2.5 miles
2 trails
44 degrees / wind: 15 mph
Windy this morning and warmer than I thought it would be. I was overdressed in a short-sleeved shirt, a hooded pull-over, and short running tights. I continue to feel sore, so I wondered if I should run. Luckily. my back and glutes didn’t hurt when I was running. In fact, they felt better, like the movement was loosening them up. There were lots of shadows on the trail — from me, trees, the fence. I’m thinking about indigo today so I briefly wondered if I’d call the darker shadows indigo. Nope, they weren’t dark enough. The sun made the river sparkle as I looked to the south. Wow!
Encounter: a woman with her dog on the narrow winchell trail. As I ran by she called out, Look out for his poop! I couldn’t see it, but I leaped and hoped for the best. Success!
Anything else? Someone was sitting on the bench at the Horace W.S. Cleveland overlook. A street cleaning truck was clearing out leaves and making a ruckus across the road. The wind has strong and in my face as I ran north, and even stronger as I ran west.
before the run
Today I’m thinking about indigo. In the entry for indigo in The Secret Lives of Color, I read about indigo dye and the plants that are used to create indigo (including woad) and the process of soaking it in alkaline and drying it and collecting the powdery residue and forming it into blocks to be sent off to market. I think some part of this line might make it into my poem:
changes color upon coming into contact with the air, turning from yellowish green to sea green before settling on a deep, stolid blue.
The Secret Lives of Color/ Kassia St. Clair (190)
stolid: calm, dependable, and showing little or not emotion
Later googling “indigo,” I encountered the indigo bunting. Of course!
looks like a scrap of sky with wings
All About Birds
- “Like all other blue birds, Indigo Buntings lack blue pigment. Their jewel-like color comes instead from microscopic structures in the feathers that refract and reflect blue light, much like the airborne particles that cause the sky to look blue” (All About Birds).
- “Indigo Buntings migrate at night, using the stars for guidance. Researchers demonstrated this process in the late 1960s by studying captive Indigo Buntings in a planetarium and then under the natural night sky. The birds possess an internal clock that enables them to continually adjust their angle of orientation to a star—even as that star moves through the night sky” (All About Birds).
Knowing names correctly is everything; it’s a key to connection and tenderness and a turn to kindness. When you get to learn about an animal or plant, get to know their names, when you learn that there are birds out there who read the stars to fly home at night (indigo buntings), and how wondrous and lovely that is — maybe it might become harder to want to use a product that clogs up the sky with smog so these birds can’t see the stars?
Short Conversation with Poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
after the run
Found a PBS documentary on jeans, Riveted: The History of Jeans. I watched it online through my local library. Some things to remember:
- “In Africa, the indigo cloth is considered the next layer to the skin. It holds a person’s soul, their spirit.”
- many African captives who were enslaved in the new world brought with them the knowledge of making indigo dye and how to fix it to fabric. “Indigo is one of the ways in which slave holding became tied to the economic fortunes of the colonial experiment.”
- indigo was the second biggest cash crop behind rice in South Carolina (1770s)
Now I’m reading the chapter on indigo in On Color. Before Isaac Newton decided it was a color in the 1670s, it was only a dye.
But if colors, at least for humans, are the particular visual experiences triggered by the detection of electromagnetic waves between about 390 and 700 nanometers, there are no new colors to be seen, only new colors to be named. Any new color is just a thinner segment than has previously been recognized of an infinitely divisible continuum. It isn’t new; it was always there. So why not indigo?
On Color
Finally, I found a blue poem with some useful lines that I might read as indigo:
Blue variations/ Lubna Safi
Blue is the blue of distance, “the ink that I use is the blue blood of the swan” (Cocteau), of the sea, of the faraway, a discriminating blue, of your eyes, of memory, the blue of baby boys, of glaciers, of a last light, the great blue chord of a nocturnal symphony, of being cold, of shallow holes, of tender bruises, the gathered blue of my mother’s laughter, of once in a moon, of mountains, of blueprints, of the hottest fire, of silence, of nostalgia, of herons, of dreams, lakes, and skies, of reading The Holy Book, the blue-black of my grandfather’s hair and Hayden’s cold mornings, of the horizon, blue taste of summer, off-blue of concentric waves, of elsewhere, “this blue that opened the way to you” (Bennis), of feeling, of late nights, of blues notes, of edges, of memories of your eyes, of piercing, of the afterimages of Lorca’s words, of stones and storms, blue like thought, like time, the past and present blended together, blue tent of refugee camps, of veins, faded blue of childhood’s tongue, of cold lips, glacial blue of the Arctic nights, of God’s unfolding hand (C. D. Wright), of our pale dot, of the tepid pool water, of the elemental hue of the upper sky “that seems to retire from us” (Goethe), of the typical heavenly color (Kandinsky), blue turning deeper and deeper before going out.