Tag: no headphones

dec 13/RUN

5.65 miles
franklin loop
33 degrees
sleet/rain

Just as the sidewalks and path get completely cleared, another storm moves in. This afternoon rain then snow. Oh well. This morning it was great to run on a dry, almost ice-free path.

A gray day. Not dark gray, but heavy. Difficult to see clearly, everything out of focus. Reviewing my entries from the past year for my annual summary, I came across this description of trying to see on a gray day from March 2nd:

This light/color really messes with my vision and lack of cone cells. Looking up, the sky was almost pixelated, or maybe it was more like static? Not total static, like when tv stations would end programming for the night, but static sprinkled into the image, making everything dance or bounce or just barely move.

log entry from 2 march 2022

I was able to greet Dave, the Daily Walker and notice that the river was open and full of ripples from the wind. I don’t remember hearing any birds, but I did hear something rumbling or buzzing, some sort of equipment for repairing the street.

I ran most of the way with no headphones. For the last mile, I put in Taylor Swift’s 1989.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. on the west side, the river was a dark gray
  2. on the east side, the river looked more grayish-brown
  3. hardly any color, almost everything gray, a few dead leaves in orangish-brownish-gold
  4. one panel of the black steel fence on the east side of the river is slightly bent and bows in the center
  5. several times dark, hulking shapes out of the corner looked like people approaching. They were trees
  6. tried to sync up my steps with a car horn that was honking repeatedly
  7. the wind was swirling, sometimes in my face, sometimes my back, helping me to run faster
  8. heard some dripping under the lake street bridge on the east side
  9. saw a tarp or a blanket on the ground under the lake street bridge on the west side
  10. noticed lots of leaves skittering across the snow, being pushed around by the wind

Completed a draft of another colorblind plate poem. I have 5 now. I’m pleased with all off the longer poems that fill the circle, but a little unsatisfied with the one word versions of the poems that are hidden in the colorblind test. It’s difficult to condense a poem into one 3-5 letter word!

dec 11/RUN

3.4 miles
trestle turn around
31 degrees
10% snow-covered

Getting closer to my running goal for the year: 1000 miles. With today’s run, I have just over 34 miles left! Sloppy today — not so much on the bike trail, which was mostly dry, but the sidewalks and the roads. Everything slushy, almost melting. My socks splattered with mud.

Another good run. Started slow, stuck behind a runner who was going about my speed. I kept my distance (40 or 50 feet?) but I wondered if they were irritated by my constant presence. Or is that just me? A mile in, as we climbed the hill out from under the lake street bridge, I sped up and passed her.

I listened to an old playlist titled, bday2018. Lizzo, Justin Bieber, Little River Band, Lorde.

Greeted Mr. Morning! and waved at a bunch of runners. Slipped on a few stray bits of ice. Noticed the river — white, covered in snow. Didn’t look at the sky. (Checking now, it’s gray). Saw walkers, dogs, fat tires. No birds or squirrels or coyotes.

I’m working on my fifth colorblind/Ishihara plate poem. This one is about the Ishihara plate and why it’s a significant test for me. I want to do something with the circles and loops and the idea of taking this test and not seeing the number as the first big moment of recognition that there was something wrong with me. I dismissed it, thinking only that it meant I was one of those rare, quirky people who saw color strangely. But it was the first moment of acknowledgement that whatever strange things I had been experiencing for years weren’t just in my head. Others — my husband and kids — could see that I saw differently too. I feel like I keep writing this in different ways on this log, over and over, trying to find the right way to express it. Maybe that’s part of the circles/circling too? There’s something about the idea of inside and outside here too — this test made what had only been inner (my unexpressed/not-yet-understood thoughts about seeing strangle) outer (visible to the word, acknowledgement as a problem, or as a real thing that I was experiencing).

dec 9/BIKERUN

bike: 25 minutes
bike stand, basement
run: 1.25 miles
treadmill

Not too cold outside, but a bit icy, uneven. Today’s workout was all about adding another mile to my year total and getting a chance to move after sitting at my desk all morning while working on a poem. Watched a race while I biked, listened to Lizzo while I ran.

Worked all morning on a colorblind plate poem. This one is a cento and includes lines with colors from some of the almost 800 poems I’ve gathered on this RUN! log. Yesterday afternoon, I gathered them and discovered something: many — most? — of the poems I’ve gathered don’t mention color. Colors popped into my head as I pictured the images in the poems, but because of association and the colors I connect with certain things, not because color words were used. This was surprising to me.

The name of this poem is In (or inner if Scott can fit it in the colorblind plate), which refers to my inner color world, how I imagine color now that I can’t see it as well. Here it is:

draft of IN

Lines from the following poems:

Separation / W.S. Merwin
Ars Poetic / Aracelis Girmay
Cold Morning / Eamon Grennan
Becoming Moss / Ella Frears
Wild Geese / Mary Oliver
With A Song / Christina Pugh
Paean to Place / Lorine Niedecker
Trilliums / Mary Oliver
The Road Not Taken / Robert Frost
Forsythia / Ada Limón
Autumn / Linda Paston
Colors passing through us / Marge Piercy
A Rhyme for Halloween / Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Orange / Wendy Cope

Here’s one of the poems that I hadn’t posted yet. It’s a great one for winter; I might use it for my class!

With A Song/ Christina Pugh

There’s something about music: the wish to
be in the dark. Like I don’t know what person
this voice must belong to. At times I love
a secret, what sheers away from intellect.
Intrepid horn of birdsong when you won’t
see or know the bird. Or sometimes
I’m riding in the car on I-80, dipping
my eyes into the glamour of Ohio, its red
barns or white barns severally unpainted
by tactile fingers of winter weather.
White barns with green roofs. Sky-blue
with white roofs. Wait, isn’t sky-blue brighter
than any sky you really see? Canned sky,
you might reply, hyperbole of color. Platonist
Crayola blue. Would anyone trade a teal
feather for a trill? The highway will line
with mud and snow stripes along a fence,
then apple orchards spider in the ice.
A long stand of pines before the strip mall.
And still from the radio, an alto atremble:
I love not knowing who it belongs to.


dec 8/RUN

5.5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
19 degrees
80% snow-covered

Hooray for blue sky, not too much wind, staying upright on slippery paths! Another wonderful winter run. Ran north without headphones. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Noticed how the river was almost completely white — the dusting of snow we got yesterday morning covered the thin ice. Heard some chirping birds. Saw a few runners in bright yellow shirts, one running fast with a dog. Right before turning around at the bottom of the hill, I noticed a few open spots on the river — dark water in contrast to the white ice. Ran back up the hill. When I reached the top, I stopped, fumbled with my headphones, and put in a playlist. I ran back south listening to Harry Styles, Elton John, Foo Fighters, and Queen.

Inciting Joy: Skateboarding, the Fifth Incitement

For December, I’m reading Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy. Here are some notes for the fifth incitement.

Skateboarding: skateboarding with a friend, beholding each other as you attempt to do tricks in a dark parking lot after hours — a feeling of groundless (the mysterious, unknown). Also: sharing extra parts with skateboarding buddies (practicing gift economy). Gay places this practice of possible joy/ethics of sharing in larger context of 80s excess/hoarding of wealth, especially in terms of property and the criminalizing of skateboarding in public spaces, or private spaces that weren’t yours.

a new word: USUFRUCT “the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property short of the destruction or waste of its substance.” As in, “Gonz (famous skateboarder) is just one of a trillion apostles of the form, the genre–is because he usufructs the skateable world, which includes benches, picnic tables, walls, handrails, flights of steps, curbs, fire hydrants, ledges, parking lots, sidewalks, driveways, loading docks, loading ramps, bus stops…” (Gay, 60).

Wow. Gay’s ability to move between his particular lived experiences and a more general context is amazing. What a writer! And the idea of joy as not looking away from the larger, less joyful context, is so powerful and helpful.

I love the ethics and possibilities for joy around sharing your bucket of parts:

It was the just the case that whatever you had extra–and skateboarding, with its many components (decks, wheels, bearings, trucks, bushings, riser pads, rails, Rip Grip, bolts, etc. ) made for extra–you passed along. Most of us had a bucket of some sort where, when someone needed something, we dug around to find it. I never once heard anyone express it as an ethics (sharing, redistribution, commonwealthing), though if you tried to keep your extra to yourself, if you spoke to no one of your bucket, and then it got out you had one…the reaction would be an ethical one: Yo, that’s fucked up, man.

Sharing the bucket = sharing parts; sharing in the experience of skating into the unknown, over railings, across dark parking lots, over bumps; sharing space — public, private, off limits; and sharing “skateable” locations. I love the last line of the chapter:

join us at the new spot, this new stain , this wreckage, this abandonment, this ruin, this commons, this c’mon.

Found this poem on Instagram this morning, via The Slowdown. I love its compact lines and the idea of “the soft dislodging of eyes.”

sunrise through mount vernon, wa/ Jasmine Khaliq

after beauty I am
entranced by the soft
dislodging of eyes:

blurs of cows
necks sloping
lapped-rainbows

colors thinner
than water
and running

this is where
I most miss
the dead:

a highway pasture
bisected body
and always

I am on the other side

dec 6/RUN

5.6 miles
franklin loop
20 degrees / felt like 12
25% snow-covered

A wonderful run on a wonderful, wintery morning! Sunny, calm, cold but not too cold. I know I noticed many different things, had lots of interesting thoughts, but I’m distracted now, having read a beautiful, caring, generous post from a friend from grad school about sickness and death and recently being diagnosed with cancer. Ugh. I wanted to write a comment, to do more than “like” her Facebook post, but…too many thoughts. I’m thinking about Ross Gay and inciting joy and grief and how joy can show up when we’re willing to let others meet our sorrow and willing to take the time to meet theirs. About how much I appreciate my friend’s words and her story, how awful it is that she’s living in limbo for weeks, waiting to hear how bad her cancer is, how I felt every word and didn’t look away. About how cancer and death and grief are everywhere — Scott lost 2 aunts, a mother, and a beloved godmother in the second half of 2022, one after the other: August, September, October, November. And about the beautiful words I heard from the poet Kemi Alabi on the VS. podcast when she was asked what was moving her:

Grief is moving me. Like it’s literally running me, I feel so governed by grief. And not just personally or with my community, but collectively just seems like you can’t walk down the street without encountering, stumbling on this grief. So I’m thinking about Rebellious Mourning. That’s actually the name of an anthology, where a lot of poets thinkers and movement builders are considering what it means to mobilize around our grief, understanding that so many social movements are catalyzed by collective grief at the injustices that we’re experiencing. Grief can be a really powerful force to harness for transformation, if we’re allowed the space to be together with it, to honor it, and to actually move through it together, to let it move us, and to not run from it. 

Kemi Alabi vs. Divinity

Typing all of this out reminds me of one feeling I had throughout the run. I felt tender — not quite raw, but vulnerable, open to others, having experienced great loss recently. Apparently Scott hates the word tender; it ranks up there as one of the worst words with moist. I love it, devoted September to it. I don’t think I’d say I enjoy being tender, but I deeply appreciate the space it allows me to inhabit, the openness it offers.

10+ Things I Noticed

  1. the river: mostly frozen over with a thin skin of ice. Where the ice was thinner, it looked gray, thicker white
  2. a strange back-up on the franklin bridge. not sure what was happening. Cars were stopped, one was diagonal. No evidence of a collision. Heard some honking after I passed it
  3. a man walking 3, or was it 4?, dogs
  4. at least one bike
  5. saw my shadow off to the side, dark-ish gray
  6. colors: a lot of gray, pale blue sky, an orange cone, my pink jacket and gloves, red stop sign, sepia-toned ice, yellow dividing line on the bike path, yellow truck
  7. the air was cold as I breathed it in
  8. the biking path on the east side of the river, mostly clear
  9. some loud thuds — from the construction being done on a house across from the river?
  10. the sharp, whining whirr of a drill, or some other tool, being used by a road worker in a yellow vest in a hole in the street
  11. lifting my knees as I powered up the last hill

Near the end of my run, walking up the steps to the lake street bridge, I stopped and recorded the following thoughts. Then I put in a Taylor Swift playlist.

notes / dec 6

dec 2/RUN

5.75 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
34 degrees
50% snow-covered

Found out last night that RJP has COVID. She’s had a cold all week. So far, I feel okay, so does Scott. Will we get it? I’m a little worried, but only a little. A few years ago, I would have been freaking out. Thank you vaccines and better treatments and less severe variants! Unless I feel like total crap, I’m going out for a run when I can. Today I don’t feel like total crap, so I went out for a run. It felt good. Breathing in fresh air! Moving my legs! Admiring the half frozen river!

A great run. Just above freezing, not too slippery. Some wind, but mostly at my back. Ran north with no headphones, south with a playlist.

12 Things I Noticed

  1. a honking goose, its mournful cry amplified by the bridge
  2. a big bird flying above. I think it was a crane
  3. a runner in an orange shirt, running with a dog
  4. another runner — tall, wearing a white sweatshirt and shorts, moving fast, with long, bouncing strides
  5. passing Dave, the Daily Walker: Good Morning, Dave!
  6. a group of young people, high school or college students?, hanging out by the franklin bridge, blocking the path
  7. no sun, but not gloomy, a grayish-white sky. everything bright but with very little color
  8. the river! down at the start of the flats, the river was gray and half-frozen. Not flat or dull but interesting. Not gloomy either, but vast and quiet. Not desolate, but detached, otherworldly
  9. a car, I think it was a Prius, whooshing through a stretch of the road that was part snow, part bare pavement, then suddenly turning silent as it reached a part of the road that was all soft snow. So strange to watch it move without sound
  10. Climbing the franklin hill, encountering a line of cars with their headlights on, crawling down the hill
  11. the faint trace, in light gray, of my shadow ahead of me
  12. the knock knock knock of a woodpecker

Still figuring out my theme for December as I continue working on some color poems — currently, a gray one. Today, I’m posting something from Ross Gay about joy. Wow!

Yes, that’s how it seems to me, that we need practices, or we need to notice the practices we have, that help us be present with our sorrow. I’m not saying that help us drown in our sorrow—I’m saying be present with it, acknowledge it, befriend it even, lest we do some wretched or devastating shit trying to pretend it’s not there, or trying to hide it. And to do it in a mutual way—which, again, might be in some of our practices: dancing, gardening, mourning—but it might also be how we live, how we attend to one another, with the awareness that, yup, like me, your heart is broken. Probably not in exactly the same way, but probably, no, definitely, it’s broken. And it will go on being broken in various ways. It does not make us special, it seems to me. It makes us like each other. It un-others us from each other in fact. What happens if we live like that? My sense is that we’re more inclined to care for one another, we’re more inclined to love one another, which, yes, might be a kind of resistance to institutions who have little care for us, but it might also end up being a kind of offense to them. When we care for each other, and consequently are less reliant on the institutions or systems that, a lot of them anyway, do not care for us, we make those systems less necessary. We might be replacing those systems with something like love.

Cultivating Delight and Meaning with Ross Gay

Be present with our sorrow. Befriend it. It seems difficult sometimes to express sorrow, a brokenness, vulnerability, without it seeming weak or eliciting pity or the frustrating, You’re so brave! Or in ways that put it beside, in conversation with, delight or happiness. To me, gray holds both delight and grief, often in equal measures.

I like this idea that sorrow and broken hearts are something that connects all of us. I was thinking about that as I reread this poem by Didi Jackson, especially the last lines. The first song that is in all songs is that of sorrow/grief/mutual suffering.

Listen/ Didi Jackson

Like a hundred gray ears
the river stones are layered

in a pile near the shed where mourning
doves slow their peck and bobble to listen

to a chorus of listening.
Small buds on the lilac perk up.

A cardinal’s torpedoed call comes
in slow waves of four,

round after round. It’s a love call;
a call to make him known to himself.

The stones listen harder,
decipher the song; attempt

to offer back its echo.
But fail.

This is not a poem of coming Spring.
This is a poem well aware

that gray flesh is dead flesh.
All of the ripe listening

comes at a cost. The first
sky is in all skies.

The first song
is in all songs.

And just now, thinking even more about Jackson’s poem, I realized that the delightful gray ears that the stones become has another meaning. Gray = neutral. The gray ears listen without judgment, are open to witnessing, beholding, hearing what is said without rebuke. Another meaning of gray! Love it. Those gray ears are going in one of my gray poems, for sure!

nov 30/RUN

3.5 miles
trestle turn around
17 degrees / feels like 4
99% snow-covered

Is this the coldest day of the season? Just checked, and the next coldest was on November 20th when it was 19, feels like 9. I was worried it might be too cold, but it felt great! What a winter wonderland. White ground, pale blue sky, dark gray river. The trails were plowed — thanks Minneapolis Parks! — with only a few rough spots. I didn’t notice the ice because I was wearing yak trax. Just past the railroad trestle, I stopped to put in my headphones and a Taylor Swift playlist.

layers

  • 2 pairs of black running tights
  • green base layer shirt
  • pink jacket with hood
  • black vest
  • 2 pairs of gloves — 1 black, 1 pink and white striped
  • 1 pair of white socks with stripes, mismatched — 1 with green stripes, the other teal
  • fleece lined cap with ear flaps
  • buff
  • sunglasses
  • yak trax, a new pair

10 Things I Noticed

  1. a pale blue sky — not an intense BLUE! sky, more like the hint of blue, like if someone had taken a black and white photo of the gorge and painted in a blue sky
  2. lots of dry, brittle leaves swirling in the wind. Running by the double bridge to the north, I watched something dark fly through the fence then back again. A bug? A bird? No, a dead leaf
  3. Later on, I saw a few birds flying very fast across the path in front of me. They added to the chaos of the blustery wind and the swirling leaves
  4. 2 other runners, one near the trestle, the other further south
  5. a few walkers — any dogs? I don’t think so
  6. a group, some kids and adults, spread across the entire path, getting ready to go sledding down by the river
  7. remember to look at the river. A strange illusion. It was a dark, dark gray with a hint of brown and it looked like a wall. Instead of stretching flat on the gorge floor, it looked like it rose out of it, up towards the other bank. I’ve written about this wall of water in past winters
  8. the path was covered in mostly packed snow. The sun illuminated some of the slicker spots
  9. smelled a burnt something — I think I might have seen bits of rubber on the side of the road
  10. a truck with a plow, clearing the parking lot above the tunnel of trees

I don’t remember thinking about gray at all. Did I? Thought more about how I love running in the winter and whether or not my fingers were going numb or if my sunglasses would fog up or my foot would be sore again later today. Oh, and of course, I wondered what the drivers thought when they saw me running on this cold and windy day.

Today on the last day for singing a song of gray, I’m thinking about gravel. Here’s a bit from Mary Oliver’s “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud. I’m struck by how she makes gray here with equal mentions of black and white: the black bog and white-circled eye, the white lilies and the black ant.

from “Gravel” in The Leaf and the Cloud/ Mary Oliver

Even the mosquito’s
 dark dart,
flashing and groaning;
 even the berries, softening back
into the black bog;
 even the wood duck’s
white-circled eye,

and the first white lilies
on the shaggy pond,

and the big owl, shaking herself
out of the pitchpines,

even the turtle scratching in the dust,
even the black ant, climbing the mile-high hill,

even the little chattering swift
diving down into the black chimney.

Everything is participate.
Everything is a part of the world
 we can see, taste, tickle, touch, hold onto,

and then it is dust.
Dust at last.
Dust and gravel.

In the distance, the rabbit-field.
Ben—his face in the grass, his chomping.
His sweet, wild eyes.

Thinking about gray as balanced, as both dark and light, black and white, grief and delight.

nov 28/RUN

4.4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
33 degrees

Overcast, a bit blustery. Everything muted: burnt orange, not yellow but yellowed, brown, gray. A few clumps of snow scattered on the grass. Kids laughing and yelling on the school playground. Water trickling at the falls. I remember looking down at the river, but I don’t remember what I saw. I know it was clear and probably steel blue. Did I see any ripples from the wind?

At the start of my run, the sky glowed a pale yellow — the sun trying to break through the clouds. A strange light, reminding more of a sunrise or sunset than late morning.

Noticed the faintest trace of my shadow running ahead of me. Because the sun was still behind the clouds, it was dim, almost more the idea of my shadow than an actual one.

Listened to the gorge running south, Beyoncé running north.

My kneecap shifted a little, but I didn’t panic or feel any pain during, or swelling afterwards.

No fat tires or roller skiers or Mr. Walker or Mr. Morning! or Dave, the Daily Walker. I did pass a very tall runner in a red jacket near the end of my run.

Anything else? The creek was mostly frozen, but I could hear some drips and dribbles dropping down from the limestone ledge.

Today for my gray, I’m thinking about gray or grey dreams:

Little Grey Dreams/ Angelina Weld Grimké – 1880-1958

Little grey dreams,
I sit at the ocean’s edge,
At the grey ocean’s edge,
With you in my lap.

I launch you, one by one,
And one by one,
Little grey dreams,
Under the grey, grey, clouds,
Out on the grey, grey, sea,
You go sailing away,
From my empty lap,
Little grey dreams.

Sailing! Sailing!
Into the black,
At the horizon’s edge.