dec 21, 2019 / 4.2 miles / 25 degrees
a note from 2023: Every time I read entries from the end of 2019 or the very beginning of 2020, I think about what is coming — or already here: the pandemic and off-the-charts anxiety and shutting down.
I’m wanted to make note of this entry because I think it might be the beginning of my 10 Things Noticed exercise. After mentioning Linda Gregg’s The Art of Finding, I wrote:
I like her idea of writing down 6 things you notice each day. I might try that on my run for a month. I already do this on the log but more informally.
6 Things I Observed On My Run Today
- Saw shining, open river water through the trees
- Heard then saw a Minneapolis Parks plow approaching me on the path, then veering off onto the road
- Heard but didn’t see some kids yelling at the park, about to sled down a steep hill
- Saw a person walking through the snow on a part of the Winchell Trail that climbs up closer to the road then back down again
- Heard then saw 2 people with a dog below me on the Winchell Trail. Almost sounded like they were skiing as they shuffled along but how could that be?
- Noticed how one of the ancient boulders on the path–the one near a bench–had a mound of snow on top of it
This was difficult. Maybe because I’d already written a bunch of observations earlier in this log? I think I’ll trying doing this through January.
dec 21, 2022 / 2 mile swim / winter storm warning
In December of 2022, I was deep into my obsession with color. The result: a series of 8 poems, 7 of which are couplets about color, one which is an Ishihara 7 plate poem. At first, the each of the 7 poems were connected to a plate, but now I’m not sure if that works? Maybe I’ll ask my sister and my nieces what they think when I see them next week?
I read some more of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Here’s an excerpt that I was thinking about:
40. When I talk about color and hope, or color and despair, I am not taking about the red of a stoplight, a periwinkle line on the white felt oval of a pregnancy test, a black sail strung from a ship’s mast. I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.
Bluets/ Maggie Nelson
I’m interested in how this distinction between meaning and what it means to me works in understandings of color. Also, what meaning means here. Not truth, or what color something actually is, but how it comes to mean something to us. How we’ve collectively decided that a stop sign is red, for example. Not sure if this makes sense, but I’m also thinking about the collective decision we’ve made to understand the line on a pregnancy test as blue and not green or gray or some other color that some of us might be seeing instead. With this last sentence, I’m thinking about more than my vision issues, but the idea that how we see color can be at least partly determined by how we’ve named it. See: Crayola-fication of the world