6 a.m. And I’m off. It’s now 1,313 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a Row.
It’s been a while. Self: A while for what you might ask?
I’m losing steam. Excelling at Lethargy. Or Lori’s big 6 letter word: Torpor.
Blogging is now less than an intermittent hobby.
And — I’ve started what, 4, or is it 5 new books? And set them all aside. Can’t seem to engage, can’t seem to get a footing — I put them all down. And even more confounding, I could care less.
I shift to Audible, and I find myself 35 minutes in, with no recollection of anything I’ve just listened to.
Sawsan throws a jab in a text message, it lands, I don’t even feel it, but it’s good to let her feel like she’s won one — I get lost in her science of poetry and tattoos. It’s like I’m swimming in a fully body Novocain bath.
Early this week, Susan announced that she had two big goals for 2024. She stared at me, expecting a response on my New Year’s Resolutions, and my response? Silence. I got nothing.
I look up at Wally sleeping next to me on couch. I snap the shot, the one above. Peaceful little guy seems to have it figured out while I’m wallowing (wallying?) around.
And here I go, 1,292 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
There she stood on the dock, a Great Blue Heron, vigilant, stoic, absorbing a light drizzle.Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for what?
I walk.
Compared to yesterday’s magical sunrise, today, TODAY, was just painfully uninspiring — with the bonus of rain spitting all over the camera gear. It took all of me, all that I had, to keep forward motion and not take a u-turn back to the exit.
I walk.
A supersized BK soft drink cup lay on the path, teethmarks on the recyclable straw where the pollutant ingested the soda. Trash bins everywhere around this park, yet here it is. “I’m still willing to buy that life is beautiful if you dress it up right, that people are basically good, or that love can save you. I still want to believe.” (Jonathan Evison, Again and Again )Continue reading “Walking. It is so easy to forget…”→
…Poetry has taken me to all points of the compass, from South Korea, to Tasmania, to the interior of the Amazon rainforest, and this year to the Arctic Circle. As someone whose inner lodestone is innately tuned to the gravitational pull of the north, this felt like a date with destiny. […]
This part of the Arctic is devastatingly beautiful. Sky-scraping mountains sweep down to the coast, and without buildings to act as reference points the scale is dizzying and disarming – you don’t know if you’re a David or a Goliath among the stony valleys, sharp aretes and pointed peaks. The sense of alienation and disorientation was intensified by the 24-hour July sunlight, but the most bewildering aspect of the whole expedition, for me, was the heat. The temperature hovered around 11C for five days, and for much of the time I wandered about in shirtsleeves, jeans and a pair of trainers. The thermal long johns never came out of the suitcase. Only the mountaintops were snow-covered…
Several glaciers calve into the water at the head of the adjacent fjord, and at frequent intervals the noiseless tranquillity was broken by the sound of collapsing or rupturing ice. One evening we cruised among the floating debris, ice that fizzed and crackled as it melted, the floating ruins of what felt like some catastrophic event…
The drip drip drip of climate change is the tick tick tick of a countdown to calamity. Across the entire polar territory the permafrost ain’t so permanent or frosty any more, and structures – both natural and human-made – are starting to tilt and sink as the once frozen ground exhales its captive carbon into the air…
“Atlantification” seems to be the scientific buzzword for the way our temperate climate is extending into the polar region, drawing non-native flora and fauna towards higher latitudes, unbalancing complex and delicate ecosystems. It also feels like the right word to describe the relentless flow of plastics and other pollutants from south to north, and to explain why the stomachs of skuas and fulmars are full of cigarette lighters, condoms, fishing lines, bottle tops and the like. In 1880 the 20-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle sailed to the Arctic on the SS Hope. Ostensibly employed as the ship’s surgeon, his diary from that journey is an unapologetic record of butchery, documenting the greedy slaughter of whales and seals and the shooting of polar bears as target practice. Words were my only trophies; I returned with a handful of poems. But as a member of a species inflicting such degradation and humiliation on the natural world, my shame and embarrassment were far greater.
73° F, and it’s 4:15 am. I’ve pulled into the Cove Island Park. 1,159 consecutive (almost) days on this morning walk. Like in a row. That’s right, it’s not a typo. And yes, it’s getting earlier and earlier, despite the sun rising later and later. Look at the Blog Mast. He can’t sleep.
It’s overcast. It’s humid. It’s hot, and this is 4:30 a.m.
I walk.
No, I’m not here this morning to bitch about the weather.
Or my lack of sleep. (A continuing & Growing problem.)
Or the trash that’s left behind all over the park by the growing number of visitors during the summer – SHAME ON YOU! You wouldn’t sh*t in your own house would you? Why here?
Oh no, I’m not going to go on that tirade again. No Sir. It absolutely did not cross my mind (again) to take an iron bar across the hand of the knuckles of the polluter(s). No, I did not think or say that.
Nope, it’s not about trash today, consciously or unconsciously left behind corrupting this walk, not that I needed all that much impetus.
And it did cross my mind, today being Sunday, maybe one should focus on all the good. And I did think deeply about that. On this quiet little walk in my little heaven… I walk a few hundred yards ruminating on that…hmmmm…F*ck that!
