line seems ridiculous (and it is, in a delightful way), but it also captures the vibe of 1979.

After seeing several orange things, I decided that would be my 10 things list. I could only remember 8.

8 Orange Things

  1. a giant orange water jug set up on a table for runners
  2. orange lichen (or moss?) on the north side of the ancient boulder
  3. orange bubble letter graffiti on the underside of the bridge
  4. my orange sweatshirt
  5. the flesh of a tree where a branch used to be, newly trimmed and exposed to the elements (water, air): rusty orange
  6. leaves on the ground: burnt orange
  7. an orange effort: a higher heart rate (see 25 may 2023)
  8. hot pink spray paint on the iron fence that I initially saw as orange

ceremony/ritual/circumambulation

A few things related to my planning of a loop run as ceremony:

first, something to chant, from James Schuyler’s Hymn to Life:

Press your face into the
Wet April chill: a life mask. Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things

The whole thing, or maybe just the last bit, starting with “Attune yourself”? See also: 14 march 2024, 15 march 2024

Second, the bells! The bells of St. Thomas signaling the start of the ceremony, or the start of some part of the ceremony? Accompanied by:

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens are a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here –

or

I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

Pigrim at Tinker Creek/ Annie Dillard

converted into my 3/2 form:

My whole life
I’d been 
a bell but
never
knew until
I was
lifted and
struck. Now
I am still
ringing.

Third, form inspirations? A psalm, like Julia B. Levine’s Ordinary Psalms?

Megan Feifer: Both of your poems share the words “Ordinary Psalm.” Why did you choose to name these poems as such? Does a psalm lose its reverence when it becomes ordinary? Is that the point? 

Julia B. Levine: I am currently at work on a (hopefully) book-length collection of Ordinary Psalms. In these poems I am interested in the idea that the ordinary, if deeply lived and carefully attended to, are valid entryways into sacred or reverent experience. As a child I attended a Reform Jewish synagogue and always disliked the prayer books, though I loved the Torah. The difference, it seemed, had to do with the formal and vague language of prayer as contrasted with the heroic, vivid, and oftentimes earthy details of the weekly Torah readings. On reflection, this tonal difference in language may be the primary reason I don’t feel any sense of reverence toward an Old Testament God, but I do believe in the transcendent power of myth and stories. So, in contrast to psalms that rely on a formal address to an anthropomorphic God, I wanted to create a kind of personal prayer book that uses the living language of everyday details and experience to name and praise those aspects of this world that, for me, embody divinity.

Writer’s Insight: Julia B. Levine

JJJJJerome Ellis’ litany of names? Mary Oliver’s prayer as the attention before the words? lucille clifton’s praise of impossible things:

All Praises/ lucille clifton

Praise impossible things
Praise to hot ice
Praise flying fish
Whole numbers
Praise impossible things. 
Praise all creation
Praise the presence among us
of the unfenced is.

Oh, that unfenced is! That line gets me every time.