Well Bottom Blues

I’ve done something to my achilles, possibly pushing way too hard into barefoot shoes, although at 69 it could be any number of things. I have, for example, somehow developed duck-footedness and often sit with my feet balanced on their ball, an anxiety thing that probably doesn’t do my achilles any good either.

I was pushing towards 2 miles every day walking in the forest arboretum or the wilder Scout Island across the Avenue, with a goal of walking a daily 5k, just over 3 miles. Now I need to scale back and rest. I’m going to the arboretum but instead of ambition I go with a book on a pilgrimage of benches.

I have this stack of Poetry magazine I have been neglecting in part because it doesn’t all resonate. If I stand somewhat outside the mainstream forgive me. I was born in another century and I am New Criticism years old. I’m studying them the way I do Best New Poets, like an arcane text I pour over to see how I’m doing it wrong, and how I can do it wrong better.

So again today I’ll pick a copy up off the stack and walk just a few hundred feet to that open grove with benches where the dedication plaque quotes Mary Oliver without credit. I’ll plant my soft animal there and read a while and then walk up the trail a short ways, along the lagoon with the breeze and the water birds, to the next bench and sit and read there; and then continue to the next page and the next bench, to get in my personal yogic practice which is the sit quietly in nature not empty headed but studying by turns the page and the way the light plays in the leaves and the anhinga dries their wings.