june 23, 2017 / 6.15 miles / 63 degrees
I posted a short lyric essay I was working on for a wonderful writing class. Funnily enough, I was just thinking about this essay on one of my runs this week. I was coming up with triple beat chants and I thought, “please don’t stop.” Then I thought of the line that keeps interrupting the wandering voice in my essay: “You could stop, you know.” I wonder, should I try working on this essay some more?
june 23, 2018 / 6.1 miles / 70 degrees
I wrote mostly about what I heard:
- Scott talking
- rowers on the river
- a rushing falls
- 2 different bikers listening to talk radio
- a walker, to MPR
- an animated conversation that lingered for 30 seconds after I passed the complaining woman having it
june 23, 2019 / swim: 1.6 miles / 68 degrees
I wrote briefly about something I love doing: swimming in a soft rain:
Right before I started swimming, it began to rain. Soft, slow, steady drops for only a few minutes. I love rain on the lake–what it does to the air hovering above the water, what it does to the water hovering below the air.
june 23, 2020 / 3.5 miles / 64 degrees
I wrote about a “rather ridiculous performacne” I encountered:
Speaking of last night, about halfway through our walk, we saw a man biking, nearing the top of a hill, just past the welcoming oaks. He was singing–what was he singing? a show tune or a love song or something like that–and had his hands resting on his knees while he was biking. He looked calm and chill and unworried about the fact that he was about to bike down a hill without having his hands on the handlebars. He looked rather ridiculous but his embracing of this ridiculousness was wonderful and delightful and brought me some joy. Usually I would judge this behavior as reckless, but he was so relaxed and ridiculous that all I could do was marvel at it. I wasn’t the only one. About a minute later, I heard some other people talking excitedly about him too. This idea of a “rather ridiculous performance” is a line from Mary Oliver’s “Invitation”: “I beg of you/do not walk by/without pausing/to attend to/this rather ridiculous performance.” Maybe I’ll try to make a list of the rather ridiculous performances I encounter/witness?
june 23, 2021 / 4.3miles / 64 degrees
I wrote about layers and a tentative idea for a poem:
As I ran on the Winchell Trail through the thick green, I thought that when I’m running by the gorge, I think of in broad, basic ways: tree, rock, bluff, bird, water. Then my mind wandered, and I wondered: (Why) do we need more specific, “technical” names in order to connect with the land? I thought about the importance of names and the violence of occupying and renaming, the value of knowing the history of a place, understanding how it works scientifically, and placing it in a larger context (space, time). Then, as I ran up the short, steep hill by Folwell, I thought about how important it is to learn to think on all of these levels at once, or at least be able to switch back and forth between them. I can experience the gorge as water, rock, tree, bird, wind, or as stolen land occupied and used, abused, restored, protected, ignored, exploited. As a geological wonder, slowly–but not really slowly in geological time, 4 feet per year–carved out by the river eroding the soft St. Peter sandstone. As both wild/natural and cultivated/managed–the site of erosion due to water, and erosion due to the introduction of invasive species, industry, too many hikers, bikers, houses nearby. There isn’t an easy way to reconcile these different understandings and their impacts.
After I finished my run and started walking home, I thought about how these levels/layers could be represented or expressed in a poem. What forms would work best and how to translate all of it into a form? I imagined a mostly blank page with the elemental word in the center (rock or water or tree), then additional pages with other related meanings–you could flip through and somehow add meanings or see all of the meanings at once. Does this make sense? Then I thought about a poem that somehow mimics the form of a fossil, what would that look like? Or the different layers of rock representing different eras of geological time. Not sure if this will go anywhere, but I’ll spend some more time thinking about it.
Ongoing Projects / Ideas
- an interrrupting essay about my wandering thoughts while I’m running
- always on the lookout for rather ridiculous performances
- layers/levels of thought, existing at once — what form works? + inspired by layers of fossils