Tag: headphones

may 13/RUN

3.3 miles
2 trails
66 degrees

Went out earlier today. Already warm. High in the mid 80s today. At the beginning of the run, my body felt awkward. Stiff neck, plodding feet — no, not plodding, but feet that were landing wrong, not pushing off of the ground easily. Gradually my body warmed up and I felt smooth by the third mile. Started my run a little after 7 and enjoyed a different vibe than at 9 or 10. Softer, fuzzier, cool green glow instead of harsh blue light.

My favorite view today was when I turned down from the 44th street parking lot to enter the winchell trail. A path winding down a small hill to a stone wall then hazy, glowing air framed by trees and water. The river was below that sky but I don’t remember noticing it, just knowing it was there.

surfaces: dirt, dead leaves, grass, rubbled asphalt, rutted and slanting asphalt, concrete, smooth asphalt

number of stones stacked on the ancient boulder: 6

bird, heard not seen: woodpecker — a deep, hollow knocking
bird, seen not heard: a little sparrow darting into a bush as I ran by

No rowers, no roller skiers, no turkeys. No thoughts or lines of poetry popping into my head. No shadow, no memories of my mom. Nothing interrupting me.

Chanted triple berries in my head to keep a steady beat: strawberry / blueberry / raspberry.

Listened to the gentle buzz of cars, dripping water, voices as I ran south. Put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist on the way back north. Two versions of “What Time is It?” came on, one from The Spin Doctors, the other from High School Musical 2.

restraint and the work of being still

Yesterday, I found a wonderful podcast episode on Lorine Niedecker and a close reading of her poem, “A Poet’s Work.” So much of the episode was great. Today I’m thinking about the discussion of stillness and restraint in LN’s work, which includes another LN poem:

For best work
you ought to put forth
some effort
to stand
in north woods
among birch

I thought about movement and moving through a place instead of standing still in it, which reminded me of a passage 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

And now I’m thinking of something I posted, and then condensed, from Wendell Berry:

The slops along the hollow steepen still more and I go in under the trees. I pass beneath the surface. I am enclosed, and my sense, my interior sense, of the country becomes intricate. There is no longer the possibility of seeing very far. The distances are closed off by the trees and the steepening walls of the hollow. One cannot grow familiar here by sitting and looking as one can up in the open on the ridge. Here the eyes become dependent on the feet. To see the woods from the inside one must look and move and look again.

A Native Hill/ Wendell Berry

finding a stillness in movement?

Thinking more about moving and how it does/doesn’t fit with stillness — as in, an inner stillness — I turned to Brian Teare and his discussion of writing while moving in En Plein Air Poetics:

I’m heading up the AT to the North Trail, the kind of hike during which my mind goes from translucent to luminous, its usual wash of thought polished to a transparency that lets in the world with a force I adore. After a mile on foot, details come into focus with an oxygenated crispness. Thought can be a block to feeling the intertwining of self and world, the mesh of phenomena and the qualia of self, and hiking unblocks that feeling by muting my mind and allowing it to flood with a kind of proprioceptive ecstasy. My sense of self disappears into smell, color, sound, touch.

En Plein Air Poetics/ Brian Teare

Have I ever heard of qualia? Not sure. Here’s a helpful explanation:

Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

proprioceptive: “of, relating to, or being stimuli arising within the organism”

Here’s something else helpful from Teare about shifting away from vision as the primary sense:

Paying attention to a fully intercorporeal relation to a specific site in the field dethrones eyesight as the most valued sense through which we acquire knowledge of nonhuman bodies—the eye is no longer the portal of empiricism through which the rational mind accesses the world.

For instance, hearing and touch are senses rarely accused of the kind of imperialism associated with vision; they are powers that alert other parts of the brain to our embodied relationships with the world.

A listening, touching human mammal is an embodiment that is not all eye and mind, a sensate creature whose language—its rhythms and structures—is derived in part from encountering the sonic landscape, felt textures, and the human and nonhuman bodies that populate and constitute the field.

After all, each ecosystem produces a unique biophony that envelopes us, and writing itself is haptic, a specialized kind of touch.   

may 11/RUN

4.3 miles
ford overlook
63 degrees

Ran earlier today, which helped. The first half was windy. Windy enough that I needed to take my cap off on the ford bridge. Sunny. A mental victory: thought about stopping on the bridge but then just kept going. Made it through the hard moment. The second half of the run, I felt stronger, everything was easier.

I don’t remember noticing the river sparkling, but I did see scales on its surface as I ran west on the bridge. No rowers, no roller skiers, only a few bikers. One small pack of shirtless runners.

Ran up the steep hill that starts under the ford bridge and ends in Wabun park. At the top, I stopped at the fence and looked down at the dam. I studied the tall grass pushing up against the fence. I thought about fences for a moment, how many I encounter while I run by the gorge, some maintained, some abandoned, many damaged by leaning trees or critters or hikers. Wooden, chainlink, iron, stone. Noticed another fence at the ford overlook: chainlink.

Listened to the wind and birds until I reached the ford overlook, then I put in my “Wheeling Life” playlist. Started with “Windmills of Your Mind,” ended with “Watching the Wheels.” Thought about FWA and how he might appreciate John Lennon’s song.

Speaking of playlists, I forgot to mention this in my entry 2 days ago. Listening to my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist and Cream’s “White Room” came on. I wanted to remember this description of eyes:

Silver horses, ran down moonbeams
In your dark eyes

Is this a gleam? Or is she crying?

suburban lawns

I’m still thinking about grass. If I were to make a list of grassy things, which I should and will, the suburban lawn would be on it. I’ve thought about it before, imagining my version of Lorine Niedecker’s growing in green (from her poem, “Paean to Place,”) as the lawn and the patches of green that grow on the edge between suburbs and the few remaining farms they haven’t yet consumed. That was my childhood. Here’s a poem I found this morning to add to the image of the lawn:

Observation/ Nicholas Friedman

In the wilds of our suburban lawn,
the natural world inclines to fable:
Gray squirrels, unperturbed by rain,
jockey for position at what our landlord
speaks of, nominally, as the bird feeder.
Below, dark-eyed juncos peck at fallen millet,
masked like hangmen from another time.
The great, unwritten order of it all
scrambles when Max, our landlord’s aging chow,
starts loping toward the scene. This is his work,
so in a sense, he’s adding order, too.

One squirrel has shifted to a fencepost
where it twitches its tail and rearranges
in quarter turns like a guard. In total, there’s
more movement than the eye can account for,
all of it framed in the window’s tic-tac-toe.
The glass weeps condensation. It’s early, but
already the dog has slumped down for a nap.
There’s plenty of time to lumber after thoughts
that rise and disperse, dark-feathered things
returning when I manage to be still.

may 9/RUN

5.2 miles
franklin loop
67 degrees

Felt like summer today. Hot! A common refrain: I need to get up earlier and get out there before it gets too warm! Difficult. I can tell that the 2+ week break got me out of cardio shape. My heart rate got higher faster. I’m sure the heat had something to do with it too. After a mile, I decided to switch from 9/1 to walking every time my heart rate went above 170, then running again when it went down to 135. A did a lot of walking.

At first, I listened to the traffic and the kids at the church daycare and my feet, but after a few miles, I put in my shadows playlist — if I could find the shadows on the path, I’d find them in the music!

From the Franklin bridge the river was beautiful — so many sparkles. I noticed a few sandbars just below the surface. No rowers. They were probably here earlier in the morning — another reason to get up and run early!

I smelled the flowers — a hint of Big Red cinnamon gum. Heard the birds and construction trucks backing up. Gave attention to the grass, filled with clover and dandelions. At the end, nearing the corner of my block, I watched the shadows of leaves dancing on the grass and dirt — a big patch that was more dirt than grass. Ants? We have several of those in our backyard.

As I looked at the grass and thought about the blade and the sheath, I remembered/realized something: I can’t really see individual grass. Not enough cone cells for that. I write really because I can sometimes see an individual leaf, but just barely, and more the idea that there’s a blade, but definitely not the sheath.

I forgot to post this earlier: I stopped at the sliding bench, noticed how much green there was, and decided to take a picture in order to compare it to a pre-green picture:

sliding bench / may 2025
the back of a wooden bench, all around it a faint trace of snow and bare branches
sliding bench / dec 2024

grass roots and astroturfing

Looking through my Plague Notebook, Vol 25 notes from yesterday, I saw this: grass roots — origins of the phrase. So, I looked it up and found this on wikipedia:

A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or continent movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from volunteers at the local level to implement change at the local, regional, national, or international levels. Grassroots movements are associated with bottom-up, rather than top-down decision-making, and are sometimes considered more natural or spontaneous than more traditional power structures.
*
The earliest origins of “grass roots” as a political metaphor are obscure. In the United States, an early use of the phrase “grassroots and boots” was thought to have been coined by Senator Albert Jeremiah Beveridge of Indiana, who said of the Progressive Party in 1912, “This party has come from the grass roots. It has grown from the soil of people’s hard necessities”.

In the entry, it also mentioned astroturfing, which is an organization that presents itself as grassroots, but is really lead by an outside organization/corporation.

Astroturf — I wanted to find the origins of this term:

The synthetic grass product that eventually became known as AstroTurf® was originally designed as an urban playing surface meant to replace the concrete and brick that covered the recreation areas in city schoolyards. During the Korean War, the U.S. Army had found urban recruits to be less physically fit than rural recruits. Attributing this to lack of green space in cities, the Ford Foundation funded research for Monsanto to create a synthetic grass replica in 1962. It had to be wear-resistant, cost efficient, comfortably cushioned, and traction tested. Two years later employees of the Chemstrand Company, a subsidiary of Monsanto Industries, developed a synthetic surface called ChemGrass and installed it at the Moses Brown School, a private educational facility in Providence, Rhode Island.

Astroturf: The Story Behind the Product

What is the Grass?/ Mark Doty

On the margin
in the used text
I’ve purchased without opening

—pale green dutiful vessel—

some unconvinced student has written,
in a clear, looping hand,
Isn’t it grass?

How could I answer the child?
I do not exaggerate,
I think of her question for years.

And while first I imagine her the very type
of the incurious, revealing the difference
between a mind at rest and one that cannot,

later I come to imagine that she
had faith in language,
that was the difference: she believed

that the word settled things,
the matter need not be looked into again.

And he who’d written his book over and over, nearly ruining it,
so enchanted by what had first compelled him
—for him the word settled nothing at all.

I’m with Whitman. How boring it would be if the word settled everything!

may 7/RUN

4 miles
trestle+ turn around
59 degrees

Today I tried the walk/run method: 9 minutes of running, 1 minute of walking. As usual, I followed this method approximately. Run 9:30/Walk 1:30, 8:30/1 — I can’t remember after that. It was good. It’s still difficult, but I’m pushing through more. I greeted 2 regulars! Dave, the Daily Walker and Daddy Long Legs. I noticed how green the floodplain forest was, only the narrowest sliver of river to see. And the view from the sliding bench? Green green green. If someone was walking below, would I even be able to see them? Ran on the grass and the dirt a lot. Thought about taking the short dirt trail that cuts behind a tree nearing the trestle, but didn’t. Next time? Admired someone’s raspberry red running shoes. I used to have shoes that color. Now they’re boring dark gray/almost black.

Ran through gnats. Most of them went in my eye, one in my throat. Also ran through cottonwood, or some white flowery thing that I thought of as cottonwood fuzz. Usually the cottonwood arrives at the beginning of June, so maybe it was something else?

No rowers, no roller skiers, no turkeys or geese or bird shadows. One fat tire. One little kid. Several runners and walkers and cars.

I don’t remember what I heard for the first half of the run, but for the second half, I listened to my windy playlist (it was windy out there!).

edges / middles / context

I started the morning thinking about surfaces and the places where things meet and textures and skin and feet. And then I remembered Emily Dickinson’s love of the circumference and the wonderful site, out of Dartmouth, all about ED in 1862. It has a blog post on ED and circumference.

I was excited to read this bit:

Laura Gribbin argues that Dickinson’s conception of Circumference rejects Emersonian expansion, revises the patriarchal conceptions of the (male) poet’s encompassing consciousness, and resists being taken over by an outside power. It does so by calling attention to “the circle’s necessary boundary or perimeter without which it has neither shape nor meaning.” In Gribbin’s reading,

“Circumference marks the borderline of symbolic and linguistic order.
This border is a highly charged point of convergence where oppositions are collapsed, boundaries are explored, and meaning originates. Circumference is also the space within a circle where life is lived, pain is felt, and death is observed.”

In what amounts to a powerful critique of Romanticism, Dickinson stands not at the center but on the periphery, at the outer limits of knowledge and language, replacing, as Gribbin notes,

“the Romantic impulse toward transcendence with an alternative concept of knowledge gained within the limits of experience.”

Instead of the Emersonian emphasis on sight and specularity, Dickinson emphasizes touch and what can be felt. Because

“Circumference delineates that region where the imagination comes into play, [it] is thus the source of poetry itself.”

White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862, a Weekly Blog

While reading my “on this day” posts yesterday, I encountered a discussion of middles from 6 may 2023. It’s in the middle of my summarizing of Mary Ruefle’s essay “On Beginnings”:

It’s about beginnings and how there are more beginnings in poetry than endings. The first note I jotted down in my Plague Notebook, Vol 16 was about the semicolon, which is a punctuation mark that I particularly like. Ruefle has just introduced an idea from Ezra Pound that each of us speaks only one sentence that begins when we’re born and ends when we die. When Ruefle tells this idea to another poet he responds, “That’s a lot of semicolons!” Ruefle agrees and then writes this:

the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry) you should stop and be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being–an Italian as a matter of fact–that allows us to go on and keep on connecting speech that for all apparent purposes unrelated.

then adds: a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, and this:

Between the first and last lines there exists–a poem–and if it were not for the poem that intervenes, the first and last lines of a poem would not speak to each other.

At some point as I read, I suddenly thought of middles. The in-betweens, after the beginning, before the end. How much attention do these get, especially if we jump right in and start with them. It reminds me of a writing prompt/experiment I came up with for my running log: Write a poem about something that happened during the middle of your run–not at the beginning or the end, but the middle (see 27 nov 2019). 

the MIDDLE

mid-motion
mid-walk, mid-run
Activity: notice and record what you notice in the midst of motion. Pull out your smart phone and speak your thoughts into it.

Not how you got there or where you’re headed, but here now in-between

the middle: Lucille Clifton’s unfenced is, Alice Oswald’s purpled sea

I like the idea of being dropped in the middle — no need to endure a beginning or an ending, but what’s lost when we’re floating in the middle? Something that grounds or frames the experience: context.

aside: writing that last bit, I recalled a few lines from Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish”:

The whole world outside….
I know it’s better, whole, outside, the world—whole
trees, whole groves–but I
love it in here where it blurs, and nothing starts or
ends, but all is
waving, and colorless,
and voiceless….

This morning, I came across a learning prompt on Poetry Foundation: Context.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines context as “the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning.” The word itself comes from the Latin contexere, which means “to weave or join together,” which I interpret as “to make sense of” what we’re reading, particularly when we’re not familiar with the author’s background and/or work. Knowing a poem’s context can give us a sense of place, culture, politics, gender dynamics, etc., and situate us in a specific time and place using concrete references. . . .

A sense of place, a connection, an anchor, a way to ground ourselves and our understandings.

a few hours later: I just remembered Kamala Harris’ coconut tree comment, which RJP loved to quote during the campaign:

context

added the next day: As I read through this entry again the next morning, I suddenly remembered something I posted earlier this spring about how not knowing or acknowledging a person/community’s history is to de-humanize them, to turn them into an object and not a subject. I can’t find where I wrote about it or what I was referencing. After a lot of searching, I found it! It’s in an interview with Jenny Odell about her new book on time, Another Kind of Time. Instead of posting the lengthy quotation here, I’m putting it in my entry for 8 may.

ground contact time

The Apple watch has all sorts of data points, most of which don’t matter to me or are meaningless because I don’t know what to compare them too. One such data point is “ground contact time.” Mine is almost always between 235 and 240 ms. It’s cool to think about how little time my foot is on the ground — and how much time I’m flying! — but what does this number mean? I suppose the fact that it is consistent is good, but should I be spending more time or less on the ground? I found a helpful primer on GCT (ground contact time) that has a chart — and plenty of caveats about that chart — to use for evaluating your ground contact time:

  • < 210 ms: Great
  • 210 – 240 ms: Good
  • 241 – 270 ms: Room for improvement
  • 271 – 300 ms: Needs improvement
  • > 300 ms: Lots to work on

The bottom line: less time on the ground is better. It makes you a more efficient, less injury-prone, faster runner.

So, mine is good, but barely. Ways to improve it include: picking up the cadence, being lighter on your feet, dynamic hip exercises — plyometrics or hill repeats, more deliberate arm swing. Maybe I’ll try some of it; I’d like to fly more! I think I’ll start with hill repeats. I’ve been wanting to do those for some time.

All of this talk about surfaces and edges where things meet — seams — and middles and shortened time on ground is making me want to reread Wendell Berry’s “A Native Hill.” I finally have a physical copy of it. I think I’ll read it and mark it up this afternoon!

may 3/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
47 degrees

A little cooler, but sunny. I wore shorts and my legs didn’t feel cold. The green continues to spread. I’m sure I still have a view of the river but I don’t remember looking at it, not even once. I saw some rowers heading down to the rowing club, but didn’t hear them on the water. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Was passed by several groups of young and fast runners. High school or college teams? Not sure.

Mostly I felt good. My heart rate is still high. I guess I lost some fitness on my almost 2 week break. Monday, I’ll try some more deliberate walk-run segments.

Listened to other runners, cars, water gushing out of sewer pipes heading north, my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist heading back south.

Ran on the grass for a few stretches to avoid other runners and walkers. Thought about how several sites recommended running on more gentle surfaces, like grass, when dealing with a herniated disc or sciatica.

before the run

I’m thinking more about open fields, meadows, lawns, boulevards, village greens, grasslands both wild and manufactured. Grassy spaces I recall from childhood, living in sub-divisions in North Carolina and Virginia and Iowa: soccer fields, manicured lawns, pastures just beyond my backyard.

I decided to look through the poems I’ve gathered for more meadow poems. Found Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. Wow.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, 
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, 
an eternal pasture folded in all thought 
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light 
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

An eternal pasture with a hall made by light and shadows. After the poem, I wrote about Duncan’s idea of projective verse

poetry shaped by rhythms of poet’s breath. So cool–I want to explore this more, thinking about breathing when I run vs. walk vs. sit.

“Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath: 

“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE 
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”

poetry foundation introduction to “Projective Verse”

The heart, by way of the breath, to the line — This idea will be the start of a moving while writing experiment!

after the run

up to the wind-stripped branches shadow-
signing the ground before you the way, lately, all
the branches seem to, or you like to say they do,
which is at least half of the way, isn’t it, toward
belief — whatever, in the end, belief
is…
(My Meadow, My Twilight/ Carl Phillips)

My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts, a half acre with tall grasses and weeds and the occasional wild flower because we do not mow it but leave it scrubby and unkempt. 
(The Bench/ Mary Ruefle)

And, back to the field:

Crossing a field, wading

                   through nothing
        but timothy grass,

imagine yourself passing from
and into. Passing through

doorway after
doorway after doorway.
(Threshold/ Maggie Smith)

After the rain, it’s time to walk the field

again, near where the river bends. Each year

I come to look for what this place will yield –

lost things still rising here.
(After the Rain/ Jared Carter)

may 1/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
60 degrees

Warm! Green everywhere — tufts of grass on the bluff, leaves unfurling from the trees. Lots of bikers on the trail today. I ran to the falls without stopping, then took several walk breaks on the way back. My heart rate was high, my legs were sore. I think I should do a post-injury walk/run plan to ease back into moving.

As I write this on my deck, a black-capped chickadee is doing their feebee call. So loud! So constant. No answer yet.

10 Things

  1. Sea Salt is open at the falls — I could smell it as I ran through the park — what was the smell? fried and salty?
  2. a group of kids with adults — students/teacher? — below me on the winchell trail
  3. the falls parking lot was full of cars
  4. kids yelling/laughing on the playground
  5. a park worker driving a big mower, cutting grass on the strip between the walking and biking path — the lawn mower had a bright orange triangle on the back
  6. a biker in a bright yellow shirt with a matching bright yellow helmet
  7. someone swinging at the falls playground
  8. a biker biking in wide circles under the ford bridge
  9. flashes of white though the (already) thick green on the trail below me and beside the creek — I think it was the heads of people taking the path that leads to the river
  10. yellow and red tulips near a parking lot

before the run

Thank you past Sara for posting this beautiful Katie Farris poem — Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage — and giving me inspiration for a May challenge with these lines:

America’s optimistic to dye its money
green. Leaves are green
because of chlorophyll, which is the machine
that turns sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into leaf, stem, and root. All
the little blades of grass left behind by the lawn mower like Civil
War soldiers. Same as cash.

Grass! A whole month with grass? Maybe a whole month with green, one week with grass? Yes! And (at least) a week with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gathering moss. Will this challenge idea go the way of last month’s steps? Forgotten after a few days? I hope not.

like Civil War soldiers — the line this is referencing in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was one of my first favorite lines from a poem:

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I posted this section of Song of Myself on 18 may 2020. Here’s another part I want to remember:

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

And now I’m thinking about Mary Oliver and her line about rising up again like grass, and realizing that she was referencing Whitman with it. She loved Walt Whitman. Uh oh — I’m feeling a shift in direction. Will I forgo grass for a study of Walt Whitman?

during the run

As I mentioned in my 10 things list, while I was running, I encountered a park worker mowing the strip of grass between the bike and walking paths. I decided that that would be my image of grass for today. I could smell the freshly cut grass as I ran by. I wonder what the parks’ department’s schedule for mowing grass is — how often? and how many acres of grass do they maintain across the city?

after the run

1

Read Mary Oliver’s chapter in Upstream, “My Friend, Walt Whitman.” I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this line before, but I’ll do it again because it fits:

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple–or a green field–a place to enter, and in which to feel.

2

I decided to look up information about minneapolis parks and mowing.

4,660 acres of grass/turf mowed

They divided grassy areas into 3 types: athletic fields, general park turf, reduced mowing areas.

general park turf: “We cut grass to a height of 3 inches on a regular basis as time and weather allows, but grass height may exceed 5 inches at times. This standard applies to most of the Park System including neighborhood parks, boulevards, parkways and active use areas within regional parks.”

reduced mowing areas: “We maintain some park lands through mowing on an infrequent basis. These areas include steep hillsides, erosion prone slopes, shorelines and park lands that are not intensively maintained.”

I love that the parks department posts this information!

Also wanted to add this video. It’s light on sources, especially the early history of grass, but I like the clips from commercials:

And here’s a useful resource to return to, and also to use to supplement the video:

The History of Early American Landscape Design: Lawn

And also this — Get Off My Lawn! — which has an interesting 30 minute podcast, images related to the lawn from the Smithsonian Museum.

april 10/RUN

4.5 miles
river road, north/south
51 degrees

Today I wore shorts! I did a variation on the beat workout. Mile 1 = chanting triples / Mile 2 = metronome at 175 / Mile 3 = Playlist (Color). The variation was that I took a little longer between miles and I tried to get faster with each one. I felt faster and more locked into the beat, which was fun.

Right after I started the run, the tornado sirens went off. Hmm — it’s not Wednesday and it’s not the first week of the month, so what was happened? I asked a walker I encountered and she told me it was tornado prevention month. Of course!

10 Things

  1. the river road was crowded with a steady stream of cars as I entered the path
  2. a small tree beside the path, some of its tops were spray painted orange
  3. a bike was hidden behind the feet of the lake street bridge
  4. a man and a woman standing next to 2 overturned lime scooters — the man had his phone out, was he about to rent them?
  5. a tree leaning heavily against the wooden fence above the ravine — how long until the tree falls or the fence breaks or the park workers fix it?
  6. a runner ahead of me wearing white mid-calf socks, looking smooth and relaxed
  7. the part of the road between the franklin and I-94 bridges is open again
  8. I mistook the tree trunk with a burl at the height of a head for a person again
  9. a heavy gray sky
  10. road closed April 12th — what for? a race?

color

Today’s ROYGBIV:

Red — Taylor Swift’s song, “Red”
Orange — my sweatshirt
Yellow — another runner’s bright yellow shirt
Green — the grass, a pale green
Blue — a recycling trashcan along the route
Indigo — ?, maybe the color of a car?
Violet — the sky, the palest, slightest hint of violet

I’m reading more of the book, On Color. Here are some passages/ideas I’d like to archive from the introduction:

1

Color is an unavoidable part of our experience of the world, not least as it differentiates and organizes the physical space in which we live, allowing us to navigate it.

Often, this navigation is assumed, taken for granted, unspoken. It is not that I can’t see color; it is that I see it in unreliable ways. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes green is brown, yellow pink. Red is gray. Orange makes an object invisible.

2

But for all color’s inescapability, we don’t know much about it. There is no comparably salient aspect of daily life that is so complicated and so poorly understood. We are not quite sure what it is. Or maybe it is better to say we are not quite sure where it is. It seems to be “there,” unmistakably a property of the things of the world that are colored. But no scientists believe this, even though they don’t always agree with one another about where (they think) it is.

Chemists tend to locate it in the microphysical properties of colored objects; physicists in the specific frequencies of electromagnetic energy that those objects reflect; physiologists in the photoreceptors of the eye that detect this energy; and neurobiologists in the neural processing of this information by the brain.

*

For artists, the precise scientific nature of color is more or less irrelevant. What matters is what color looks like (and also, and not to be underestimated, how much the paint costs). 

3

Color vision must be universal. The human eye and brain work the same way for nearly all people as a property of their being human—determining that we all see blue. But the color lexicon, meaning not merely the particular words but also the specific chromatic spacethey are said to mark, clearly has been shaped by the particularities of culture. Since the spectrum of visible colors is a seamless continuum, where one color is thought to stop and another begin is arbitrary. The lexical discrimination of particular segments is conventional rather than natural. Physiology determines what we see; culture determines how we name, describe, and understand it. The sensation of color is physical; the perception of color is cultural.

4

Always with color, what we see is what we think is there.

A Crown of Sonnets?

A few days ago while working on my color sonnets I suddenly remembered that sonnet crowns existed. I wasn’t quite sure what one was, I just knew of them. Could this work for my color poems? I like the thought of it, but I’m not sure I can make it work — but I’ll try, at least!

7 sonnets linked through a structure: the last line of one poem is the first line of the next, and the last line of the final sonnet is the first line of the firsts sonnet. Tricky to not make it sound contrived. (see Learning the Sonnet)

Some variations — link with lines throughout but don’t make the last line of the last sonnet the first line of the first OR do the first/last line with 1 and 7, but not throughout.

april 7/RUN

5.4 miles
franklin loop
30 degrees

Wore my new Brooks for the first time today. I need to adjust the laces at the top, but otherwise, they’re great. Hooray for past Sara for buying these shoes, and hooray for new shoes! Sunny and cooler today. Wind. I felt strong and relaxed, occasionally my back was tight.

10 Things

  1. a flash of silver in the sky — a plane
  2. a blue sky — cerulean — no clouds or birds
  3. the river, 1: from the trestle on the west side: blue
  4. the river, 2: from the franklin bridge: small waves, textured
  5. the river, 3: from the lake street bridge: sparks of light moving fast, making my head buzz in disorientation and delight
  6. the deep bellow of a train horn on the east side
  7. the soft knocking of a woodpecker
  8. a turkey on the trail — as I neared them, they flared their feathers then moved over
  9. another turkey in the brush on the edge of the trail
  10. the bridge railing casting a thick grid of shadows on the path

Listened to voices in the gorge below — high-pitched, a laughing kid or a startled animal? — and wind and water in the trees for most of the run. Put in my color playlist on the bridge. Went deep inside the beat as I listened to “Mr. Blue Sky.”

Tried to think about my orange poem — I’m a little stuck — but got distracted by my effort and the wind and the turkeys. Now, after the run, here’s some inspiration:

excerpt from Notes on Orange/ Jennifer Huang

In case you’re wondering, the fruit came first, the color
name second. They called it red-yellow for some time, and
for some time it was just that. Red brought nearer to
humanity by yellow, as Kandinsky described it. I am just
that: a human who wants to be closer to god. What is the
true opposite of human? Maybe orange. A piece of sun, its
properties have been known to help us recall the feeling of
cool-blue grass under toes, the chime of a baby robin, the
holy scent of ripe mud. What is it that makes us want to get
close? To the gods, to summer, to sweetness, before we
retreat again . . .

One section — right now, it’s the beginning — of my orange poem is this:

Before word fruit and before fruit color
not as concept but movement, a certain
length of light finding its way to the back
of an eye, to a brain, through a body.
More than sight, sensation, the feeling
of heat* bursting out of the blue**

*or flame?
**blue as orange’s contrast color and blue as the lake water surface an orange buoy sits upon

hmm . . . I’ll play around with this some more. I need to connect this section with my experiences with seeing and not seeing orange buoys.

april 6/RUN

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls steps and back
45 degrees

Yes, spring! Bright sun and clear paths. Warmer air. Lots of runners and walkers and one roller skier in a bright yellow shirt. My lower back/glutes did not hurt when I was running — even though they had ached slightly (or softly?) yesterday and last night.

Did a slightly different route today: river road trail, south / godfrey / hiked down the steep trail then ran across the flat, grassy part below the falls where the creek pools and begins to bend / walked up the 100+ steps / climbed over the green gate / ran through the park / north river road, trail / boulevard grass

Running south I listened to the roller skiers poles striking the ground and happy voices, returning north, my color playlist. An orange song happened at the end, Shake it Well/ Koo Koo. Like most orange words, its about the fruit.

10 Things

  1. a loud rustling in the dry leaves below the double bridge
  2. a big turkey on the winchell trail, they moved off to the side to let me pass — no hissing or gobbling
  3. white foaming water falling beside slabs of ice
  4. the creek, moving past over the rocks, glittering in the sun
  5. a woodpecker somewhere in the trees, laughing
  6. the bench above the edge of the world, empty
  7. something big and bright and shining across the river
  8. something else big and white — at first I thought it might be the sky through a gap in the trees but later I decided it was a building
  9. my shadow in front of me — sharp, looming, distracting
  10. a lumpy shadow cast on the paved trail by a gnarled tree branch leaning over a crooked fence

This month, I’m slowly incorporating steps into my training, and my thinking about color, especially but not exclusively, orange. Here’s a color poem I discovered yesterday:

Black lake, black boat, / Emily Skaja

black fog I can’t find my way
through. Black trees, black
moon. I once knew the sky
from the water. This course
I remember, its narrowing.
How I crept my way down
the ladder like clutching
the gluey rungs of a throat.
I know you know how I’ve been.
Like you, like blood sucked
from a cut. A hot metal gash,
a beat of alarm, too late.
The water is listening.
That’s my name in its mouth.

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.