Tag: no headphones

june 2/RUN

2.25 miles
2 trails
75 degrees

A quick run in the warm, sunny, windy afternoon to celebrate 11 years of running. 11 years ago today, sometime in the morning, when I went out to Minnehaha Creek and did my first session of couch to 5k, the first of many doors opened to a new way to be. I don’t remember much about how I felt or what I saw or heard; I didn’t begin keeping a log about my runs until the beginning of 2017. I remember it being hard, and that I was excited to go out again 2 days later and that some of the earliest songs on my running playlist were: “She’s a Bad Mama Jama” and “Firework” — or is it Fireworks?

What do I remember about today’s run? Hot and windy. I listened to a playlist as I ran south, then the gorge when I reached the Winchell Trail. The river was very blue and I was running with the wind at my back (that’s a tailwind, right?) when I started. There were bikers and walkers and runners out on the trail. No roller skiers.

Sound of the day: This sound is not from my run, but an hour or two earlier, when Scott, RJP, and I were driving over the lake street bridge. A bike bell distorted by the doppler effect as we passed it. Such a long bell sound! The ones I usually hear are much shorter and shriller. This bell was stretched and sounded so strange — long and bent.

Here’s some fun with five letter words. I love five letter words and five syllable lines and experimenting with the number five! (and Questlove.)

And here’s a poem that Aimee Nezhukumatathil read in a keynote she gave last year:

First Grade/ RON KOERTGE

Until then, every forest
had wolves in it, we thought
it would be fun to wear snowshoes
all the time, and we could talk to water.

So who is this woman with the gray
breath calling out names and pointing
to the little desks we will occupy
for the rest of our lives?

I’m thinking about wonder for my class and the idea of “childlike” wonder keeps coming up, especially how we lose it and then try to find it again. I just asked this question in a log entry from April 10 of this year.

june 1/RUN

4 miles
top of franklin hill and back
61 degrees

Wow! A beautiful morning. Sunny, calm, cool, not too crowded. Called out a “Hi!” to Dave the Daily walker, waved at Daddy Long Legs. Smelled some lilac, heard a distant weed whacker or leaf blower, felt my running belt flapping on my back. Saw some roller skiers, bikers, walkers, runners, and someone on an eliptigo (which, until I looked it up just now, I thought was called an “elitigogo”). Felt my left toe — the one that keeps getting pinched by the new design for Saucony grid cohesions. Wondered if a squirrel was going to dart out in front of me (it didn’t), or if the port-a-potty door would fly open in my face as I ran by it (nope). Overheard a conversation that I wanted to remember, but can’t now that the run is over and I’m home. Sprinted up part of the final hill that ends by the sprawling oak and the ancient boulder (that didn’t have any stones stacked on top of it today). No woodpeckers or crows or eagles or turkeys. I might have heard some music from a car or a bike somewhere, but I might be thinking of another day. No rowers or a school group of kids biking in bright yellow vests. Oh—almost forgot: the cottonwood is flying. A few wisps almost flew in my mouth.

Remembered posting a poem about Cottonwood a few years ago in this log. Found it, with a few sentences I wrote (from may 17, 2018):

Early on in the run, I remembered a poem I read this morning. It was about cottonwood trees. I wondered, when will the cottonwood trees start snowing cotton? Probably in June.

running log / 17 may 2018

Cottonwood/Kathy Fagan/from Sycamore

The cottonwood pollen is flying again,
Adrift like snow or ash. It lines
The curbs, it sticks to my lips
Like down to a fox’s muzzle.
I made a poem about it years ago.
We were new then. We’d set fire
To our old lives and made love day
And night, mouths full of each other.
Back then, we were a match
For June: arrogant, promising, feverish.
For as long as we live, summer returns
To us. And snow, ash, they, too, return.

may 31/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
68 degrees
wind: 16 mph / gusts: 25 mph

Windy today. Ran south to the falls without headphones, stopped in the park and put in headphones, then took them back out when I reached the Winchell Trail.

10 Things I Noticed: Sounds

  1. my breathing — often jagged
  2. the wind howling past my ears
  3. a few kids at the playground — not too loud or too exuberant. Were they subdued by the wind? — either their spirits or voices?
  4. a faint bagpipe from somewhere over on the other side, in St. Paul — a Monday after Memorial Day ceremony?
  5. the falls rushing and gushing
  6. the sewer pipe trickling
  7. my left foot striking the ground a littler harder than my right
  8. “Eye of the Tiger” (when I briefly put my headphones in)
  9. “I Knew You Were Trouble”
  10. cars whizzing by

I thought it would, but the wind didn’t bother me that much. Everything was green and fuzzy in the grayish light. Lots of squishy mud on the Winchell Trail and leaning trees. Evidence from last night’s thunderstorm. The river was such a pale blue that it almost looked white. No rowers. No roller skiers. No groups of runners. Lots of people at the falls. As I passed by a woman with a young kid, I wondered how they were enjoying the falls, with all of the big wind gusts. No turkeys or black-capped chickadees. I do remember (now that I wrote that last sentence about birds) encountering a bird on the Winchell Trail. They were on the path just in front of me, not wanting to have to move. Half-heartedly they hopped from the sidewalk to the fence and back. Finally, they decided I was too close and flew on the other side of the fence and down the bluff a bit. I remember seeing the blur of their body as it flashed across my peripheral. I’m not sure what kind of bird it was, but I think it was a robin. I always think it’s a robin or a cardinal.

The other day, I discovered that Harryette Mullen wrote a collection of tanka poems as part of her daily practice of walking and writing poetry. Very cool! It’s called Urban Tumbleweed, and I’m planning to use it in the class I’m teaching at the end of this month.

Here’s some of her introduction:

Merging my wish to write poetry every day with a willingess to step outdoors, my hope was that each exercise would support the other.

She wrote a tanka a day, inspired by a walk, for roughly a year.

This is a record of meditatios and migrations across the diverse terrain of southern California’s urban, suburban, and rural communities, its mountains, deserts, ocean, and beaches.

I just began reading through them. So wonderful!

The morning news landed in the driveway, folded,
rolled, and rubber-banded, wrapped in plastic
for protection from the morning dews.

When I first read this tanka, I thought the last bit was “for protection from the morning news” — meaning the walker was protected from the harm of the morning news. This misreading seems to fit with another of her tankas:

Instead of scanning newspaper headlines,
I spend the morning reading names
of flowers and trees in the botanical garden.

Here are 2 others that struck me:

Chain-link fence, locked gate protect this urban
garden. Fugitive fragrance of honeysuckle
escapes to tempt the passing stranger.

Why should I care about my neighbor’s
riotous dandelions? Does he concern himself
with my slovenly jacaranda?

may 27/RUN

2.5 miles
2 trails
68! degrees

Hooray for warmer weather! I’m tired of feeling cold and wearing long-sleeved shirts. Today it was sunny and warm and wonderful. I did a short run, partly because I got a late start. On the paved, upper trail, I listened to Harry Styles’ new album, Harry’s House. Very nice. When I reached the Winchell, I took out my headphones and listened to:

  1. the trickling water of the sewer
  2. a dog’s collar jangling
  3. someone’s footsteps behind me
  4. my breath
  5. the steady beeping of some sort of emergency siren from the other side
  6. birds
  7. someone apologizing — “Oh, sorry” — for not noticing I was there and taking up the entire path

That’s all I can think of. I’m sure I heard bikers above me, or fragments of conversations, or rustling leaves, or cars rushing by, or lawn mowers, but I don’t remember hearing them.

I love today’s poem for the Slowdown Show:

I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won’t/ Traci Brimhall

cook lobster. They’re loyal sea rubies and deserve
better than a pinch of lemon and herbed butter.

But I’ll shower hot enough to brighten you, make
zinnias of your shoulders and steal the towels when

it’s over, your water-tattooed back a garden before it
fades. I won’t shave anything unless I feel like it, but

I’ll wax whatever part of your body you request.
I’m not an empath, so I won’t cry when I do it. I’ll let

your pain be yours. I won’t give up coffee or pistachios
or my dog. I know you wouldn’t ask, but I like to be

up front about my boundaries. I bark mine like a seagull,
touching my books, my mother’s china, my chest,

but you’re fine with kindness. You wait for me to feel
safe. I will always let you tease me about talking

to my plants when I water them if you let me tease
the way your hips go stiff when we salsa, but even then

I won’t plan another trip to Rome with you. Not this
year anyway. Not after we’ve given back the tickets

and calendars, dinners and sunburns we thought were
waiting. Instead let’s accept the mail order lemon trees.

Let’s accept repeating puzzles we’ve already finished,
try the paloma recipe again. Let’s accept it’s not what

we would do for each other, but what we can do,
and I can feed the sourdough starter we named Gizmo.

You can return my bowl when you’ve washed it. But
I won’t let you say Pluto is not a planet—I miss the solar

system’s symmetry. I won’t agree that ghosts aren’t real,
even if you’re right. I like a dose of fear. I like whispering

back to the knocks on the wall. I won’t release balloons
when you die because I love sea turtles almost as much

as you. Maybe it’s a tie. I won’t kiss anyone after you die
for at least 60 days, and probably longer, but if I meet

someone who smells like you, I might invite them into
the rain and keep my eyes closed. We can disagree about

the shower curtain, can have days without texts. I can
chide you about the state of your tomatoes, and you can

correct the way I say trilobite, and the only time I’ll run
is across the gymnasium in a pink dress, and the only time

I will give up is in hearts, when I count the cards and know
your hand, and yes, I want to help you shoot the moon.

The title, and so many great details, and the appearance of a lone seagull — so great! If I teach the fall class I’m hoping to, I might add this poem in as one we read.

may 23/RUN

4.5 miles
veterans’ home loop
58 degrees

Sunny and calm. A beautiful spring day that feels like early April not late May. Tried to look at the river, but had trouble through so much green. Heard some cardinals the call of the pileated woodpecker, a crow. I think I looked at my shadow off the side at least once. Did I? Noticed the bench next to the big boulder: empty. Lots of people visiting the falls. Lots of “right behind yous” followed by “that’s okays.” I wasn’t bothered by the crowds. Ran up the short set of steps right before and after the falls.

The run felt good, but I was ready to be done. The last mile was difficult.

Someone posted an excerpt from Adrienne Rich’s essay Someone is Writing a Poem. Wow! Here are a few bits I’d like to remember:

The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language—that daily, mundane, abused, and ill-prized medium, that instrument of deception and revelation, that material thing, that knife, rag, boat, spoon/reed become pipe/tree trunk become drum/mud become clay flute/conch shell become summons to freedom/old trousers and petticoats become iconography in appliqué/rubber bands stretched around a box become lyre. 

Take that old, material utensil, language, found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use, and make it into something that means more than it says. What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’s easy to forget that it’s not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors (every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome), prismatic meanings lit by each others’ light, stained by each others’ shadows. In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones of language take on colors that disappear when you sieve them up out of the streambed and try to sort them out.

And all this has to travel from the nervous system of the poet, preverbal, to the nervous system of the one who listens, who reads, the active participant without whom the poem is never finished.

We go to poetry because we believe it has something to do with us. We also go to poetry to receive the experience of the not me, enter a field of vision we could not otherwise apprehend.

But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers.

Someone is writing a poem. Words are being set down in a force field. It’s as if the words themselves have magnetic charges; they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other. Part of the force field, the charge, is the working history of the words themselves, how someone has known them, used them, doubted and relied on them in a life. Part of the movement among the words belongs to sound—the guttural, the liquid, the choppy, the drawn-out, the breathy, the visceral, the downlight. The theater of any poem is a collection of decisions about space and time—how are these words to lie on the page, with what pauses, what headlong motion, what phrasing, how can they meet the breath of the someone who comes along to read them? And in part the field is charged by the way images swim into the brain through written language: swan, kettle, icicle, ashes, scab, tamarack, tractor, veil, slime, teeth, freckle.

may 22/RUN

4.25 miles
river road trail, north/south
50 degrees

In the 40s this morning. I had to turn the heat on. Boo. Still, it was nice weather for a run. Not too much wind, not too warm, sunny. I tried to remember to look at the river, and did at least once. I could barely see it through all of the green. Saw Mr. Morning! Today he waved at me. I think he could tell I was too busy navigating through all of the people to speak. Listend to the world running north, a playlist running south.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. No rowers
  2. a big group (10+) of roller skiers, with a coach on a bike in the back
  3. a biker calling out to his friend: “I love that show!” what show?
  4. a sliver of blue river through the leaves
  5. no stacked stones on the ancient rock
  6. the path felt like it was floating in the trees at the spot where it’s so thick with green above and below that you can tell where the ground or sky are
  7. passed Mr. Holiday and he said, “well, at least there’s sun”
  8. clouds in the sky, sometimes covering the sun
  9. a blue plastic tarp folded up on the ground under the lake street bridge, near the porta potty
  10. no squirrels or chipmunks or black-capped chickadees or woodpeckers or sewer smells or burnt toast smells or purple flowers but one irritating mosquito bite on the back of my leg

Naming the Heartbeats/ Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I’ve become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie,
Honeybunch, Snugglebear—and that’s just for my children.
What I call my husband is unprintable. You’re welcome. I am
his sweetheart, and finally, finally—I answer to his call and his
alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little
Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you
get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out
into the evening’s first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras,
a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation
of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl
and sleep, when shadows of moons we don’t yet know brush across
our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when
we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying
to remember a path or a river we’ve only visited in our dreams.

may 20/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
56 degrees

Hailed this morning for a few minutes. Small pellets today. Yesterday afternoon, golf ball sized ones flinging themselves against the windows. A thunderous noise. Strange weather.

Ran to the falls. Didn’t realize it until much later, but my watch died 30 seconds in. I need to get a new watch, or stop wearing a watch. I’m thinking about the latter. Earlier on, wearing a watch and tracking my miles, pace, minutes exercised, calories burned seemed important as motivation. Now I don’t really need it…or want it. Maybe I’ll try not having it this summer and see how that works (or doesn’t work).

Ran to the falls without headphones, listening to the kids playing at the Dowling Elementary School playground. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the kids at the Minnehaha Academy playground and how their yells seemed menancing and mean. Today’s kids were not mean but out of control with exuberance. Not completely joyful, but not unjoyful either. As I listened to the “woo woo woos” and the “aaaaaaaahhhhhhs” I thought about being unhinged or out of control and how it can be connected to a sense of freedom or letting go.

I also thought about soft attention and noticing through the peripheral, not focusing on the edges, but making note of what’s happening there — what’s off to the side or below you. Looking ahead at the trail, I noticed a walker across the road and off to the side of me. I think they were waving their arms. Was it at me as a greeting. Not sure.

There was lots of debris on the sidewalks and the trail from the violent rain/hail last night. Not any big branches, just lots of leaves and twigs and muck. Yuck! Did I see any worms? I don’t think so. Did I look at the river? I think so, but I can’t remember what color it was or if it had any foam on it.

I ran by Minnehaha Creek right before it spilled over the falls. It was high and rushing. I didn’t look at the falls, but I could hear them gushing — or, I felt they were gushing? A school group was there somewhere, but I didn’t run into any of the kids. 2 long rows of porta potties lined the path, ready for the “Women Run the Cities” race tomorrow. I ran it a few pre-pandemic years ago.

When I entered Minnehaha Regional Park, I looped around the falls, then stopped to take off my sweatshirt and put in my headphones. The first song I listened to was Paramore’s “Misery Business.” It’s 173 bpm and helps me lock into a quick, steady rhythm. After that, Foo Fighter’s “The Pretender” helped me keep that rhythm. No more thinking about anything, just steadily moving.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. a frantic squirrel almost jumped out in front of me, but quickly turned and ran up the tree next to me
  2. I just remembered that the school group I mentioned above was below me, at the spot where the creek collects and kids wade in the summer
  3. a few big puddles on the path — I avoided all of them
  4. the sewer pipes were all dripping or gushing
  5. I waved to at least 2 other runners
  6. a biker whizzed by me from behind — it felt close!
  7. I encountered a tall runner in shorts and a t-shirt — I think they were both gray — twice, once heading south and once heading north
  8. no kids at the Minnehaha Falls playground
  9. someone was stopped at the water fountain in the 36th street parking lot, filling up a water bottle
  10. At the start and end of my run, as I neared the river, a street crew was blowing smoke through the manhole, checking for sewer cracks and leaks. Smoke billowed up and spreading out across the street

That list of 10 things was hard to create, probably because I had already described so many things I noticed. I can’t believe I almost forgot about the sewer smoke. It was a very memorable sight.

In the Clearing/ Patricia Hopper

After last night’s rain the woods
smell sensual—a mixture of leaves and musk.
The morels have disappeared, and soon I’ll come across
those yellow chanterelles, the kind they sell
in town at the farmers’ market. Once I saw
the Swedish woman who raises her own food
foraging for them, two blond boys
quarreling near the pickup, and the next morning
they were selling them from their stand beside the road.

Out here, among last year’s dead
leaves with the new shoots of spruces
poking through them, I’ve come to the place where light
brightens a glade of ferns and the log someone else
placed here—carved “B.W.”—where I sometimes sit
to listen to the birds. Today the sun is breaking through
the wet branches, revealing a clean sky,
brilliant, cerulean. Then, suddenly, a raft of scudding clouds

promising more rain. If it comes, I’ll read all afternoon—
Henry James, or maybe Eudora Welty’s
Delta Wedding, where so many characters
vie for attention I can never keep them straight.
Here, there’s no one else, no one to worry over
or argue with or love. Maybe the earth was meant
only for this: small comings and goings
on the forest floor, the understory astir
with its own secret life. If I sit still enough
among the damp trees, sometimes I see the world
without myself in it, and—it always surprises me—
nothing at all is lost.

I love how this poem describes the clearing so clearly, and the last few lines about seeing the world without myself in it.

may 17/RUN

4 miles
2 trails, the longer version*
60 degrees

*the longer version = south on the river road/enter Winchell Trail at southern start/north on Winchell, past 38th street steps, through oak savanna, up the gravel by the ravine to rejoin the paved path/tunnel of trees/over to edmund at 33rd/west on 32nd/south on 43rd. Eventually I might try the longest trail, which would involve returning to the Winchell Trail past the lake street bridge and taking it until it ends near Franklin.

Decided to listen to music for most of my run this morning. Before I headed out, I thought about how I’d miss hearing the birds, but then I thought about how I’ve been struggling on my runs lately. Time for distraction, I think. I put Taylor Swift’s Lover on shuffle. Years ago I was critical of her but I’ve come to enjoy her lyrics, especially her ability to tell a story. I think it was Evermore that did it for me.

Initially I was planning to write more about the songs I listened to by Swift, starting with “ME!,” and how my perspective on her has changed, but I think that would take up too much time right now, and I’d rather use her music as a needed distraction instead of an opportunity for critically reflecting on excess, parody, and what it means for a privileged white girl to (ironically or not) claim so much space. (psst: after writing this aside, and then working on the entry, it turns out that a critique of Taylor Swift’s ME! haunts this entry. Funny how that happens.

So, back to the run. I made sure to look at the river, which was difficult. Even lower down on the Winchell Trail the green is taking over. It was mostly sunny with a breeze, but I couldn’t see any sparkle on the water. Was it because of the trees? No rowers either.

Can I think of 10 things I noticed? It might be difficult, but I’ll try.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. at the start of my run, passed under the thick, horizontal branch of a sprawling oak tree and imagined it falling on my head…crack!
  2. a blue river
  3. many of the benches were filled, one person per bench, not sure if I saw any with two or more people
  4. running down to the start of the Winchell Trail, I passed somone sitting in the grass, facing the river, right next to the paved trail
  5. took my headphones out as I entered the lower trail and heard the kids on the playground above me and on the other side of the river road
  6. heard some bikers above me as I crested the hill after the ravine with the sewer pipe that gushes (as opposed to the one that drips) — I tried to make out their words, but couldn’t
  7. a mix of sounds near folwell: a leaf blower, the rushing wind, a bird*, cars
  8. parts of the winchell trail were muddy, but the part that is usually the worst — the stretch between 38th and the savanna — was mostly fine
  9. the dirt trail below the mesa, in the oak savanna, was mostly soft sand (limestone?) instead of packed dirt. Is that the consistency of this soil, or did they bring in more soil here to create this trail?
  10. at least 4 (was it more? I couldn’t tell) stones stacked on the ancient boulder

*hearing all these sounds together, I suddenly had a question which led to a wonder (or wander): when a bird hears a leaf blower, what are they hearing? That is, how do they process that sound? Do they connect it with humans? Is it a threat? A singing partner? Do they ignore it? I’m sure the answers to these questions are different depending on how close the leaf blower is, this one was far away. As I posed these questions in my head I started thinking outside, or beside, myself about how others hear and listen to sounds and what it might mean to listen without immediately making it all about me and how the sound affects me or, as Taylor Swift sung to me this morning, “ME!”

After climbing the short, steep hill, near folwell avenue, this thinking about ME! turned to Alice Oswald and how she works hard to try to look beyond the beauty and herself to see the world from the perspective of a weed or, in this case, a bird:

I’m just continually smashing down the nostalgia in my head. And trying to inquire of the landscape itself what it feels about itself. Rather than bringing my advertising skills — getting rid of words like picturesque…there’s a whole range of words that people like to use about landscape, like pastoral, idyll. I quite like taking the names away from things and seeing what they are behind their names. I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.

full quote and source in March: Alice Oswald’s Dirt

At some point after folwell and before the steps up to 38th street, I thought about care and a class proposal I’m trying to put together for the fall about poetry and social transformation. Audre Lorde’s suggestion of “selfcare as warfare” and Sara Ahmed’s 2014 blog essay about it popped into my head. It would be interesting to put this into conversation with Taylor Swift’s ME! claim.

Post-run, I’m thinking about nature poetry and birds. I randomly came across this amazing poem on Ours Poetica. Wow!

Where Every Bird is a Drone/ Tarik Dobbs
Where Every Bird is a Drone/ Tarik Dobbs

I also just started reading Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem. He writes:

I can’t write a nature poem
bc it’s fodder for the noble savage
narrative. I wd slap a tree across the face,
I say to my audience.

—

Let’s say I literally hate all men bc literally men are animals—
This is a kind of nature I would write a poem about.