I first posted this “On This Day” entry on February 23, 2023. I’m editing and adding to it on February 23, 2024.
feb 23, 2017 / 10 mile run / 33 degrees
Running as body-prayer:
Currently reading Jen A. Miller’s Running, a love story. Miller mentions Katherine Jeffers Schori, so I looked her up. In an interview with Runner’s World, Schori says this when asked if she feels running helps with her work:
Absolutely. It’s focusing for me. In my tradition we might talk about it as body prayer. It’s a meditative experience at its best. It’s a sort of emptying of the mind.
feb 23, 2020 / 3.1 miles / 45 degree / 50% ice and puddle covered
(from 2023): This is a great example of a wandering/wondering inspired by some lines of poetry. I love reading a poem and then taking up the invitation it offers to wonder about something, then wander through other examples of it. In this entry, I was invited by May Sarton’s “The Work of Happiness” to wonder about tree rings:
Yesterday, I posted May Sarton’s poem, The Work of Happiness. In her first stanza, she writes:
But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.
No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark
Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.
Here are a few things that her tree ring/circle made me think about:
1
Reflecting on how she always feels like she’s 11, even though she’s 64, Sandra Cisneros tells Krista Tippett:
You know how you look at a tree, and there are some rings that had a lot of rain, and it gets really bigger, and they shrink? Well, we can think about our own years and what defined us or what happened to us in those years.
2
In her poem, “Can You Imagine?”, Mary Oliver imagines a tree’s irritation with the slow, soundless, boring passing of time represented in the thickening of the rings:
surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in it’s own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.
3
Did you know the modern science of tree-ring study is called dendrochronology? I didn’t, until I read this essay, Shared Dendrochronologies: Andrew Schelling on poetry, translation, & the aliveness of wor(l)ds.
4
And that the original dendrochronologist, William E. Douglass, created it to track how trees record climate change through their rings?
What a wonderful log entry this is! Through the process of writing it, I feel better–joyful and delighted with my run today.
feb 23, 2023 / 2-hour shovel / 18 degrees
A skier skiing on the street past our house,nan impossible-feeling task accomplished, and a magical poem!
Scott and I were sitting in the front room, listening to music, and looking out at the snow, when suddenly Scott cried out, A skier! Someone is cross-country skiing in the street! Yes! It’s not a real snowstorm until someone is skiing down the middle of your street in the middle of Minneapolis in the early evening while the snow is falling. Oh, to be that skier! A life goal, I think. Also: it’s pretty cool that Scott was the one who pointed it out to me, and with enthusiasm. My delight habits are spreading!
At the start, it seemed overwhelming. Too much snow and nowhere to put it. But I just started and kept going, and slowly it felt less overwhelming to imagine clearing it. Then, possible. Then, inevitable. Then, cleared. The runner Des Linden always talks about showing up and simply putting one foot in front of the other when you’re feeling overwhelmed by a big task, like a long run. Sometimes this idea seems too simple and impossible at the same time, but it usually works. It worked today. I didn’t believe I could clear it, but I started anyway. And then I did it.
Okay, I said I’d explain what I mean by the “this” in I love poems because they can do this, and I’ll try. I’ll start here: Last night I was telling Scott about this poem and the tweet. I didn’t have the poem in front of me, or any of its lines memorized, so I explained it as best I could, which was not very well. I think I didn’t succeed with my summary because the meaning and magic of this poem doesn’t come in a summarized telling of it, but in the specific words used, the line breaks, the order of the words, their rhythms. This poem isn’t so much telling the story of a man and his dead beloved who has come back as a dog, but inviting you into the story to witness it, to behold his grief and tenderness. And, it’s inviting you to believe in other worlds where such gentle, tender moments are possible. Or, even if you don’t/can’t believe in them as true/real/ scientifically possible, you can give room for them to live or to breathe or to be possible for someone. Also, it’s strange. I love strange!