march 31/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

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

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

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

10 Things

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

Found this poem the other day:

Color Keeps Time / Patrycja Humienik

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

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

Lover, let the morning slow
time through the branches.

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

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

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

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

march 30/BIKERUN

bike: 35 minutes
run: 1 mile
outside: 32 degrees / snow

I finally decided to start watching the Apple+ show, See. A plague has wiped out all but 2 million people. The survivors are blind. At the time of the series, centuries later, vision exists only as a myth. The first episode begins in a remote village. I wanted to watch it because I’m curious how blindness is represented in the show. I should add that I am watching the show with audio descriptions on; I don’t think I’d be able to watch without them. My first question: what do they mean by blind? They never specify. Is it pure darkness, or can they detect some light?

The blind villagers function normally; they navigate with long sticks and dogs and ropes that are strung up all around the village. Also: wind chimes and bells. Many of them have extremely good hearing.

If you’re lying, I will hear. Nothing escapes my ears. I hear doors closing in your voice.

Just as I was stopping my bike, the evil queen appeared. I’m not sure what her deal is yet — I just know that she’s evil and she wants to kill the two babies that have just been born in the village because she hates their father and has a bounty on his head.

Do I like this show? Not sure. I’ll keep watching. One thing that was difficult — the fight scene between the queen’s henchmen, the witch finders, and the village, led by Jason Momoa. It was long and very visual — so much audio description.

While I ran I listened to the mood playlist: energy. Not sure why this is the case, but running actually helps loosen up my back when it feels a little tight. I only ran a mile, but it was enough. Now I’m tired and hungry!

before the run

In his introduction of the poem-of-the-day for the slowdown poetry podcast, Major Jackson says,

Today’s marvelous poem reminds me we exist in liminal zones where the extraordinary renders the ordinary visible and uncanny, an assertion of the imagination that makes our world shimmer.

episode 1321

The ordinary as uncanny, shimmering. I love this description and Heather Christle’s work for this reason. My lack of functioning cone cells makes more of the world uncanny and shimmering. Often, things are not quite and almost. Everything seems to be vibrating and pulsing, soft and slow. And my reliance on peripheral vision means I am much more aware of movement. Before, when my central vision worked, I had an easier time blocking that movement out, but now I see all of it. While this is a problem, it is also offers the possibility of seeing the world differently, of accessing the magic and wonder of it.

The Running of Several Simulations at Once May Lead to Murky Data/ Heather Christle

How do you say ‘inopportune’
in a small forest of cell phone towers
disguised as bizarrely regular trees?
I am asking in case it happens,
because anything can and even does.
Sometimes I want to shrink
and move into a miniature model village
mostly because the particular green
of the imaginary grass corresponds
with how my body believes joy would feel
if joy were to happen here on Earth,
where my eyes receive light in this
certain way: limited, but not
without pleasure. As a child
I visited one model village
so extensively constructed I fell
into a state of complete wonder—
‘They thought of everything!’
even the person running late
for the train, and the window
left slightly open to the storm—
and I should like to request
the arrival of this sensation in response
to the world at its actual scale—
just imagine! Someone
has even gone to the trouble
of filling the egg cartons
individually with smooth brown
eggs and one—such detail!—
has broken, but not enough
to be noticed before the carton
has been paid for and brought home.
Sometimes artificially I will
induce this feeling in myself
by going silent at a large
restaurant gathering, pretending
—until it is real—that each person
is speaking from a highly naturalistic script,
having carefully rehearsed each
tiny gesture, the mid-sentence reach
for the salt, and I fall immediately
in love with my companions,
in awe of their remarkable talent
for portraying with such detailed conviction
the humans I know as my friends.

I can’t quite put it into words, but this poem speaks to a conversation Scott and I were having last night. He was pointing out all of these minute details about our environment, like how the pinball machine was set up and leveled, and how that process affects game play and your enjoyment of it. There was something about the attention to the details and learning more about all the (almost) invisible things required to make a thing work properly and then describing that work as “care” work that is echoed in this poem.

Future Sara, will this make sense to you? It connects to being oriented toward care and wonder and finding delight in the small details.

march 28/RUNWALK

5.3 miles
ford loop
53 degrees

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

“10 Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Waters of March

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

Lately,/ Laure-Anne Bosselaar

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

ritual / ceremony / chant / movement

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

as you move
through a

place, it moves
through you

OR

move through a
place and

it moves through
you too

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

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

a The chorus is making sentences now: look,

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

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

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

walk: 35 minutes
edmund
67 degrees

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

march 27/WALK

45 minutes x 2
walk 1: 50 degrees / longfellow flats
walk 2: 62 degrees / edmund

Walked with Delia the dog in the late morning. The good news: it’s beautiful today, my back feels so much better, the water was supposed to be off all day (for water main work down the street), but it’s already back on at noon. The bad news: I feel overwhelmed and have the strong urge (need?) to disengage. The saga of getting a girl to go to school continues; now it’s college classes. I am tired. One of my best friends is coming into town this weekend, and I want to see her (have plans to see her), but I’m not sure I can do it. In this scenario, which is the best way to be kind to myself: to be generous and encourage myself to cancel plans and rest, or to be stern and encourage myself to push through and keep the plans?

The walk helped me to feel better, but did not help me decide what to do.

update, after walk 2: I have decided to be generous to myself and cancel my plans. There have been many good things that have happened this year (with the year starting last fall), but also many very difficult things. Two mantras I’m trying to remember: be kind to yourself and whatever gets you thru the night is alright (John Lennon).

I was planning to make a list of 10 things, but when I tried my mind went blank. Too much pressure to produce? I think I’ll write about what I remember in this paragraph instead of in a list. I remember the river burning through the trees. Just a small spot, shimmering at the edge of my vision. I remember a man taking a break from running, breathing very heavily. He was struggling — wheezing and coughing. Had he done a hard/fast set, or was he just very out of shape? I remember the woman with the dog stopped at the wooden feence above the ravine who started up again just before Delia and I got to them. They went a few feet and then the dog plopped on the ground and wouldn’t move. It was impossible to get by them, so we explored the rim of the ravine. I remember taking the old stone steps down to the forest floor and walking past a big tree that had fallen and then been moved out of the way, presumably by park workers. So many tangled roots! I remember the feel of the soft sand and the blue of the blue water. I remember how the trail through the forest opened to the river and how the tall grasses framed the water. I remember the wonderful burning feeling of my glute muscles as I powered up the stone steps. I remember the soft geometry of the fence slat shadows. I remember hearing voices that were either deeper in the gorge or on the other side. I remember hearing the St. Thomas bells ringing, but I don’t remember how many times they rang. I remember witnessing 2 sewer workers doing something with the manhole. I think they were turning the water back on — they had a long pole that was in the center of the hole and they were leaning over and moving clockwise as they tightened (or loosened?) something. An unsual sight. It looked strange and uncomfortable.

It was very cool to witness these workers. Somehow I had imagined that a machine would turn the water off and on. The sewer pipe is too delicate, Scott thought. Of course. I like learning about these things, knowing how they happen, being reminded of the physical, and usually invisible, work that is required — and by people — to do them.

Delia and I did the second walk with Scott. Here are 3 delightful things that happened:

1

Below Edmund in the part of the boulevard dotted with trees I pointed out a huge tree that had lost its head — it didn’t have a top, just a jagged trunk — but still had two thick and long branches that stretched horizontally with clusters of smaller branches. They were gnarled and twisted and seemed to be reaching across the grass. They also cast a wonderful shadow.

2

Under another tree, Scott pointed out a woodpecker. Amazingly I was able to see it — it was tiny — because it had moved and my peripheral vision had caught the sense of movement. After a minute or two, it started knocking on the wood — a soft tap tap tap tap.

3

I was able to point out the rock wedged in the tree with = > ÷ painted on it that I wrote about yesterday. I asked Scott if he would have seen it while just walking by. Just as he was saying, no, only if I decided to stop and look at the tree, while looking at another tree, he noticed 2 more of the rocks wedged in the trunk! Later, another one in yet another tree. Wow! I love noticing new things, discovering something that you probably had walked by dozen of times without noticing. Moments of unexpected joy, hidden in plain sight, waiting for you to notice them and be delighted!

Reading a recent issue of The New Yorker, I found a beautiful poem. If you click on the link, you can listen to the poet read it — I love how they read: so natural and not affected or sing-song-y at all.

What Am I Afraid Of?/ Sasha Debevec-McKenney

The silence, the thoughts
that come with it, the sinking
suspicion that something more
is wrong with me than anyone
knows, including myself, including
the doctor who hooked me up
to the EKG machine and said
that though my heartbeat was irregular,
the irregularity was normal.
It was nothing to worry about.
The doctor told me there are two kinds
of people: unhealthy people who refuse
to get help, and healthy people
who always think they’re dying.
Nobody’s in between. But I’ve met
so many kinds of people:
people who stretch before
they get out of bed, people
who walk through life unstretched,
people who think their body
is a house and people who don’t
think of their body at all.
People who peel their carrots,
people who don’t. People who
stand on the roof and let the wind
make them cry. People who are afraid
to cry. People who step on all the leaves
on the sidewalk, people who look
straight ahead. There are people
who aren’t like me, they
don’t know the names
of all the different apples.
Once when I was cashiering
a woman said to me, “Wow,
you really know your kale.”
And once, at the butcher shop,
a man said to his dog, “That’s
the nice lady who smells like meat.”
I’m afraid I don’t know
what kind of person I am.
I thought I would get a chance
to do my life over in all the ways
anyone could think of: dying
would be like changing the channel.
I hate that you can’t hold on
to anything. I was washing an apple
and then I was coring it
and then it was cut—
and that was weeks ago now.
It was a Honeycrisp, and it lived up
to its name.

Of course a doctor, trained in dualism and either/ors and this or thats, would think this:

The doctor told me there are two kinds
of people: unhealthy people who refuse
to get help, and healthy people
who always think they’re dying.

I’ve been thinking about lists and list poems and reviewing a chapter from a craft book about them. I like the poet’s list of types of people.

march 26/RUNWALK

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin and back
46 degrees

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

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

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

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

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

10 Things

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

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

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

intro to ecodeviance / CA Conrad

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

birdsong!

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

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

Wow! So uniform.

Happy 151st Birthday Robert Frost!

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

For Once, Then Something/ Robert Frost

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

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

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

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

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

oh orchid o’clock

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

/it is the president’s turned up o’clock it is America’s deadliness and dailiness

o’clock / it is glued to the headline o’clock

it is lunchhour-beeline o’clock / it is it’s only Tuesday o’clock another

curbside memorial o’clock another caterpillar miracle o’clock another

people emptying from their lives o’clock or into

their lives o’clock the Nile floods the Nile floods every hotspell in this week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

= > ÷

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

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

march 10/WALKRUN

walk: 60 minutes
winchell trail
57 degrees

A slow walk with Delia the dog. Stopping and sniffing and pooping and peeing and listening nervously to rumbling trucks and roofers. On the Winchell Trail, a black capped chickadee just overhead feebeed and chickadeedeedeed at us. Only a few remnants of the snow remain. A mix of dry path with puddles and mud.

Near the end of the walk I decided that what I really needed to do with my back was loosen it up by walking faster. Maybe I’m tensing up too much? Also decided that I’d try a short run.

run: 2 miles
just north of lake street
59 degrees

Ran past the ancient boulder and down through the tunnel of trees. The floodplain forest looks barren — no snow or leaves on the trees, only brittle and brown on the ground. Felt pretty relaxed and a little awkward — not quite a hitch in my step, but not smooth either. That got better as I warmed up. Listened to the breeze passing through the trees, and voices running north. I put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist for my run south. Heard: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is; A Summer Wasting; Suspended in Time. All three offering visions of life outside the clock/capitalist time.

I almost forgot: I wore shorts today!

10 Things from my Walk and Run

  1. park workers in orange vests getting ready to do some work — trim trees? clear out brush? (walk)
  2. after weeks, they’re finally doing something about the gushing water on the corner of 46th! the barricades were gone, and so was the sound of water gone wild (run)
  3. chick a dee dee dee — a black capped chickadee in a tree just above my head — what I saw: a small dark flurry of movement on a branch (walk)
  4. the soft, energetic din of kids on the playground at Dowling Elementary (walk)
  5. a line of snow — a lump, not big enough to be a wall — stretched across the walking path (run)
  6. the river: open, shimmering, blue (walk)
  7. the tree line on the other side, a golden glow (run)
  8. a slight slip in mud on the boulevard between edmund and the river road (walk)
  9. the soft shadows of gnarled oak tree branches on the grass (run)
  10. 4 stones stacked on the ancient boulder (run)

circumambulation

Returning to circumambulation and the ceremony/ritual of looping around the gorge. A thought: when I swim at the lake I do multiple loops, but beside the gorge, I only do one loop. What’s the difference (mentally, spiritually, physically) between a loop vs. multiple loops. Also, where do my there and back runs — trestle turn around or the franklin hill and back or the falls and back — fit in? What sort of ritual are they?

Loosely, the structure of Gary Snyder’s “The Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais” is:

  • a brief description of place
  • a sacred chant/mantra
  • a further description — more details, directions, feelings/reflections/encounters

I’ll try this structure. I think I want to do the 8 loop that combines the ford and franklin loops. But, I’m taking it easy with the running right now, so maybe I should wait to do this until next month?

but now we really hear chanting
we can’t decode–Don’t
be so rational–a congregate speech
from the redtrembling sprigs, a
vascular language prior to our

breathed language, corporeal, chemical,
drawing our sound into its harmonic, tuning
us to what we’ve yet seen, the surround
calling us, theory-less, toward an inference
of horizontal connections there at

ground level
(Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais/Forrest Gander)

Some chants I might include:

I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible

All trees are just trees

In every part of every living thing/is stuff that once was rock

Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise/in gauze and halos./Maybe as grass, and slowly. Maybe as the long-leaved, beautiful grass (added the next day: these lines don’t fit with the others, not enough rhythm?)

Life is but Life, and Death is but Death. Joy is but Joy, and Breath is but Breath.

In the name of the Bee-
And of the Butterfly-
And of the Breeze–Amen!


march 6/WALKBIKE

walk: 25 minutes
neighborhood
27 degrees / patches of slippery ice

Where people shoveled yesterday, the path is mostly bare with a few streaks of slippery ice, but where they didn’t it is not. Slabs of thick, untouched snow. The slick spots were the most unwelcome, especially with my tight lower back. Aside from the ice, it was wonderful to be outside. Bright blue sky, chirping birds, warm sun. So warm that I took off my hat.

At one point Scott mentioned how the strip of grass between the sidewalk and road is not called a boulevard everywhere. It’s a regional thing. He couldn’t remember what else it was called and where he heard about it, but I did — at least where he heard about it; I couldn’t remember what else it was called. He heard about it from me, during one of our runs together. I couldn’t remember much else, so I had to look it up. Yep — here it is:

I described a New Yorker article I was reading before we left about forensic linguistics. My description included misplaced apostrophes, devil strips, and Sha Na Na. 

log entry on 8 april 2024

A linguist solved a crime in which someone left ransom notes that read, “Put it [the money] in the green trash kan on the devil strip at the corner 18th and Carlson.” Here’s the important part in the article:

And he knew from his research that the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street—sometimes known as the “tree belt,” “tree lawn,” or “sidewalk buffer”—is called the “devil’s strip” only in Akron, Ohio.

Wow, I’ve amassed a lot of information on this blog. Some of it I always remember, and some of it comes back when my memory is triggered, like today.

bike: 30 minutes
basement

I wanted to move my legs and get my heart rate up today so I biked. Watched part of Fame — the end of freshman year and the beginning of sophmore year. Two scenes I especially recall: 1. when Mrs. Sherwood shames Leroy for not being able to read in class — terrible and 2. when the acting teacher instructs the students to pay attention to the details — chewing, talking — of their life:

I want you to observe yourself doing ordinary everyday things. You’ll be asked to duplicate those here in class. An actor must develop an acute sense memory so concentrate on how you deal with things in your world. How you wash your face or hold your fork or lift your cup or comb your hair. Observe and study your own mechanicalness. See if you can catch yourself in the very act of doing something or saying something. See if your actions and reactions fall into patterns and what those patterns are. And in particular, pay close attention to the physical world. Isolate and concentrate on the details.

from Fame –first year (1980)

I’ve been doing this with my vision for several years now, partly because I’m curious and partly because I think it’s necessary for me to function. To isolate and understand and work around the strange and unexpected ways my eyes work (or don’t work).

I could also imagine using this exercise while running or walking as a way to achieve “extreme presence” (from CAConrad). Focusing on breathing or the lifting of the foot or the swinging of the arms, etc.

It felt good to bike. My back didn’t hurt at all. Only my left knee, a little, which is normal. Maybe I’ll do a week of biking. Could I work my way up to an hour on the bike?

conjunction junction, what’s your function?

In late fall or early winter, I wrote a haunts poem about all that the gorge could hold. I named it And. This morning, I found another poem with that title:

And/ Nicole Sealey (click link for audio)

Withstand pandemonium

and scandalous

nightstands

commanding candlelight

         and

         quicksand

and zinfandel

clandestine landmines

candy handfuls

and contraband

         and

         handmade

commandments

and merchandise

secondhand husbands

philandering

         and

         landless

and vandal

bandwagons slandered

and branded

handwritten reprimands

         and

         meander

on an island

landscaped with chandeliers

abandon handcuffs

standstills

         and

         backhands

notwithstanding

thousands of oleanders

and dandelions

handpicked

         and

         sandalwood

and mandrake

and random demands

the bystander

wanders

         in

         wonderland.

Along with the poem, there was a link to a writing exercise inspired it: Conjunctions/Connections, After Nicole Sealey by Maggie Queeney

  1. Read the poem “And” and listen to it several times. Jot down some notes.
  2. Pick a conjunction other than and — or, but, for, nor, yet, so. Make a list of words that contain your chosen conjunction.
  3. Turn your list of words into a poem. “Keep the sound of the word in the air as long as possible through rhyme and repetition.”

I think I’ll choose “or.” When I was writing my and poem in November, I told Scott about it on one of our runs. He mentioned how “and” and “or” work in his coding of web databases:

A mile later, Scott described how you code and in css (where and means both this and that must exist to make a statement true) and how you code or(where or means either this or that can exist to make a statement true). I was fascinated by how and was restrictive and narrowing in the code while orwas expansive. In my poem, I’m understanding and as generous and open and allowing for more possibilities not less. I told Scott that I might need to write an or poem now. And is accumulation, more layers while or is a stripping down. 

And = all these things can be true, and moreOr = at any give time, any one of these things could be true

log entry on 24 nov 2024

There’s also a great “or” poem in this entry.

march 2/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill
26 degrees

Hooray for being outside and on the walking trail! Hooray for not much wind! Hooray for running up the Franklin hill! My back was a little tight, but not too bad. My legs felt fine.

The river was open; the only ice was on the edges. The sky was a mix of clouds and bright sun. Before the run I heard some geese — did I hear any during? I don’t think so. Also heard before the run: some kids having fun inside a house — laughing and yelling through the closed windows.

At some point, I had an idea for my monthly challenge: the run as ceremony. Inspired by Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies, I want to return to Gary Snyder, Mount Tamalpais, and circumambulation. What sort of ceremonies can I make out of my run that brings together my blind spot and the gorge?

10 Things

  1. bright pink graffiti on a foot of the 1-94 bridge
  2. the top of one section of the wooden fence on the edge above Longfellow Flats is missing
  3. the chain across the old stone steps has been removed
  4. the path was almost completely clear — the only bit of snow I recall seeing was under the lake street bridge: a low and narrow ridge — just remembered one other bit of snow: just past the franklin bridge
  5. a full-length mirror left by the trashcan
  6. disembodied voices — coming from inside houses, below in the gorge, far behind me on the trail
  7. sh sh sh — my feet striking the grit on the asphalt
  8. my shadow briefly appeared – not sharp but soft, faint
  9. at least 2 trios of runners, some pairs, several runners on their own
  10. my friend, the limestone slabs propped up and looking like a person sitting against the underside of Franklin, is still there. I’d like to name them and add them to my list of regulars: Lenny the limestone?

lower back pain

My lower back has been sore lately. Sore enough that I took 5 days off of running. Not sure why I’ve waiting this long, but i decided today to look up lower back stretches for runners. I found this video and its 4 helpful stretches — the video claims to have 5 stretches, but they are only 4. I wonder what the missing one was?

The stretches: pretzel, thread the needle, plank to lunge, hip sweep

I’ll see how it feels in a few hours, but right now, having just stretched, it feels good!

a purple spill from march 1

I wrote this yesterday, but didn’t have a chance to post it.

It’s March and the purple hour is over, but in true purple fashion, the color can’t be contained to one month. Always it oversteps its boundaries. Reading the poem of the day, “Fog” by Emma Lazarus, purple appeared:

Swift, snowy-breasted sandbirds twittering glance 
Through crystal air. On the horizon’s marge, 
                Like a huge purple wraith, 
                The dusky fog retreats.

wraith

1
a: the exact likeness of a living person seen usually just before death as an apparition

b: GHOST, SPECTER

2

an insubstantial form or semblance SHADOW

3

a barely visible gaseous or vaporous column

f you see your own double, you’re in trouble, at least if you believe old superstitions. The belief that a ghostly twin’s appearance portends death is one common to many cultures. In German folklore, such an apparition is called a Doppelgänger (literally, “double goer”); in Scottish lore, they are wraiths. The exact origin of the word wraith is misty, however, and etymologists can only trace it back to the early 16th century—in particular to a 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid by Gavin Douglas (the Scotsman used wraith to name apparitions of both the dead and the living). In current English, wraith has taken on additional, less spooky, meanings; it now often suggests a shadowy—but not necessarily scary—lack of substance.

Merriam-Webster entry

marge = margin = edge

Wraith — I like that word and what it conjures. And to make it purple? Good job, Emma! I’m not sure about the middle section where she imagines the “orient town,” but I like “Fog,” especially this:

for on the rim of the globed world 
I seem to stand and stare at nothingness. 
                But songs of unseen birds 
                And tranquil roll of waves

Bring sweet assurance of continuous life 
Beyond this silvery cloud. Fantastic dreams, 
                Of tissue subtler still 
                Than the wreathed fog, arise,

And cheat my brain with airy vanishings 
And mystic glories of the world beyond. 

Returning to the purple — I like how she imagines the lifting fog as purple. Back in November of 2022 (how has it been that long?!) when I studied gray, I devoted a day to fog and mist: 23 nov 2022. Last month, purple — especially lavender and lilac or eggplant and dark purple — replaced gray. Where I used to see gray everywhere, now I see purple, or imagine purple.

feb 28/WALKBIKERUN

am walk: 20 minutes
neighborhood
wind: 20 mph / 42 mph gusts

Sitting at my desk in the front room before heading out for a walk, I could hear the wind howling. I wrote in my Plague Notebook, Vol. 24, the wind purpled the sky. Later, walking with Scott and Delia, feeling and hearing and seeing the wind, I said it again and explained it to Scott: the blustery wind, like someone mad and full of bluster, their face turning purple with outrage. I had been planning to try running outside today, but after being pushed around by the wind, I decided I’d prefer to be in the basement.

My favorite things about the wind: the way it swirled the leaves on the sidewalk; turning the corner and feeling the wind on my back, seeing the leaves flying ahead of me.

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1.5 miles
basement

Watched part of S2: episode 1 of Sprint on Netflix while I biked. I’m so glad I put on the audio descriptions! I could never read the big block text they used for identifying people and locations. It’s pretty good, even though they’re using a worn storyline: rival sprinters, one is flashy and talks a lot, the other is quiet and avoids the spotlight.

Listened to a running podcast for the first 10 minutes, then an energy playlist for the rest. I didn’t want to do much in case my back or hips flared up. They both seem fine — not completely pain free, but not painful either. It felt good to get my heart rate up for the first time since Saturday.

Writing this part of the entry at 11:45 am, it’s even windier with 47 mph gusts! Very glad I didn’t go outside to run!

the purple hour

The final purple hour. I’ve enjoyed devoting time to this color. Today’s goal: to write some lines inspired by my exploration.*

2:06 am / dining room

  • thick, heavy stillness
  • the clicking keys echoing in the silence
  • a soft, high ringing in my ears
  • bouncing my legs vigorously
  • “lavender gray: a widow’s shroud” from The Nomenclature of Color/ Richard Jones
  • lavender is the new gray

rituals/ceremonies for each of my main colors? see CA Conrad on red

2 shadows, cast on the closed curtain, light source: a neighbor’s security light
shadow 1 = a thick smear of bird poop on the glass turned into a small form on the curtain
shadow 2 = the thin branches of the serviceberry bush, shimmering in the wind, thin shadows vibrate on the curtain

The wild/ing in this girl is purple, I think, A deep and dark purple.

Wilding/ Shara McCallum

Machetazo!, Bony Ramírez & Blonde Dreams, Alison Saar

you can take the girl out of the wilderness
you can strand her bewilder her for a time
you can even hang her upside down
in your rickety attempt to shake loose
the source of her power but you won’t ever
disentangle the wilding from her
the force of a thousand suns unfurling
and hurling her toward the ground
you won’t be able to erase the traces
of salt lacing her ravenous dreams
oh you can try unwebbing her feet
but the lizard in her will keep sunning
itself as the day is long and at nightfall
will crawl up your walls lurking
at the corners of your vision
goading you on while she thwarts
your every endeavor abandoning
her tail anything required of her
to keep eluding your capture

*Here’s a first draft of something about purple:

Purple Things

a wind-stirred sky / the space between your eye and the object you’re looking at / agitation / the light from a full moon filtered through the blinds / the square shadow it casts on the carpet / deep inside the beat a thought a dream / darkened doorways / a bruise / mold / mist / a sunset after a volcano / a fashion craze / a widow’s shroud / fibs / a house, settling / the beginning / the end / interiors / oxygen-starved extremities / ornamental grass / asters / tantrums / restlessness / the buzz beneath / impending thunderstorms / ink / iodine / inheritance: a mother’s jacket, a daughter’s despair / fake fruit flavor / static / the only color I see when I wake up in the middle of the night

feb 23/WALK

1.5 miles
neighborhood, with Delia-the-dog
38 degrees

Ahh! Sun, above freezing, no wind! Birds! Melting snow! The promise of spring! I’m taking a break from running today because I’ve run 5 days in a row and my lower back is tight and slightly sore. Also, I wanted to make sure that Delia got a proper walk today. It’s difficult to balance walking her and running. And, when it was so cold last week, she didn’t want to go out that often.

Lots of walkers and dogs out on the sidewalks. Overheard: 2 women walking in the street — one to the other, isn’t that cute! aww . . . poor thing. Poor thing? Were they talking about Delia in her cute orange letterman’s sweater? If so, why did they say, poor thing? Did I miss something when I put her harness on?

10 Things

  1. blue, cloudless sky, only a few birds and branches in it
  2. drip drip drip — one gutter
  3. gussssshhhhhh — another gutter
  4. a steady stream of cars on the river road
  5. a steady stream of runners on the trail
  6. one runner in shorts, their bare white legs glowing in the sun
  7. soft snow on the grassy boulevard, no sharp snaps from my striking feet as we walked, avoiding the voices and a clanging collar behind us on the sidewalk
  8. the faint knocking of a woodpecker
  9. a view of the river through the bare trees from above on edmund: all white, looking less like water and more like field
  10. that sun! stopping to let Delia sniff, feeling the warmth on my face — flashes of memory from other warm winter days

the purple hour

2:30 am / bedroom

light coming in through the ineffective blinds, casting purple — lavender carpet and walls, indigo couch and closet interior

8:45 am / dining room

Trying to determine which tint of purple the carpet was, I encountered periwinkle.

Periwinkle is a color. . .

A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears somewhat brighter than lavender, bluer than lilac, clearer than mauve, and dimmer than amethyst. But it’s hard to say with precision, because the purples are strange ones, polarizing, and violets are even more so. Few hues are more beguiling and more reviled than this grouping, the last stop on the rainbow and the tacked-on v at the end of that schoolchild’s mnemonic, Roy G. Biv. According to the scholar David Scott Kastan, shades of violet exist within their own special category. Violet is, like glaucous, a color-word that denotes a certain quality of light. “Violet seems to differ from purple in whatever language—not so much as a different shade of color than as something more luminous: perhaps a purple lit from within,” Kastan writes in On Color, his 2018 book on the subject. “Violet is the shimmering, fugitive color of the sky at sunset, purple the assertive substantial color of imperial robes.”

Periwinkle: the color of poison, Modernism, and dusk

a window of time . . .

But lately, I’ve found myself waiting for the sun to go down, timing my walks so that I can be outside then, when the bats begin to swoop around the oaks and the mosquitoes hum around my face. It’s not the golden hour (which occurs about an hour before the sun touches the horizon), it’s the periwinkle window. It lasts only a few minutes in the summertime; dusk descends fast in the north. But for fifteen minutes, the sky is painted with various shades of violet, indigo, and mauve. At dawn and dusk, my tiny little dead-end road becomes another place, quieter than during the daylight hours, but visually much louder.

Periwinkle: the color of poison, Modernism, and dusk

…a flower (vinca minor)

The species is commonly grown as a groundcover in temperate gardens for its evergreen foliage, spring and summer flowers, ease of culture, and dense habit that smothers most weeds. It was once commonly planted in cemeteries in parts of the Southern U.S. and naturalized periwinkle may indicate the presence of graves whose other markers have disappeared.

source

from Hymn to Life/ James Schuyler

Everyday, in every room a shawl tossed untidily upon a chair or bed
Created no illusion of lived-in-ness. But the periwinkles do, in beds
That flatten and are starred blue-violet, a retiring flower loved,
It would seem, of the dead, so often found where they congregate. A
Quote from Aeschylus: I forget. All, all is forgotten gradually and
One wonders if these ideas that seem handed down are truly what they were?
An idea may mutate like a plant, and what was once held basic truth
Become an idle thought. like, “Shall we plant some periwinkles there
By that bush? They’re so to be depended on.”


…a snail/whelk

Littorina littorea is known as the Common Periwinkle. It is native to Europe from the White Sea, Russia to Gibraltar. It has been introduced to the West and East coasts of North America and the Mediterranean. Some introduced occurrences have failed to establish sustained populations, but others have persisted, especially on the East Coast from Newfoundland to Virginia. This snail is characteristic of intertidal rocky shores, wharves, and pilings, but also occurs in mudflats and marsh habitats. It is a common food item in Europe, but is rarely eaten in North America. It is highly abundant in parts of its introduced range and has had impacts on food webs, through competition with native species and increased grazing which reduces seaweed abundance. It is also host to a variety of parasite species.

source

I first encountered periwinkle-as-snail in a poem by James Merrill:

from Periwinkles/ James Merrill

You have seen at low tide on the rocky shore
How everything around you sparkles, or
Is made to when you think what went before.

Much of this blaze, that’s mental, seems to come
From a pool among the creviced rocks, a slum
For the archaic periwinkle.