4.15 miles trestle+ turn around 60 degrees wind: 35 mph gusts
Another earlier run. Cooler and windy! Luckily, I wasn’t running straight into it for that long, or if I was, it didn’t bother me. I felt strong and relaxed and like I’m slowly getting back into the groove.
Right after my run, we drove down to St. Peter to help FWA move out of his dorm. He graduated a few weeks ago. I didn’t have time to write this entry until I got back. Can I remember 10 things?
10 Things
the green has taken over the gorge, no more wide open view of the river, only a splotch of bright white through the small gap in the trees
heard, not seen: a roller skier’s clicking poles
Good Morning! to Mr. Morning!, twice
running past the field at Minneahaha Academy, all dug up. Scott thinks they’re putting in a new irrigation system
little purple flowers — not sure if it was Siberian Squill, maybe some other purple flower?
empty benches
passed the dirt rail near the trestle and thought about taking it but didn’t
a small blue ball under the trestle
most of the stones stacked on the ancient boulder — there had been 6 — were blown over in yesterday’s storms, only 2 small pebbles were still stacked
the big crack just past the trestle that they’ve patched up several springs in a row is cracking again. 2 out of the 3 sections of it have big cracks, the one closest to the trestle has a big crater
I decided to stop and take a picture of it:
crack, overview / 16 may 2025crack, close-up / 16 may 2025
Listened to the blowing wind as I ran north, my “Beaufort Scale” playlist running south.
among / between
When I read and posted Lorine Niedecker’s poem about standing among the birch last week —
For best work you ought to put forth some effort to stand in north woods among birch.
I was struck by the word among and wondered how it was different from between. I looked it up this afternoon and, after wading through discussions about how between is used with 2 items, among with more than 2, I came across a helpful distinction in Merriam Webster:
We use between when we want to express a relation to things and have them considered as individual and usually equal entities.
Among, on the other hand is the best word to use when referring to things collectively and imprecisely.
I like among in LN’s poem, although I wonder about the effect of using between (or beside or with) instead. to stand/in north woods/between birch. Among indicates a kinship — among all of us trees, but between suggests an actual place — stand between this birch and that birch and an exchange — between us. I like both meanings. I like imaging my best work as trying to become a tree. But I also like the idea of my best work happening when I stand between birch — giving and receiving air.
I was reminded of among and between while reading this passage from Marie Howe:
That was really a big deal. I was given this place to be without any expectations really. And everything changed so that the particulars of life—this white dish, the shadow of the bottle on it—everything mattered so much more to me. And I saw what happened in these spaces. You can never even say what happened, because what happened is rarely said, but it occurs AMONG the glasses with water and lemon in them. And so you can’t say what happened but you can talk about the glasses or the lemon. And that something is in BETWEEN all that.
You can name/describe the collection of things (among), but you can’t find words to describe how their meaning has changed in that moment. Often when I think about the slight shifts in meaning between small words, like among or between, I’m reminded of an essay I read about Mary Oliver and her mousier words. I love mousy words! Meanwhiles and in-betweens and yous and wes and usses (is that the plural of us?).
…it’s tempting to be blinded by the more immediately visible parts of speech: the monolithic nouns, the dynamic verbs, the charismatic adjectives. Mousier ones—pronouns, prepositions, particles—go ignored.
4.15 miles minnehaha falls and back 68 degrees dew point: 59
Even though it was warm and the dew point was high, my run was good. Managed to bring my heart rate back down and keep it under 170 until I reached my favorite spot at the falls — 2.25 miles in. Excellent. I’m feeling stronger, mentally and physically.
10 Things
a turkey in the middle of the road, honking? squawking? yelling? at the cars unwilling to stop and let him cross
a hazy green above the gorge
the sun hitting the light green leaves so intensely in the distance that I thought it was a bright yellow crossing sign instead of a tree
the falls were rushing, all white foam framed by green trees
a steady procession of cars on the road
roots and rocks hidden in the shadows on the trail — I lightly twisted both ankles, one from a root, the other a rock
the tree that feel in the creek sometime last year was gray — will they remove it?
a line of a dozen or more cars backed up on the parkway, stuck at the stop sign
a crowded trail heading north — bikers and walkers, a few runners, strollers
the water fountains have been turned on again! I stopped for a drink and to wet down my hat
Listened to the hum of traffic as I ran south, my “Doin’ Time” playlist heading back north.
before the run
Thinking about LN’s poem — that I posted yesterday — about standing in the north woods with birch, which led me to think about becoming a tree, like in Katie Farris’ “What Would Root” and Linda Pastan’s “In The Orchard” — I shall come back as a tree.
I’m also thinking about Mary Oliver and “Can You Imagine” — surely you can’t imagine trees don’t dance from the roots up, wishing to travel a little, not cramped as much as wanting a better view, or sun, or just as avidly, more shade.
during the run
I don’t remember thinking about becoming a tree or rooting or stillness while I ran, but I remembered right after I finished and as I walked back home I recited “What Would Root” in my head. I need to practice the second half of the poem. Then I thought about the illusion of stillness and how nothing, not even rocks or trees, stand still. They’re sinking and shifting and swaying and responding to (being changed) by the world around them.
after the run
Still as not not moving but being stuck in a rut, doing the same thing again and again, as in, you’re still doing that?
Still as not needing more, content, at peace, satisfied, stilled desire or anxiety.
If Socrates drank his portion of hemlock willingly, if the Appalachians have endured unending ages of erosion, if the wind can learn to read our minds and moonlight moonlight as a master pickpocket, surely we can contend with contentment as our commission.
Deer in a stubble field, small birds dreaming unimaginable dreams in hollow trees, even the icicles, darling, even the icicles shame us with their stoicism, their radiant resolve.
Listen to me now: think of something you love but not too dearly, so the night will steal from us only what we can afford to lose.
walk: 1 hour winchell trail / edmund 77 degrees
Remembered to take Delia the dog for a walk before it got too hot. We walked to the Winchell trail than sauntered, me studying the leaves with my fuzzy vision and fingers, and Delia sniffing them with her snout. Warm in the sun, cool in the shadows.
10+ Things
clumps of tallish grass growing through the mulch — a vibrant green
even taller grasses growing among the flowers on the hill, creating a visual effect that was dizzying as my eyes tried to land on anything solid
little bits of some sort of plant scattered along the top of the fence. It looked like it was growing there — a form of lichen? — but I couldn’t tell. It might have just fallen from a tree
the pleasing, easily identifiable shape of the maple tree on the trees close to the trail
sparkling, blue water
blue water, blue sky, green trees
the laugh of a woodpecker
a yard with several bleeding heart bushes, all in bloom
sprawled tree shadows on the grass
the crotch of a tree — standing beside a tree that branched off into two equally sized limbs which looked like thighs to me. I imagined a person planted head first in the ground, which is what happens in “What Would Root”
walking near Hiawatha Elementary, watching as a gym class “ran” around the block, studying the different approaches to “running” — a steady jog, sprint then stop then sprint, skipping, arms flailing and screaming while moving
As I walked with Delia, stopping at almost every tree or tuft of grass or clump of dirt, I thought about the differences between walking and running, this time in relation to a sense of self. Does one enable you to lose yourself or step outside of yourself more easily? I haven’t decided, but I think while walking you can be more aware of what you are doing, how you are attending to the world and noticing what is going on. While running, the attention is less deliberate; you’re too busy managing your effort to carefully study things. There was more to that thought but I lost in the time that it took me to get home.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 2025sliding 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.
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.”
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!
It was nice and I felt good, so I decided to go for a short run this morning. Hot! I wore my summer attire: tank top and shorts. Sunny. Sharp shadows, still air, not much shade. Ran right by the Minnehaha Academy playground and heard all of the kids shouting and shoving and having fun. I peeked at the river through the trees: a flat blue. No turkeys or roller skiers or gushing water. No headphones either. Instead, I listened to the kids and the cars and the loud rumbling of a truck. Also heard: someone’s workout program on their phone, you have complete 3 miles — or something similar to that.
before the run
This morning, I’m reading another chapter of RWK’s Gathering Moss: The Advantages of Being Small: Life in the Boundary Layer. I was excited/please/inspired to encounter this passage:
Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. This meeting ground between air and land is known as the boundary layer. Lying cheek to cheek with rocks and logs, mosses are intimate with the contours and textures of their substrate.
Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
surfaces / where earth and atmosphere meet / boundary layer / intimate / contours / textures
I’m interested in surfaces, both ground surfaces by the gorge and water surfaces at the lake. I’ve gathered poems and thought about them before. And there is a line from my Haunts project that I’m still trying to write around/beside/through: It begins here: from the ground up, feet first, following. Today, I want to think about surfaces and boundary layers and textures and the intimacy that is created when air and land, foot and ground, meet.
things we did on grass
When you lie on the ground on a sunny summer afternoon to look up and watch the clouds go by, you place yourself in the boundary of the earth’s surface. When you are flat on the ground, the wind speed is reduced, you can scarcely feel the breeze that would ruffle your hair if you were standing up.
Things we did on grass is a line from an XTC song. I’ve been wanting to experiment with it. RWK is inspiring me!
still
the air becomes progressively slower and slower until, immediately adjacent to the surface, the air is perfectly still, captured by the friction with the surface itself. It is this layer of still air that you experience while lying on the ground.
Such a rich word and idea, still. I’ve been orbiting around it for years. And yet, the opposite of restlessness, something I can’t do: sit still, a calmness and willingness to stop and just be.
during the run
Since I’m thinking of surfaces, especially grass, I decided to run on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road. After the run, as I was walking home, I recorded some thoughts:
[transcript] may 6th. I’m thinking about surfaces and moss and where air and ground meet and these little spaces that are sheltered, that are a little warmer and still and allow for friction without total erosion. Then I was thinking about how I like those spaces — those small spaces, those enough spaces. Then RWK’s bit at the end of the chapter, about how moss still need to germinate and seed and they can’t in these sheltered spaces so they have to expose themselves. Also thinking about the back deck as a sheltered space. It’s interesting to put this in a context of the pandemic because of how the surfaces and how this dirt trail is surely wider because people were running and walking and using it during the pandemic. All the different ways that (the pandemic) is written on this surface, this boundary layer.
Earlier in the run, I was also thinking about friction in relation to surfaces meeting. In particular, my feet and the ground, but also RWK’s example of free flowing air being disrupted and altered by rock. My thought: we need that friction to feel bodies, to feel our bodies. A flash of Wittgenstein and his rough ground (as opposed to smooth ice) flashed through my head.
I thought about the benefits of being small and a discussion I had with FWA the other day when he was suggesting that humans are resilient in the way that small trees that can bend and lean with the wind during a heavy storm are.
after the run
Ideas to give some attention:
Intimacy and Forrest Gander and Anne Pringles’ conversation about intimacy as an encounter that transforms you and Scott describing two trees growing out of the same spot and intertwining as intimate
the texture of wind when encountering objects, makes me think of light on surfaces and how the ancient greeks took that into account in their understandings of, and names for, color
surfaces and feet first, following — the encounter between foot and ground is the space where a poem can be written and offered
the boundary layer visible to our eye as the horizontal lines I mentioned last month: the line between blue and brown
where earth and atmosphere meet = violet
grass as threshold (a boundary space): the threshold between neighborhood and park, between life and death — grass as a space where the dead and living can meet
the dirt trail through the grass as a record of the pandemic
Warm! Nothing hurt, it was just hard. My heart rate was higher. Who cares? No back or calf or hip pain! I’m trying to ease back in. Today I ran 4 minutes/walked 1, 8 times. I was proud of myself for sticking with it, even as my heart rate climbed. Yes, I’m ready for some mental toughness!
10 Things
an abundance of sparkles on the river
more green leaves crawling up the trunks of trees
fee bee fee bee
shadow, 1: a straight-ish line on the path from the fence
shadow, 2: soft, sprawling branches
shadow, 3: me — sharp, upright, satisfied
the faint, slightly off tune dinging of the train bell
flowing falls
park workers had the one set of stairs blocked off — I heard water, were they spraying down the steps?
passing another runner from behind, they were dressed warmly in long pants and a a jacket and breathing heavily
enoughness / contentment / not scarcity
Moss lifeways offer a strong contrast to the ways we’ve organized our society, which prioritizes relentless growth as the metric of well-being: always getting bigger, producing more, having more. Infinite growth is ecologically impossible and exceedingly destructive, as it demands the transformation of the lives of other beings into raw materials to feed the fiction. Mosses show us another way—the abundance that emanates from self-restraint, from enoughness. Mosses have lived too long on this planet to be seduced by the nonsense of accumulation, the delusion of permanence, the endless striving for productivity. Maybe our heartbeats slow when we sit with mosses because they remind us that contentment could be ours.
Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
When I think of green, I think of another concept Robin Wall Kimmerer promotes: abundance — as in, a gift economy and a challenge to the (mostly) myth of scarcity. In May, green is almost too abundant — a gift that is not scarce!
walk: 45 minutes winchell trail (ravine) / tunnel of trees / edmund 76 degrees
Took Delia out for a walk in the afternoon. The green is taking over. The view from above in the tunnel of trees was only green — no dirt trail below, no sliver of river, no exposed sewer pipe. Just green. As we walked, I thought about another passage I read from RWK in “Ancient Green” this afternoon:
They [green moss] cover the inanimate with the animate. Without judgment, they cover our mistakes, with an unconditional acceptance of their responsibility for healing.
Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
Everywhere green — not moss, but leaves — were covering bare branches, sewer pipes, the gorge. A green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return of the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Did I feel that way about the green I was encountering today? Somewhat, but I also felt it taking over, transforming the floodplain forest in ways I didn’t like: too hidden.
overheard: music from car radios! Someone blasting “Bohemian Rhapsody,” someone else “Rhapsody in Blue.” Until typing these 2, I didn’t make the rhapsody connection.
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are. (The Man with the Blue Guitar/ Wallace Stevens)
rhapsody: a portion of an epic poem adapted for recitation
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.
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”
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)
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
Sea Salt is open at the falls — I could smell it as I ran through the park — what was the smell? fried and salty?
a group of kids with adults — students/teacher? — below me on the winchell trail
the falls parking lot was full of cars
kids yelling/laughing on the playground
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
a biker in a bright yellow shirt with a matching bright yellow helmet
someone swinging at the falls playground
a biker biking in wide circles under the ford bridge
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
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:
