April Diary 10: on not following myself

 

yesterday for the first time I tracked myself on one of those hiking apps which is a weird experience. the app was already on my phone so i thought what the hell. i wanted to verify that the distances i thought i was walking were accurate and they were. but!

it was somehow very distracting, like even though my phone was in my pocket i couldn’t stop thinking about my progress on a virtual map

until the actual world around me began to seem abstract, even a little unreal

but i thought i’d do it again today just so i could measure the alternate-day version of the hike when i go up the other ridge from the bottom, though the distance is bound to be within a tenth of a mile of the other route

halfway down the hollow i noticed i somehow hadn’t the gotten the app working properly and as it was too late to go back i shut it off. immediately i felt a huge wave of relief.

i walk for pleasure, inspiration and healing—to feel connected with the cosmos. everyone who’s into fitness claims their ultimate goal is to feel good but they’ve got some mighty strange ideas about how to get there

a few hours later i got a message from my cellphone carrier that i was almost out of data so it’s a good thing i fucked up today’s attempt to follow myself

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questions that popped into my head while walking down the hollow:

how have the past 9+ years of making erasure poems changed the way i write?

how have the past 9+ years of making erasure poems changed the way i read?

i guess i thought if i wrote them down like that i’d have answers by this time. but it’s getting late and my brain is barely working. I’ll have to come back to this — and no doubt i will but it’s funny how i had so much to say about erasure poetry during the first couple of years of the Pepys Diary project when i really didn’t know what i was doing stylistically, but ever since i kind of figured out where i was going with it i don’t think i’ve written another thing, other than the occasional response to someone’s comment or question

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another day of intermittent showers, even colder than yesterday

i sat in the sun against a tree and read fewer than 10 pages (Charon’s Cosmology again) before the dark clouds came up and a cold wind began to blow so i packed up and walked a mile and a half along the ridge through several very brief showers to the bench without wifi by which point the sun was shining again

so there i am sitting in the sun, gazing across the valley toward the other mountain disappearing into rain as I drink my sassafras tea

six crows fly over emitting duck-like calls: fish crows! (confirmed by comparing with audio from an online library). my brother the birder who lives in town later tells me he’s seen them along the river near the bottom of the mountain so i guess the species is moving into our area now, like black vultures before them and Carolina wrens before that — southern species moving north. next it’ll be Carolina chickadees i suppose

between showers
six fish crows
and the sun

made a somewhat experimental photo haiga out of that one since earlier in the day i’d posted a more standard haiga for a somewhat experimental haiku. i get bored of doing things the same way all the time

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Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with another.

Mark 9:50

happened across this quote, which i must’ve read more than once but somehow never paid attention to, whilst coming the Bible for quotes about peace that might fit on a gravestone or memorial marker (my dad, who died last September, was a peace scholar). don’t think we’ll use this one but as general advice it’s kind of perfect

the good ol’ KJV may not be the most reliable translation of the Bible but it is for sure the most poetic

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Dear April yesterday i walked through a three-minute sleet storm. today it was graupel. the weather is becoming more opaque

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