4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
45 degrees
wind: 12 mph / 21 mph gusts
I thought it was supposed to be less windy today, but it didn’t feel like it. Heading north, I was running straight into the wind. Sometimes it felt fine, and sometimes it felt hard. Listened to birds, especially black capped chickadees but also the faint knocking of a woodpecker somewhere near a house being built. Admired some gnarled shadows from the oak trees I passed by in the park. Heard rushing water at the falls and the recorded ding of the light rail across the highway. Managed to step in almost every pothole without twisting or rolling anything. Remembered to look at the river and notice how it sparkled in the sun.
Listened to the birds and the wind and the water as I ran south. Listened to my new “It’s Windy” playlist, and a LOUD kid on the playground, as I ran north.
wind!
A lot pf wind outside today, and more inside, at my desk (and no, I don’t been gas). Started with a playlist:
It’s Windy
- Windy/ The Association
- Summer Breeze/ Seals & Crofts
- I Talk to the Wind/ King Crimson
- Dust in the Wind/ Kansas
- The Wind Cries Mary/ The Jimi Hendrix Experience
- Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow/ Frank Zappa
- Summer Wind/ Frank Sinatra
- Wind of Change/ Scorpions
- Blowin’ In the Wind/ Peter, Paul & Mary
- In the Air Tonight/ Phil Collins
- The Chain/ Fleetwood Mac
- Ride Like the Wind/ Christopher Cross
- Wind Beneath My Winds/ Better Midler
- Break Like the Wind/ Spinal Tap
- Listening Wind/ Talking Heads
- You’re Only Human (Second Wind)/ Billy Joel
- Wind Chimes/ The Beach Boys
- The Long and Winding Road/ The Beatles
- They Call the Wind Maria/ Paint Your Wagon
- The Zephyr Song/ Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Wind It Up/ Gwen Stefani
- Shining Star/ Gwen Stefani
- Shining Star/ Earth, Wind & Fire
- Runnin’/ Earth, Wind & Fire
- Classical Gas/ Mason Williams
- Bohemian Rhapsody/ Queen
- You Don’t Mess Around with Jim/ Jim Croce
Here are the songs that I listened to today as I ran:
Windy/ The Association
Summer Breeze/ Seals & Croft
I Talk to the Wind/ King Crimson
Wind of Change/ Scorpion
Blowin’ In the Wind/ Peter, Paul & Mary*
*I started with the Bob Dylan version but when he busted out the harmonica I had to switch to the version I remember when I was kid
Somewhere between Summer Breeze and Wind of Change I thought about what words I might associate with these songs: Windy – capricious; Summer Breeze – carefree; I Talk to the Wind – indifferent; Wind of Change – hope; Blowin’ In the Wind – possibility
Listening to Blowin’ In the Wind, I thought about all of the questions posed in it and was reminded of a line I recited earlier this morning from Rita Dove: Someone once said: There are no answers/just interesting questions. I thought about the idea of questions being spoken into the wind and how there are no certain answers to them but that doesn’t mean they’re just rhetorical. Oh — now I’m thinking about the unanswerable questions and the koan.
other things noticed: the word straight was used several times — In I Talk to the Wind: said the straight man to the late man and Wind of Change: The wind of change blows straight into the face of time. In Windy, the wind is tripping down the street. I wonder if the swirls or whirls in any of my songs?
first definitions of wind from the OED: Air in motion; a state of movement in the air; a current of air, of any degree of force perceptible to the senses, occurring naturally in the atmosphere, usually parallel to the surface of the ground.
- with specific reference to direction from which it blows
- in reference to navigation, as means of propulsion
- to take, have, get, gain the wind of, to scent or detect by or as by the wind
- As a thing devoid of sense or perception, or that is unaffected by what one does to it — talk to the wind, spit into the wind
- a type of violence, a fury: swiftness, freedom or unrestrainable character, mutability or fickleness, lightness or emptiness — the furies? fates and furies?
- air in general, as a substance or element
- gas
- air inhaled and exhaled by the lungs
- air as used for blowing or sounding an instrument
So many directions in which to go!
Revisiting a poem from a past entry:
Project/ A. R. Ammons
My subject’s
still the wind still
difficult to
present
being invisible:
nevertheless should I
presume it not
I’d be compelled
to say
how the honeysuckle bushlimbs
wave themselves:
difficult
beyond presumption.
As I wrote about on this log before, wind is a great counter to the claim, what you see is what you get or seeing is believing.
wind thoughts
Early on in this log I was obsessed with the wind, particularly in terms of my run. How much wind was there outside? Would I have to run into it? I disliked running into the wind; it made it so much harder and I needed it to be as easy as it could be. At some point, I’m not sure when (maybe I’ll try to find it?), I stopped caring so much about how windy it was. It’s never really that windy in Minneapolis, not like St. Peter or Rochester. High winds freak me out.
I’d like to search back through my archive, but I have a problem: I mention the wind a lot, over 700 times. I often record the wind speed, or make a brief reference to it in the first lines of the entry like, it was windy today or so windy! Is this an impossible task, to read through and tag all of these entries? Perhaps. I think I might just start looking through entries and see what happens. . . . A few entries in and I’m already remembering some thoughts about and experiences of the wind:
- shaking the leaves in the trees
- sounding like sizzling bacon
- unnoticed, forgotten at my back, but when I turn around I remember!
- trying to rip my hat from my head — it’s only happened once!
- making the tassel on my hat tap me on the shoulder, making me think of my mom
- rushing past my ears, almost forgotten when I have my ears covered
- making waves on the water, making the river sparkle
- in the lake, making the waves so choppy — the past few summers it’s been windier
- summer breeze — on a playlist
two more random wind thought that just popped into my head:
- FWA and his love of the Zelda video game, Wind-waker
- FWA telling me one day when he was 8 or 9: I hate the wind. When I grow up I want to invent a device that gets rid of the wind
Walking back to the house after my run, I thought about how fun it is to explore an image like wind and how helpful it is to give so much attention to it and to be open to so many possibilities. Future Sara will appreciate all of the wind options I’m giving here, I think.