april 8, 2017 / 10 miles / 53 degrees
One of my favorite long runs I’ve ever run.
10 miles on a beautiful morning. Wasn’t sure if I’d run the 10 today or tomorrow, but once I started I knew that this run was my long run. I can tell that all the training and the increased mileage has made me more mentally tough. I used to spend significant portions of my longish (6+ miles) fighting against doubts and the desire to stop or start walking. Not today. There was no question that I would be running all 10 miles.
april 8, 2021 / 3.25 miles / 63 degrees
To return to when I think more about the limits and possibilities of naming:
Here are 2 poems from Swan that get me thinking more about the limits and possibilities of naming and language and knowing.
Wind in the Pines
It is true that the wind
streaming especially in fall
through the pines is saying nothing, nothing at all,
or is it just that I don’t know the language?
Bird in the Pepper Tree
Don’t mind my inexplicable delight
in knowing your name,
little Wilson’s Warbler
yellow as a lemon, with a smooth, black cap.
Just do what you do and don’t worry, dipping
branch by branch down to the fountain
to sip neatly, then flutter away.
A name
is not a leash.
I’d like to put these poems beside:
Sometimes, what I try to get people to do is to disconnect for a moment from that absolute need to list and name, and just see the bird. Just see that bird. And you begin to absorb it, in a way, in a part of your brain that I don’t know the name of, but I think it’s a part of your brain that’s also got some heart in it. And then, guess what? The name, when you do learn it, it sticks in a different way.
On Being episode with Drew Lanham
and
Goldenrod/ Maggie Smith
april 8, 2022 / 4.75 miles / 39 degrees
This entry — wow! Some great stuff about fungi and entanglement. Before the run, 7 different ideas to return to. During the run, this:
I thought about Arthur Sze’s poem and his lines:
your field
of vision tears, and an underlying landscape
reveals a radiating moment in time.
I reflected on the underlying landscape as layers that can’t be seen with your eyes, only smelled or felt or imagined. And I delighted in the idea of so much happening, so much present beneath me that I couldn’t see, that I didn’t need to see, for it to exist or to affect me or to be connected to me.
april 8, 2023 / 3.85 miles / 32 degrees
A story about birds to be turned into a birding poem:
And here’s another story about birds. This one’s from yesterday. Walking Delia the dog with my son FWA in the afternoon, I noticed 2 crows, high in the sky, harassing another bird. They seemed to be running into it mid-air while cawing furiously. A block later, we saw them again, still at it. Then, a few blocks further, just one crow, which both FWA and I assumed was one of the combative crows. It flew by, cawing, then perched on a lamp post and looked down at us. It had something in its mouth. FWA quipped, the other bird’s eyeball. My response: Yes! In my world, that’s exactly what it is. As we kept walking the caw continued to look at us, almost to say, watch out or I’ll take your eyeballs next!
Also, a great discussion of how poets, in this case Ammons, write differently than prose writers. And a great article about Ammons as an eco poet to revisit:
All of Ammons talk about garbage and poetry makes me wonder about his book’s connection to eco-poetry. I found a helpful article to read: The Semiotics of Garbage, East and West: A Case Study of A. R. Ammons and Choi Sung-ho