Another windy, choppy open swim night. It wasn’t too bad swimming from the big beach to the little beach, just some swells from behind. Occasionally, the swells made it difficult to do full strokes. Rounding the far orange buoy was difficult. Big (at least, big for Lake Nokomis) waves straight into my face. The next loop I remembered to breathe to my left to avoid them.
10 Things I Remember
a few military planes flying above the lake
on the way back to the big beach on the first loop: voices somewhere nearby. I kept trying to figure out what they were. Finally: 2 people in a canoe, way too close to open water swimmers. When I told them they were in the swimming area, one of them said, “we’re trying to get out of here, but this wind is kicking our butt!”
lots of bits of vegetation floating in the water — I had to spit some of it out, other bits of it made it under my suit. I noticed them later, when I took a shower. A few vines wrapped around my arms
with all the waves, lots of swimmers were doing breaststroke or treading water, a few seemed to be almost clinging to the big buoys
I had no problem staying on course. My biggest problem: a nose plug that kept shifting and goggles that kept leaking. I had to stop a few times to adjust them
when the water wasn’t too choppy, I breathed every 5. When it was choppy, every 3 or 4
didn’t see or hear any birds — no seagulls or ducks, in particular
the waves made it difficult to see anything but water in front of you. Sometimes the slight swells looked like someone was right ahead of me — a phantom swimmer?
exiting the water and looking back from the shore, the water looked almost calm to me. You’d never know how choppy it was in there!
I had something else to write, but somehow I got distracted and lost it again. Maybe I’ll remember and come back and add it in here?
Even though it was choppy, another great swim. As always, I felt strong and happy and confident.
Found this beautiful poem the other day by the wonderful Marie Howe:
swim: 2 miles / 2 loops lake nokomis open swim 75 degrees
More wind, more chop, more rolling waves and swells. Today was a morning swim so the orange buoys were backlit. For me, and my lack of cone cells, this meant they weren’t orange but invisible and then, at fairly close range, dark hulking shapes. Do most people see their orange-ness? As always, I am amazed at how comfortable I’ve become swimming towards something that I can’t see but I trust to be there, based on past experience + deep knowledge of the lake’s layout + my strong, straight shoulders. But this year, there’s another layer to this swimming into nothingness that amazes me: I trust that I’m going the right way, but I also don’t worry if I’m not. So what if I get off course? Who cares if the lifeguards need to nudge me back a little closer to the buoys? I am much less bothered by not knowing, or–and this is a theme for the summer and will feature heavily in a writing project I can tell I’ll be starting in the fall–not quite knowing or roughly/approximately knowing. Not exactly but mostly, almost but never completely. Part of the picture, but never the whole thing. I’ve been writing a lot about bewilderment and unknowingness. This not quite knowing is not bewilderment but something else. Not wild, not lost, but not found either. Hmm….
For the past four times at lake nokomis (sunday, tuesday, thursday, friday), the water has been choppy/rolling in the same way: Smoothest (but not really smooth) from the big beach to the first orange buoy. Swells picking up between buoy 1 and 2, difficult to breath on right side with waves rolling quickly over my head from right to left. Not too bad between the 3rd orange buoy and the white buoy at the little beach. From the little beach back to the big beach, increasingly rough and choppy–waves crashing into me, water spraying up, sometimes difficult to breath on both sides. A wild ride rounding the final green buoy just off the big beach. Swells lifting me up and pushing me along swimming parallel to the shore and heading towards the orange buoy. I like the challenge of choppy water and the energy that it produces but I’m ready for some smoother water. With so many waves, I have to lift my head higher to sight (and breathe?) and my neck is getting sore.
run: 2.7 miles 2 trails 83 degrees
Decided when I got home from swimming that I’d go out for a run. Hot, but a cooler wind. Listened to a playlist for the first half, then the wind mixed with my breathing for the second half. I was able to run in shade most of the time. Very warm in the sun. Don’t remember much of anything. No irritating or memorable people–as I write this now I remember some bikers stopping and blocking the entire path on the way down to the Winchell Trail. Lots of acorns and walnuts on the ground. Don’t remember hearing any birds or seeing any spazzy squirrels. No roaming dogs. Oh–ran past a garbage truck and the smell was terrible. It (the smell) followed me for a few blocks. And I thought again about how I’d like to work with older students (55+) and teach classes that somehow combine critical thinking, creative writing and experiments, deep awareness of place, and physical activity. Still now sure what that would look like or how to start…
loving like the lake
Yesterday I went through poems I gathered about water and made a list, based on these poems and some of my own ideas, about what water does and how it loves. I’m thinking I might use these various things as titles or first lines for poem. Here’s a line I’d like to turn into a poem:
I think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling no matter the weather, when our lives are rather like lakes
3.25 miles 43rd ave, north/tunnel of trees/welcoming oaks/oak savanna/edmund, north/7 Oaks 49 degrees
Hooray for wonderful runs! Sunny, warm enough for shorts, clear trails, welcoming oaks, robins who sound like they’re singing “hurry up hurry up hurry up.” Ran on the trail but don’t remember looking at the river; too busy looking out for other people. After reading an article about “The Warbler Wave” at 7 Oaks, decided to end my run there and listen. According to local bird expert Dave Zumeta (I have his Birds of the Mississippi Guide pdf), mid-May is a great time to see/hear warblers as they migrate south, and 7 Oaks is the best place to do it:
Warblers are Zumeta’s favorite birds, bar none. He not only knows the subtleties of their markings, but can also recognize their songs. His favorite place to watch for warblers isn’t Costa Rica or the Greater Antilles Islands. It’s a sinkhole on 34th St. and 47th Ave. just a stone’s throw from his house. He said, “Seven Oaks Park is the reason we moved where we did. I think it’s one of the best places to bird watch anywhere – and it’s a warbler magnet.”
Wow, I love where I live! Here’s the recording I took as I stood on the edge of the sinkhole:
May 7th, birds at 7 Oaks
I have loved Marie Howe ever since I read one of her amazing poem from What the Living Do and listened to her On Being interview. Such beautiful words! Here’s one that features a bird:
From Nowhere/ Marie Howe
I think the sea is a useless teacher, pitching and falling no matter the weather, when our lives are rather lakes
unlocking in a constant and bewildering spring. Listen, a day comes, when you say what all winter
I’ve been meaning to ask, and a crack booms and echoes where ice had seemed solid, scattering ducks
and scaring us half to death. In Vermont, you dreamed from the crown of a hill and across a ravine
you saw lights so familiar they might have been ours shining back from the future.
And waking, you walked there, to the real place, and when you saw only trees, come back bleak
with a foreknowledge we have both come to believe in. But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,
and making coffee in the usual way, measuring grounds with the wooden spoon, I remembered,
this is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture after gesture, what else can we know of safety
or of fruitfulness? We walk with mincing steps within a thaw as slow as February, wading through currents
that surprise us with their sudden warmth. Remember, last week you woke still whistling for a bird
that had miraculously escaped its cage, and look, today, a swallow has come to settle behind this rented rain gutter,
gripping a twig twice his size in his beak, staggering under its weight, so delicately, so precariously it seems
from here, holding all he knows of hope in his mouth.
I love the idea of our lives as thawing lakes in a bewildering spring, and the kind day descending and things happening cup by cup, gesture by gesture, and the surprise of sudden warmth, and the delicate, staggering bird. The line about the bird reminds me of Ada Limón’s interview on VS:
Ada Limón: Yeah. I think, for me, there are a couple of new poems I’ve been working on. One of them, just recently, where I saw a beautiful kestrel that was on a really small branch. And I kept sort of loving this image of a heavier bird being held up by a small branch, right. And I kept thinking, I’ve got to do something with this, I’ve got to do something with this. And then, really, towards the end of the poem, I realized, like, I want this image to somehow tell me that as the branch, I can bear more, and I can bear a lot. And as the bird, I can balance on barely, you know, on something that’s barely there. And yet, in the poem, I recognize that it’s not telling me that, right. That that’s actually—all it is is a bird doing its thing, landing where it needs to land. And, you know, I want to look at those lessons. But I also need to pull back and think, okay, maybe it’s just a noticing, and that’s what my job was. And not always turning it into a … fable, you know. (LAUGHS) Or an idea that will somehow rescue the speaker. And in this case, you know, the speaker being me.
Franny Choi: Yeah, that helps me totally see what you mean when you say, allow the animal to be an animal alongside us as animals. Like To just like, be with them in an environment together, rather than being a colonizer like, be like, th, like, how is this tree useful for me? How is this bird useful? What can I -what can I make it for?
It’s interesting how these images of birds are opposites: Limón’s is too big for the branch, Howe’s is too small for the twig, but both are about the too-muchness of life—the world’s weight, too much for our small branched bodies, and hope’s sudden and unexpected appearance, almost too much to bear.
May 6/WALK
A break from running today. Took Delia on 2 walks instead, one just me, the other with STA and RJP. One down by the ravine, the other in the grass between the river road and Edmund.
Starlings/ Maggie Smith from Goldenrod
The starlings choose one piece of sky above the river and pour themselves in. Like a thousand arrows pointing in unison one way, then another. That bit of blue doesn’t belong to them, and they don’t belong to the sky, or to the earth. Isn’t that what you’ve been taught–nothing is ours? Haven’t you learned to keep the loosest possible hold? The small portion of sky boils with birds. Near the river’s edge, one birch has a knot so much like an eye, you think it sees you. But of course it doesn’t.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen starlings in person. I checked my bird list and they do live in the Mississippi Gorge. Maybe someday I’ll see them? Anyway, I picked this poem because it uses two interesting bits of information that I’ve wanted to use in a poem ever since I found out about them: 1. a boil of birds and 2. the tree with eyes.
a boil of birds
On March 9th, 2020, one day before I got my first of many sinus infections and just days before the pandemic became real in Minnesota, I went for a walk and noticed a big bird circling in the sky. Wondering why it circled, I looked it up and found out about thermals and boils of birds. Here’s what I wrote:
Thermals are updrafts of warm air that rise from the ground into the sky. By flying a spiraling circular path within these columns of rising air, birds are able to “ride” the air currents and climb to higher altitudes while expending very little energy in the process. Solitary birds like eagles and hawks often take advantage of thermals to extend their flight time as they search for food. Social birds that fly in large flocks also use thermals to gain altitude and extend their range during migration. The sight of dozens or hundreds of birds riding a thermal has been said to resemble the water boiling in a kettle, so the terms kettle or boil are sometimes used as a nickname for a flock of birds circling in a thermal updraft. The benefits of thermals are not limited to the animal world either as glider pilots often take advantage of them to gain altitude as well.
I want to see hundreds of birds riding a thermal and looking like water boiling in a kettle! Mostly so I can see them doing it but also so I can write about the boil of birds I just saw.
a tree with eyes
On June 18th, 2020, walking with STA and Delia the dog, we noticed a tree that looked like it had eyes. Here’s what I wrote:
Every day, in the late afternoon around 5, Scott and I take Delia the dog on a long walk between Edmund Boulevard and the River Road. This week, while stopped near the upper campus of Minnehaha Academy–the one that was recently rebuilt after the old building exploded a few years ago, Scott noticed all the eyes on an aspen tree and took a picture of it. I remember remarking, “oh, I bet there’s a name for that. I’ll have to look it up.” I finally did just now. The most popular answer? Aspen eyes. According to several sites I found, these eyes are formed through self-grooming, when aspens shed their smallest branches.
walking and listening this morning
On my walk this morning with Delia the dog, I heard black-capped chickadees, pileated woodpeckers, cardinals, and the red-breasted nuthatch I just identified yesterday. Also might have heard the plink plink of a bobolink–is that possible?Standing at the rim of the giant sinkhole that’s been turned into a city park at 7 Oaks, I heard so many other birds, including one that I hear all the time but I can’t yet identify. I manage to record it (along with other birds). \
May 6th, a one-syllable bird call at 7 Oaks
Birding by ear is difficult and overwhelming at first. Too many different sounds that I can’t distinguish. So, I’m looking for tips, like these: Six tips for birding by ear. In it, they suggest some things to listen for.
I ran to the falls for the first time in a long time. I looked it up, and unless I missed something, the last time I ran to the falls was July 10th. Wow. I read somewhere that the falls were beautiful this winter; I avoided them because of all the people. Was I too cautious? Probably, but it’s hard to run to the falls in the winter in any year. Even though the Minneapolis Parks plows the trail it’s narrow and they can never clear the double bridge.
Today, it’s cold and windy. I didn’t care. It was a great run. The river was pale blue. I heard lots of birds–especially crows. Speaking of crows, here’s a great poem I read the other day by the ornithologist, J. Drew Lanham from his collection, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts:
No Murder Of Crows/ J. Drew Lanham
I watched a flock of crows fly by, counted forty-two black souls, then up to sixty-five, maybe more. Not sure whether fish or ‘merican They were silent as coal, headed to roost I assumed, a congregation I refused to a call a murder because profiling aint’ what I do: besides, they was just flyin’ by. No cause to criminalize the corvid kind.
What else do I remember from my run? The annual Get in Gear race, which STA and I have done a few times, was happening today. Mostly virtual, I think. Low key. I haven’t run in a race since October of 2019–is that right? The falls were gushing! As I approached them I thought I was hearing a noisy truck. Nope, just the rushing water. Encountered lots of packs of runners, a small group of fast moving bikes that completely ignored the stop sign. No roller skiers or eliptagogos. No rowers or roller bladers. Enjoyed listening to my feet shuffling on the sandy grit at the edge of the road.
Here’s a MO poem I found last night. It’s very much like all the others, which used to bother me–why say the same thing over and over again?–but I see it (and her work) differently now. The repetition of the words–the habit of repeating this process of noticing, then being astonished, then telling about it–are needed. Practice is necessary because we always need to remember to remember. Maybe it’s like what they say with running: it never gets easier, you just get better at handling the hurt/pain/difficulty of the effort. And, of course, occasionally, your diligence (what the runner Des Linden describes with her mantra, “keep showing up”) can result in a moment, which is what MO describes in this poem:
Such Singing in the Wild Branches/ Mary Oliver from Owls and Other Fantasies
It was spring and finally I heard him among the first leaves— then I saw him clutching the limb in an island of shade with his red-brown feathers all trim and neat for the new year. first, I stood still and thought of nothing. Then I began to listen. Then I was filled with gladness— and that’s when it happened, when I seemed to float, to be myself, a wing or a tree— and I began to understand what the bird was saying, and the sands in the glass stopped for a pure white moment while gravity sprinkled upward like rain, rising, and in fact became difficult to tell just what it was that was singing— not a single thrush, but himself, and all his brothers, and also the trees around them, as well as the gliding, long-tailed clouds in the perfectly blue sky—all, all of them were singing. And, of course, so it seemed, so was I. Such soft and solemn and perfect music doesn’t last for more than a few moments. It’s one of those magical places wise people like to talk about. One of the things they say about it, that is true, is that, once you’ve been there, you’re there forever. Listen, everyone has a chance. Is it spring, is it morning? Are there trees near you, and does your own soul need comforting? Quick, then—open the door and fly on your heavy feet; the song may already be drifting away.
april 23/WALK
Drizzling. Took a walk with Delia the dog down the worn wooden steps past the chain-link fence to the slick slats above the ravine. Listened to the water trickle out of the sewer pipe then drip down the ledge. Such calming colors: the rich browns of freshly watered tree trunks mixed with pale green leaves and light gray gravel. Today I marveled at the tree trunks. Three different trunks, coming up from the bottom of the ravine, leaning into the fence. I can’t remember much about them but how beautifully brown they were and that they were of varying degrees of thickness and that one of them curved gracefully away from the others. Thinking about these trees reminds me of an MO poem I read this morning from her collection, Evidence:
The Trees/ Mary Oliver
Do you think of them as decoration? Think again, Here are maples, flashing. And here are the oaks, holding on all winter to their dry leaves. And here are the pines, that will never fail, until death, the instruction to be green. And here are the willows, the first to pronounce a new year. May I invite you to revise your thoughts about them? Oh, Lord, how we are for invention and advancement! But I think it would do us good if we would think about these brothers and sisters, quietly and deeply. The trees, the trees, just holding on to the old, holy ways.
And here’s another poem that features trees. This one puzzles me; it seems to speak to MO’s conflicted feelings about words and the answers they offer: even as she loves words, she laments how they get in the way of just being. There’s something about her description of her grandmother’s “uneducated feet” and “faulty grammar” that bothers me and I’m not sure what to do with this poem.
Answers/ Mary Oliver
If I envy anyone it must be My grandmother in a long ago Green summer, who hurried Between kitchen and orchard on small Uneducated feet, and took easily All shining fruits into her eager hands. That summer I hurried too, wakened To books and music and cicling philosophies. I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers That could not solve the mystery of the trees. My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles. Smiling, in faulty grammar, She praised my fortune and urged by lofty career. So to please her I studied—but I will remember always How she poured confusing out, how she cooled and labled All the wild sauces of the brimming year.
Having just read through both of these poems again, I’m struck by the parallels between the “old, holy ways” of the trees and the easy, eager, uneducated habits of her grandmother. Still not quite sure how I feel about this connection, especially the description of her grandmother.
Here’s another poem that speaks to the holding on to the old, holy ways:
From The Book of Time in The Leaf and the Cloud
7. Even now I remember something
the way a flower in a jar of water
remembers its life in the perfect garden
the way a flower in a jar of water
remembers its life as a closed seed
the way a flower in a jar of water
steadies itself remembering itself
long ago the plunging roots
the gravel the rain the glossy stem
the wings of the leaves the swords of the leaves
rising and clashing for the rose of the sun
the salt of of the stars the crown of the wind
the beds of the clouds the blue dream
the unbreakable circle.
Reading this poem, I immediately thought of these lines from Marie Howe in “The Meadow”:
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
I also thought of this:
I will not tell you anything today that you don’t already know, but we forget, we human people, and our elders have told us that our job is to remember to remember. And that’s where the stories come in.
Wow, what a beautiful morning! A bright blue sky, not much wind, warm air, few people. Ran above the river and made sure to notice it today. Pale blue, almost white or light gray in parts. Flat, no sparkle. Calm. No rowers. Heard a kid below me as I ran above the oak savanna. Heard some more kids at the Dowling school playground. Managed to take my bright orange sweatshirt off and tie it around my waist while I was running. Didn’t see any turkeys but heard a pileated woodpecker and a few black-capped chickadees.
Tried to breathe mostly through my nose while I was running but it was hard. Sometimes I could do it, other times I could breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, but often I had to resort to all mouth breathing. Is this because of my left nostril plugging up a lot? I’m reading Breath by James Nestor right now and he’s a very big proponent of nose over mouth breathing. Is it good for running? I decided to google it and discovered that it’s not that simple; sometimes runners need to breathe through their mouths, especially during faster runs, to ensure they get enough oxygen. I’m glad I checked; now I won’t worry as much if/when I mouth breathe while running. This is a helpful resource: How To Breathe While Running
While I was running, I tried to think some more about Mary Oliver and her messy and irresolvable tensions around poetry, words, language, being human, the Self, the World, and nature. One question I kept asking myself is: why am I spending so much time on these tensions?
Before I went out for my run, I took the following notes:
Mary Oliver and the Bedeviled Human
from The Meadow/Marie Howe
Bedeviled, human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words
that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.
Reading MO, I’ve noticed, and have been trying to articulate, a tension in her poems between the I, the World, Nature, God, Eternity, Work. This tension seems to take many forms and MO imagines it to be endlessly intriguing and part of the process of living. Never to be resolved but to be puzzled over. One element of this tension involves the plight of the human—born to doubt and argue and question what it all means, to be both brought closer to and further away from the world by language and the power and beauty of words, which are never as powerful or beautiful as the world itself. To want a name and a useful place, to claim a life, but also to belong to the world, to be “less yourself than part of everything.”
from “Work” in The Leaf and the Cloud
3. Would it be better to sit in silence? To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?
This is the way of the orange gourd. This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which the water pours all night and all day. But the nature of man is not the nature of silence. Words are the thunders of the mind. Words are the refinement of the flesh. Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments— we just manage it— sweet and electric, words flow from the brain and out the gate of the mouth.
We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar. We are slow, and choosy. This is the world.
Words can help us to remember a beloved but long dead dog:
And now she’s nothing except for mornings when I take a handful of words and throw them into the air so that she dashes up again out of the darkness,
and console us in our anger and grief:
and what could be more comforting than to fold grief like a blanket— to fold anger like a blanket, with neat corners— to put them into a box of words?
Words can keep us company, offer exits out of difficult spaces, open thousands of doors, give us a place in the world. But, they can also separate us from the world, feeding our hubris:
Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, entierh do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.
Upstream/Mary Oliver
or our constant doubts:
from “Riprap” in The Leaf and the Cloud
2. In my mind, the arguers never stop— the skeptic and the amazed— the general and the particular, in their uneasy relationship.
…
O what is beauty that I should be up at four A.M. trying to arrange this thick song?
5. And, anyway, what is thought but elaborating, and organizing? What is thought but doubting and crying out?
From The Book of Time in The Leaf and the Cloud
5. What is my name, o what is my name that I may offer it back to the beautiful world?
from “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud
6. … It is our nature not only to see that the world is beautiful
but to stand in the dark, under the stars, or at noon, in the rainfall of light,
frenzied, wringing our hands,
half-mad, saying over and over:
what does it mean, that the world is beautiful— what does it mean?
Watched a race while I biked. Ran with a playlist, then remembered a runner mentioning listening to “thunderstruck” while they ran and liking it, so I switched to that for my final minutes. Nice. AC/DC is fun to run to. Didn’t think about anything except that I breathe better when I’m working out. I also breathe better outside and in the winter, which I noticed (again) earlier today when Scott and I were walking Delia the dog. So bright with the white snow.
A nice relaxing day. Managed to stop myself from obsessively checking the news every few minutes. Sat on the couch and read Agatha Christie’s “The Secret Adversary” with the sleuthing duo, Tommy and Tuppence. Scott and I discovered their 1982 (or 83?) BBC show a week or so ago and we’ve been watching it almost every night. I like their dynamic and saying “Tuppence” as much as I can–maybe Tuppence and Bunty from Father Brown should team up for a show. Such strange names.
Went out on the deck for my moment of sound this afternoon. Managed to convince my 14 year old daughter to join me. Today’s sound is mostly the scampering of Delia the dog–her collar clanging as she shakes, her claws scratching the deck, her scampering paws. Delia loves leaping through the snow like a bunny.
jan 9, 2021
I’m already liking these moments of sound. The quality isn’t that great and maybe what I’m capturing isn’t that interesting, but the act of capturing a moment of sound outside and then listening back to it and writing about it is helping me develop (or reinforce) great habits–making sure I get outside and that I stop and stand still and listen are important/helpful things to do right now. Plus, it helped me to get my daughter outside to play in the snow for a few minutes–something she hardly ever does.
Discovered this afternoon that there’s an animation for an awesome poem by Marie Howe:
And here’s a poem I found the other day that I like:
During roll call a black beetle wanders to the sink, near my toothbrush, and I say, “Poor thing, I better let you go.”
My father says, “You better smash that thing before it multiplies.” I think he says the same about me.
I lie awake at night and think about crunchy leaves crushed in the autumn.
My mother sees six red ants running around the loaf of bread anticipating their breakfast. She says to me, “Get those things off the table.”
My sister panics at the sight of a spider. She runs to the kitchen and screams bloody murder. I remind her, “We don’t find scary things scary anymore.”
My mother flicks the grasshopper off her book. She asks how I am doing. I lie to her and say, “I’m doing quite all right, I smashed a bug with my shoe. We all do what we don’t want to do.”
I see a cockroach on the ground. “Gregor,” I whisper, “you better run fast.” He says to me, “I only need to run faster than you.”
bike: 20 minutes bike stand, basement run: 1.25 miles
It wasn’t too cold outside, but I decided to stay inside so I could do some biking too. Watched a few races and, when I heard Lorde’s “Royals” playing during one of the races, I decided to watch that video. Wow, just looked it up and it’s hard to believe that “Royals” is from 2013. It’s 7 years old?! With some more (albeit cursory) digging, I found that it was on popular radio in the US in August of 2013. I probably heard it around then, or later. In the fall of 2013, I was just shifting away from my TROUBLE blog and writing about researching and creating an interactive documentary about my family’s farm on a new blog, STORY.
Because I always feel compelled to document my life, I have a summary of the creative/intellectual work I did at that time:
SUMMER 2013
Edited my Grandma Ines’ memoirs, which she wrote in the late 1980s a few years before she died, by breaking it up into manageable chapters and combining it with supplementary videos, photos, a scan of her scrapbook and a forward and concluding essay written by me. Excitedly published it in iBooks, eagerly shared the link with family members and unrealistically and perhaps unfairly hoped that they would read it and recognize it for what I imagined it to be: a gesture of love and an invitation to reconnect with each other through a shared investment in the Puotinen heritage
Created and began posting content on a new site for archiving farm-related materials and documenting the process of reflecting and remembering the farm and its inhabitants
FALL 2013
Analyzed interactive documentaries, did research on how people tell stories online and created a resources page with links about online storytelling, interactive tools and examples of projects that were inspiring and influencing me
Crafted a storytelling manifesto
To make the most out of an annoying time gap between when I dropped off my son for school and when I dropped off my daughter, began another digital storytelling experiment with digital moments documenting brief moments of life with a second-grader who was curious about the difference between a pie and a tart, who liked playing hopscotch and swinging on the monkey bars, who was transfixed by freaky trees that looked like they had teeth and who hated swimming the butterfly stroke
Researched and wrote an Interactive Media Project Grant Proposal for a $50,000, two-year project that I correctly predicted would never be accepted but that I (mostly) enjoyed doing anyway because it enabled me to learn a lot of new things and forced me to get off my ass and actually start working with all of the farm materials that I had collected and had promised to use in farm stories for years
I still lived in my old house but my son was starting 5th grade at one elementary school a block and a half from our future house while my daughter was in 2nd grade at another school. (This was the start of them being at separate schools. Scott and I always talked about how they wouldn’t be back together again until FWA was a senior and RJP a freshman in 2020. Of course, now it’s 2020 and they aren’t in school at all, but at home doing online school during the pandemic). That summer, I swam across Lake Nokomis for the first time and fell in love with open water swimming. That swim changed my life. Now, I cannot imagine not being an open water swimmer–which made my decision to not swim in the lake this summer even more difficult.
The idea of changing your life reminds me of the poem I reviewed today and then recited a few times during my bike ride: Marie Howe’s “The Meadow.” Such a beautiful last sentence!:
Bedeviled, human, your plight in waking, is to choose from the words that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change our life.
After biking, I changed into my new berry red shoes and ran for 12 minutes while listening to Taylor Swift and Lizzo and Justin Bieber. I almost, but didn’t, fell of the back of the treadmill when I got distracted, checking my pulse. Oops.
note: This post, and my ability to find so much of what I did in 2013 online, reminds me again of how grateful I am for past Sara. She did such a great job giving accounts of our life.
bike: 25 minutes bike stand, basement run: 2.4 miles
It wasn’t too cold, but it’s Saturday, which is more crowded, and it’s icy, which is more difficult when it’s crowded, so I decided to work out in the basement. Couldn’t find anything to watch while I biked so I started listening to a “You’re Wrong About” podcast episode. I need to find something like “Cheer” or “Selling Sunset” to watch. As I ran I listened to music. Tried to start with Schoolhouse Rock but I determined that multiplication rock is not that motivating when you’re running on a treadmill in the basement. Switched to my playlist and ran faster to “Eye of the Tiger” and “Black Wizard Wave.” Don’t remember thinking about much or noticing anything. I got lost in the steady striking of my feet. That’s cool.
This afternoon we (all five of us) took a drive. Near the end we drove on east river road, beside the path that I take for the ford loop. So beautiful with an amazing view! It makes me want to run this loop soon. I’m thinking I might stop at several of the overlooks. Maybe Monday?
Saw this poem on twitter. Oh, Marie Howe, I love you!
The Copper Beech/ MARIE HOWE
Immense, entirely itself, it wore that yard like a dress,
with limbs low enough for me to enter it and climb the crooked ladder to where
I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.
One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell darkening the sidewalk.
Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches, I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,
BIDEN DEFEATS TRUMP! Such a wonderful, needed headline. Sitting upstairs at my desk, working on my poem in the late morning yesterday, Scott called out, “He did it” or “It’s over” or “He won,” I can’t remember which. I started walking down the stairs, stopped, then began to cry. So much relief and joy. It will take weeks for all the fear and despair to leak out, I think. I recognize this is not the end of all that, just the beginning of a renewed hope in the world and the belief that we can avoid the darkest timeline.
Very windy and warm this morning. Noticed my shadow a few times. She’s very excited about Biden and Harris (Harris!) winning too–I could see it in how she held her frame as she ran. Listened to a playlist and felt happy to be outside moving. I wore shorts. I might be able to do that again tomorrow, but after that it’s running tights. We might get snow on Tuesday.
Admired the sparkling river as I ran above on Edmund. I can’t wait until I can run by the river again without worrying about getting too close to people. Next spring?
Scrolling through twitter, one of my favorite poetry people just tweeted: An open gate. Love it! Possibility…not guaranteed, but a chance to enter a new world, a new era, somewhere other than where we’ve been for the past 4 years. Reminds me of a poem I memorized this summer (and have already almost forgotten, sadly…I’ll have to review it a few times):
*44th ave, north/32nd st, east/river road, south/42nd st, west/edmund, south
Another good run. Cooler and very calm, still, quiet. Don’t remember hearing (m)any birds, no conversations, no rowers. At least 3 separate times, I thought I was hearing the clickity-clack of roller skiers, but was actually hearing a bike with noisy wheels or messed up gears or something. Strange that it happened 3 times when I don’t remember ever making that mistake before. Was it the quality of air? Hardly any wind this morning. Sunny, but not bright. Did I see my shadow? Can’t remember.
Recited “The Gate” one more day and thought about gates and openings and doorways and thresholds and windows and spaces where movement and breathing and new stories/ways of being are possible. I think this is my new theme for the month and/or for a series of poems/essays.
Recorded myself reciting it just after finishing my run–my heart rate was probably around 140 or so as I spoke. I got it mostly right but messed up the second to last “this.” The order she writes the three thises–“This is what you’ve been waiting for, ” “And he’d say, This,” and “This, he’d say” is important. It doesn’t have as much impact the way I recited it.
The Gate, July 20
Yesterday, reading Ted Kooser’s Delights and Shadows, I found these two poems that I really liked:
Grasshopper/ Ted Kooser
This year they are exactly the size of the the pencil stub my grandfather kept to mark off the days since rain,
and precisely the color of dust, of the roads leading back accross the dying fields into the ’30s. Walking the cracked lane
past the empty barn, the empty silo, you hear them tinkering with irony, slapping the grass like drops of rain.