Tag: walking

may 22/WALK

60 minutes
winchell trail, south/grassy boulevard, north
55 degrees

The rain is over. Now, warm sun and green green green! A beautiful morning for a walk with Delia the dog. Calm and quiet and wonderful.

10 Things

  1. lilac bushes
  2. BLUE!
  3. BEEP! BEEP!
  4. velvet
  5. squish
  6. tin-whistle
  7. friends
  8. dappled
  9. dandelions
  10. unruly

Walking by a row of lilac bushes up against a fence, breathing in the sweet, flowery smell. No memories conjured, just a smile spreading across my face and a feeling of satisfaction.

With my polarized sunglasses on, the sky looked almost too blue to be true. The kind of blue that is so intensely BLUE! that it seems ominous.

Walking in the grass with Delia, our reverie was interrupted by a BEEP! BEEP! as a car attempted to pass 3 cars on the river road before quickly slotting in behind a fourth right as a car was approaching from the other way.

On the winchell trail, I reached out to a basswood (also known as linden) tree and its lined leaf. A soft shock — the leaf felt like velvet!

After the rain, I wondered how wet the dirt would be. Wet! I stepped cautiously on it and squish, mud!

That sound! Sharp. Metallic. I think it was a robin with its tin-whistle call, echoing throughout the savanna.

Up on the mesa, we encountered another dog and their human. Delia and the other dog, about her size and temperament, chased each other while we — the humans — wished good morning to each other. A brief encounter with new friends.

The trees cast their shadows on the grass. All around, dappled light.

The slender, rubbery stalks of dandelions with their fluffy white heads dotted the grass. I wondered what this stage is called so I looked it up: AI says, seed head or blowball. I prefer blowball!

Everywhere I looked, green. Green grass, green trees, green view. Unruly green leaves reaching through the slats of the fence. Oh, to be that green! To claim space with such wild abandon!

note: This is the second day I’ve tried a new experiment with my 10 Things. Instead of describing the things in the list, I’m picking 10 words and then writing about each in sentences and/or paragraphs.

air / breath

Was reminded of this beautiful poem from my entry on this day in 2017:

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out.
(This Connection of Everyone with Lungs/ Juliana Spahr)

I want to connect this idea of lungs and breath to a favorite fragment of mine about feet first, following. Feet syncing up with breath.

Spahr’s lines make me think of the moment as a space, a Nothing space. Not empty, but no words or memories or history or self. A shared space possessed by no one, Chloe Garcia Roberts’ the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection.

In the time that it took me to find the Roberts line, I lost my train of thought. Maybe it is dwelling in that space between? Can I return to it?

Not sure if this is the thought I lost, but I’m also thinking of this space/time — moment — as when/where I encounter a walker on the winchell trail and I thank them for moving over to let me pass. The moment after I say, thank you, and before they say, you’re welcome, when the you is floating between us, in the process of being exhanged from them to me.

No, I think this might have been it: Not the floating passivity of Roberts — a nothing in-between — but more like dirt in Sharon Olds’ “Ode to Dirt“:

Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you, I thought that you were only the background for the leading characters—the plants and animals and human animals. It’s as if I had loved only the stars and not the sky which gave them space in which to shine.

That space, that air — and here I’m thinking especially of the air above and within the gorge — that is a character in my story, not just the background —

When I understood I had never honored you as a living equal, I was ashamed of myself, as if I had not recognized a character who looked so different from me

I’ve devoted a lot of attention to water and stone beside the gorge, but the air has always been there, too. Air as the space between things, which isn’t really empty, but filled with stuff too small to see.

sinkhole

Last night at dinner, FWA mentioned that a sinkhole had opened up somewhere in St. Paul. I hadn’t heard about it. Just now I looked it up. A 35 foot — 35! — hole happened in the middle of busy 7th street. Watching a news clip about it, the director of public works said, we’re not sure how it happened yet. We need to dig down 35 feet to the sanitary sewer and fix that. Wow — so the sewer line is 35 feet below the surface? 35 feet is more than 6 Saras stacked! The sinkhole opened up on 8 may. I couldn’t find any update about it. I wonder when and if we’ll find out what caused it.

may 15/WALK

50 minutes
winchell trail / ravine / grassy boulevard
75 degrees
wind: 18 mph / gusts: 34 mph

Windy and warm and green. Nearing the crosswalk that leads to the 36th street parking lot and the winchell trail, an intense smell: cannabis. After crossing, 2 guys near the bench, with scooters, talking: dogs are the coolest. I love dogs! and wanna keep going? I’ve got plenty of charge! So chill and enthusiastic and generous to the world.

Delia and I descended the split and worn wooden steps into a strange, green world. Something seemed different down here today. What was it? Some trees leaning over the trail, three trees right up against a chainlink fence that I’ve admired before seeming taller. A tree trunk mixed in with the riprap.

Delia managed to poop right near a trashcan. Nice work! And then again, close to home. A new trend for her: double poops on walks. Better on a walk than hidden in grass in our yard! While leaning over to pick up her poop, something flew into my eye. I thought of Katie Farris’ “What Would Root.” I was hit simultaneously in both eyes with some sort of flying detritus (pollen or seed). Love that poem. Ever since I connected her poem with the image of a tree as a person upside and nuzzled into the earth, I can’t unsee it. All around the neighborhood, people planted in the ground, their legs sticking out. I thought about what it would be like to have your head/mind in the dirt, among the roots and nets of trees and fungi, and your body in the air. The opposite of Alice Oswald’s idea of the mind/body split in swimming with your body immersed in the water and your head in the air.

I was planning to take the old stone steps down to the river, but Delia wasn’t interested in that today. We kept walking on the trail above and I admired the blue of the water below. No sparkles or rowers or speed boats or paddle boats or canoes.

suspension / pause / hesitation / a moment

Before my walk, I read Siddhartha Menon’s thoughts on his poem, “Captivity,” which I posted a few days ago. It is sparking many different thoughts and is returning me to one of my obsessions: the moment.

Though “Captivity” ends in something like paralysis (as does “Liberation”) I now slightly regret its final line: “You are paralyzed.” It suggests the fatal indecision of a rabbit caught in a hunter’s flashlight, and snaps the poem shut. This is a plausible way for the poem to conclude but I was actually more interested in the kind of creative suspension in which an either/or gives way to a neither. You are with the bird in the moment, seeking to neither see it more clearly nor shutter it into your camera, seeking indeed nothing at all that would interfere with the moment. This is less paralysis than a kind of shimmering equilibrium.

Siddhartha Menon on Epigraphs

either/or gives way to neither, no choice is necessary
seeking nothing, or Nothing — the space/time beyond judgment or decision or the need to act

Thinking about this idea, I recalled a line from Georgina Kleege in Sight Unseen and wrote about it in my Plague Notebook, vol. 25:

Everyone has a blind spot, mine is just bigger than yours.

I added, the moment between seeing and sight, between receiving light and comprehension, between signal and image. Everyone has a moment between seeing and sight, mine is just longer than yours.

Now I’m thinking about Radiolab and their episode about how long it takes for sight to happen. I found where I last mentioned it, on 16 july 2024

may 14/RUNWALK

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

  1. a turkey in the middle of the road, honking? squawking? yelling? at the cars unwilling to stop and let him cross
  2. a hazy green above the gorge
  3. 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
  4. the falls were rushing, all white foam framed by green trees
  5. a steady procession of cars on the road
  6. roots and rocks hidden in the shadows on the trail — I lightly twisted both ankles, one from a root, the other a rock
  7. the tree that feel in the creek sometime last year was gray — will they remove it?
  8. a line of a dozen or more cars backed up on the parkway, stuck at the stop sign
  9. a crowded trail heading north — bikers and walkers, a few runners, strollers
  10. 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.

Nox Borealis/ Campbell McGrath

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

  1. clumps of tallish grass growing through the mulch — a vibrant green
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. the pleasing, easily identifiable shape of the maple tree on the trees close to the trail
  5. sparkling, blue water
  6. blue water, blue sky, green trees
  7. the laugh of a woodpecker
  8. a yard with several bleeding heart bushes, all in bloom
  9. sprawled tree shadows on the grass
  10. 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”
  11. 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.

may 12/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
70 degrees

Took Delia the dog on a walk to the river. So much green everywhere. Birds, blue sky, soft breeze. Everything out of focus. Walked above the winchell trail and the ravine. Made note of the angle of the leaning tree on the wooden fence. Couldn’t see anything below through the thick leaves. Encountered 2 women with coffees deliberating whether or not to descend the old stone steps. Let’s go further and take the road down. I took the steps down to the trail that leads to the river. The river was blue and sparkling with small waves lapping the shore. A boat must have just come through — I didn’t see it. I wish I could have stayed there for longer but Delia wanted to keep moving. Returned to steps and waited for someone descending. At the bottom, they turned around and walked back up. Did they change their mind, or were they doing a stair workout?

For the rest of the walk Delia was difficult. Refusing to go in certain directions, wanting to stop and pee near every tree, slowing down right in front of me. I want to forget my irritation and remember what a beautiful morning it was, how the river looked, how the air felt. Breathing it in, a sense of calm and euphoria enveloped me.

before the run

Yesterday I came across this call for submissions:

What does it mean to be a poet engaged with the physical material of the world around us? How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? How do we write collaboratively with—rather than about—nonhuman beings and ecologies?

For the Fall 2025 issue, Arc is seeking experimental eco-poetry that engages with the possibilities of organic form. We welcome experiments with lyric, visual poetics, material poetries, and sound poetries.

I want to spend today (at least) exploring what this might mean for my writing around/beside/within the gorge. And, if I can manage it, I’d like to find another home for some of my favorite lines: it begins here, from the ground up: feet first, following. I started to write, finally find a home, but then I remembered that I’ve actually used the line in a poem that was published earlier this year: Girl Ghost Gorge

My organic form is based on breathing and foot strikes: 1 2 3 breathe in/ 1 2 breathe out. Is this experimental enough?

How do write collaboratively with the nonhuman? Does my form, based on foot strikes, impose an order on the nonhuman? Does it offer a way outside of myself and into somewhere else?

How does poetic form change in the encounter with other beings? I’m thinking about water and stone and wondering how they inform my poetry about the gorge.

during the run

I tried to think about my form as I walked. Mostly, it’s easier for me to think about the words/content than about form and shapes of the words. I wondered about absence and the gorge as eroding/eroded and how that affects the page. An blank space that is not empty but open. Yes, can I push at the idea more?

after the run

I think some inspiration would help in thinking through how form can be inspired by place. Time to revisit Susan Tichy and her collection North | Rock | Edge.

distills somatic observations down their bones. Tichy describes an immersive, granular experience exploring the contours, rocks, winds, and waters of Shetland, a remote northern archipelago between Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Norway. In isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks, she details the distances and resonances between geology and language, minutely mutable coastscapes, and how to write and walk in a time of planetary change.

distills / somatic / immersive / granular
contours / rocks / winds / waters
isolated yet accumulative images and line breaks

In the interview, Tracy Zeman suggests:

The islands’ bays, rugged edges, and jagged protrusions correlate with the way the poems look on the page, a varied right margin, short lines, and a proliferation of line breaks. There are few stopping points in the poems, no periods, and sparse punctuation generally, so that pacing and rhythm are made with line, as if the reader is part of one continuous yet staggered experience.

In my poems about the gorge, I’m less interested in having the words look like the place, but I like the idea of the few stopping points, lack of punctuation and a poem that is part of a continuous experience. Maybe a mostly continuous experience with a few pauses?

There are rhythms to walking on rough ground, a step-after-step persistence that swallows obstacles, like irregular lines that nonetheless carry forward through the poem. There’s also a sensory excitement in a sea-rock-light-wind-bird-flower-seal-seep-peat-rain-salt—oh look, there’s a whale!—environment that subsumes attention to any one thing into the press of the whole.

I like this idea of the sensory excitement that doesn’t subsume attention to any one thing, even as there is one thing: the gorge as gap, gash, bowl.

Tracy Zeman: you also eschew the “I.” I feel that the lack of “I” allows the reader to experience the place as the poem’s speaker does, and that the landscape stays primary and the human secondary in the action. Can you explain why you made this choice and what effect you hoped it would have on the reader’s experience of the text?

Susan Tichy: To me, the poems feel so intensely somatic and personal that the grammatical sign felt unnecessary. Here and there, I drafted other people’s words to express the sensation more directly, such as Robert Macfarlane’s thought diffusing /at body’s edge in “Eshaness | Is It Force Failure.”

Where do I/the poet fit into my poems? I wrote in Plague Notebook, no. 25: To be with the gorge, to witness/behold it, demands participation not observation. It is intimate — contact, meeting, interfacing — and transforms you. You transform it (the gorge world), too.

I feel like this poem that read today on Poetry Daily (poems.com) speaks to and against that:

Captivity/ Siddhartha Menon

it is impossible
to kill and question at the same time.
—Louise Glück, “Liberation”

Or to watch and at the same time
to capture.
A restive robin in your path
flew onto a low cable
and you had to choose between
binoculars and camera. You knew
it would not stay for both.
So near: a killing
to capture it forever here.
Only to watch is a kind of questioning.
You are paralyzed.

captivate = to hold something’s attention
captivated = rapt, enthralled, cannot look or turn away

may 10/WALK

60 minutes
winchell trail
63 degrees

A near perfect morning. Wow! Sunny with a slight breeze. Blue sky. Quiet. A slow walk with lots of stops for Delia. We walked to the winchell trail and took the worn, wooden steps down to the oak savanna, then another set of wooden steps up to an overlook. So much green everywhere — new trees popping up, tufts of grass, moss. We walked behind the mesa along the abandoned chainlink fence and I marveled at the bright green moss. At one point, I bent down and touched it — almost like carpet, but better.

10 Things

  1. the odd curve of the abandoned chainlink fence on the dirt trail behind the mesa
  2. that same fence, buried deep in the dirt and leaves, only the top was visible
  3. rowers! not seen, only heard — the coxswain calling out instructions
  4. a speed boat moving fast near the opposite shore
  5. tall grass in clumps and tufts and patches
  6. someone sitting by a tree stump, hidden in the green until they were right in front of me
  7. the clicking and scraping of a roller ski’s poles
  8. two runners, running by single-file, talking about a video game
  9. a big bird flying high in the sky
  10. on the boulevard between the river road and edmund, the grass was uneven and bare in many spots, studded with dandelions in others

The moment of the walk was when I stopped to let Delia sniff — more like she demanded to stop — and I stood on the edge of the bluff looking out at the blue water and feeling the soft, cool breeze. All around bright green leaves were fluttering. Below, the river surface was glittering. The movement was mesmerizing, meditative.

Against Lawn/ Grace Bauer

The midnight streetlight illuminating
the white of clover assures me

I am right not to manicure
my patch of grass into a dull

carpet of uniform green, but
to allow whatever will to take over.

Somewhere in that lace lies luck,
though I may never swoop down

to find it. Three, too, is
an auspicious number. And this seeing

a reminder to avoid too much taming
of what, even here, wants to be wild.

manicure – patch – carpet – uniform Great words to describe an over-managed lawn. Last night Scott and I were talking about lawns and the moral imperative to maintain your lawn to a certain standard. That is not the case as much in our neighborhood. Most people’s yards don’t have manicured grass. Partly because we live in a quirky neighborhood in the city, and partly because we’re near the river and people know that lawn chemicals get into the groundwater and then travel through the sewer to the river. I mentioned to Scott that I don’t judge people if their lawn isn’t manicured, I judge them if it is because it can only be that way if they’re treating it with chemicals — and if they’re not using chemicals, they’re still wasting water on their laws. But, I don’t want to judge anyone, so I’m trying to work on that.

Somewhere in that lace lies luck. . . What a great line!

a reminder to avoid too much taming
of what, even here, wants to be wild.

I’m always returning to this question of what it means to be wild and where the gorge fits into that. In the spring, when left alone, the small patches of grass on the bluff want to be wild. Tall blades and dandelions and little trees everywhere. Unruly, sometimes almost menacing as they creep closer to the trail, blocking out the view. Not wild, but re-wilding.

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!