Walk Around

A week ago I sent my friend Jen a poem I wrote called Selfheal. They told me that they too have a meaningful connection with the plant, and then sent the above image back. When I saw it, for some reason these words came: "Believe in your next steppingstone."

Jim Harrison interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L3STymsjeg&t=932s

Listen and read more: https://www.walkaround.run/p/the-most-important-thing-about-life

Jen's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chthoneural_/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.walkaround.run

Recorded near Port Townsend, Washington. A short rumination on movement, landscapes, and people—how they all connect. I read a poem called By Firelight, and discuss a run I took on Christmas Eve.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.walkaround.run

Transcript

(Includes typos and run on sentences)

Welcome to Walk Around. This is Hudson Gardner.

I've always been attracted to edges.

And I feel like I've written about it.

About edges, I guess, many times, trying to understand

Why I'm always kind of going along to edges and right now I'm sitting right at the edge of light in open oak woodland in western Oregon in the Willamette Valley.

It's a really rare type of place these days, actually, in this area.

It used to be the dominant ecotone or guild, kind of a mix of sedges and grasses, reeds in the more marshy areas, madrone, old standing doug fir.

and kind of some open meadows and kind of like a prairie savanna.

I think they call it an oak savanna.

And it's one of the most beautiful types of environment that I think exists in the world.

You have these huge gnarled oak trees that have branches going every different direction and they're so articulate and so complicated and so beautiful and so stable it seems, so strong.

And then you have the grasses in between them and younger oaks coming up and flowers when it's raining in the spring and all these insects that you can hear.

Stellar’s Jays going from dead trees, from a snag to a snag looking around for things to eat.

Woodpeckers and hawks.

And then you have this forest edge here that's just a solid wall of big doug fir and some elderberries and young ash trees.

And here I am sitting right at the edge and the edge of the light thinking about how I'm so attracted to spots like this once again.

I was once talking to a friend who was an ecology major in college, and she was mentioning that when we were stopped somewhere, we were standing with some trees behind us looking out on an open space—and she said “it feels good to be here.” And we both started talking about: why is that?

Why does it feel good to be in a spot like this?

With the trees behind and open space in front and I think it's a very old feeling.

It's a feeling of possibility and openness in front and then behind safety and shelter and places to hide and get out of the elements and stuff and also another different type of food and resource available.

And I think that's why standing on the edges of forests and fields has always felt good to me.

Maybe it's this very old kind of a feeling.

And then there's all these edges in life, like transition, which I feel like in a weird way for the last 10 years or something, I've been in some state of transition where I haven't ever really touched down and stayed wherever I've been.

I feel like there's many people who listen to this podcast who've met me in one of the many places that I've lived and then moved on from.

And transition is really hard, actually, because everything's up in the air.

You have to find all the things.

Whenever you get to the next place you're going, you're constantly considering about what you need.

Friends aren't just a given.

Community isn't just a given.

It's this thing you're having to build actively every time you move somewhere else.

Being on the edge like that for so long, like I have, I feel like has been really hard.

And it makes me wonder why I prolonged this kind of lifestyle, endlessly moving around.

I feel like I've talked about this before,

It's all led me to where I am now which is I think been an essential and really important and extremely I guess extremely necessary path

It's like the more situations I've found myself in and moved on from, the more I've learned.

And not just touching down and staying somewhere has really opened my world to a massive possibility of people and interactions and ways of life and ways of thought and it's really cleaned my brain out and my body I think in many ways.

and kind of detoxified me from some of my harsher tendencies towards judgment and criticism and things like that.

To set out into the world really makes a person realize how insignificant they are.

Especially if you go somewhere and you're always having to rebuild your life wherever you stop.

You're new to everyone.

You have to explain your story.

After a while it starts to get old and you want to just rest and be somewhere and have community and it's hard.

I guess I would call that an edge too.

Edges are important because it's where interchange happens.

If you look at the edges of a cell or

A bioregion or the ocean or a field in a forest, that's where all the activity is happening.

Or a lot of it.

A lot of the biodiversity, for example, in ecology is in the edges of places like estuaries or where rivers meet the sea or the edges of forests, as I was mentioning.

because the light penetrates and allows different things to grow and it brings creatures there and then they have interactions with the plants and other creatures and if you often look around on the edges of fields and you see old trees cut back in the forest there will almost always be a hawk in them if you look long enough because the hawks are watching the edge of the field for mice where the mice come to get the fallen grains and seeds from the grass

And so it's this great interchange.

It's this place of turbidity and interaction and commotion.

The edges are where it's really unsettled, which is, I guess, why it feels unsettled in some ways to be there, but maybe also why I relate to the edges of places so much.

The center, on the other hand, represents, if you think about it, it represents home, it seems.

The center, the middle, the place that we move outwards from.

It seems like it represents some kind of potential point.

And then the edges are where we reach out to, where I found myself reaching out to in my journeys.

I think I have a lot of home trauma because I

I haven't really had much of a sense of home since I was eight or nine years old.

I kind of had to build it over the years and then deconstruct it and build it again and it's been pretty hard.

Wow, I just saw a pileated woodpecker.

I wonder if you can hear that.

They're huge.

They're almost as big as a hawk.

That's special.

So this beautiful oak woodland is part of a Catholic Abbey.

It's a monastery for monks, actually.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Franciscan Monastery, I think.

Or Trappist.

It's a Trappist Abbey.

Not a monastery.

Trappist Abbey.

But it's a beautiful place and I've come here in many seasons.

I haven't come here in late summer in the evening though and it's just so beautiful, the light and the lack of people and all the animals are going about their evening business and could ask for nothing more.

I've been working I'd say 10 to 12 hour days, maybe sometimes 13.

Six days a week at a winery and it's been really hard.

I think partially because I see it as very much a dead end kind of a job.

I'm not intending to go into wine nor do I really like wine.

It was just the only job that I could find around here without having to drive into Portland and get a job there because I'm living at my mom's house.

because my plans to go to college fell through for my acupuncture degree.

So I'm in this weird purgatory at the moment of not being able to go to school but kind of waiting for an entire year, which isn't really very much fun.

So I'm working at this winery and the only thing that's really keeping me sane has been getting to know the people that I'm working with and getting to know their struggles and listening to them and talking with them and trying to kind of get to know how to be a temporary ephemeral friend to them because for the most part maybe totally I won't see any of them after

the work is over most none of them really live anywhere near me and we don't really have that much in common though there's a couple people that I feel like I could be friends with but they don't really live around here well they don't live here at all they live in a bus we have a lot in common but um it's been rough because I haven't really had any time to do something like come to this woodland and

Just sit and think and reflect and kind of puzzle out what my next step is.

Some of the things I've been thinking about a lot are how my art and creativity is such a solitary kind of a practice.

I mean, I don't really interview people that much, which I guess I could do more.

um but my writing and photography i mean all of it's done alone for the most part or i guess sometimes kind of with you know walking around with a friend or a significant other or something but um it's not like i do something for people two of the people i work with are tattooers and so their art is very much

The art that they choose to turn into tattoos is very much something for others.

And that's very useful.

It's a very applicable kind of art.

Flexible, mobile, you can get paid for it.

Especially if you're as skilled as they are.

But for writing, it's like nobody even reads anymore.

I mean there's these statistics which I feel like are just booked that have been coaxed by publishers that are like, well actually more people read than ever before.

That's gotta be nonsense.

I feel like, unless it's people that I don't know about or something, I feel like less people must be reading than ever before.

Or at least they're not reading with much attention.

They're more like skimming stuff or something.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Who knows?

But it's a weird time to be a writer.

And that's why I have this podcast.

Because being a writer is like

Wow.

Good luck.

Um, so I've been thinking, you know, I would really like to offer medicine to people.

Um, once I get licensed and stuff and that's going to take four years.

So boy,what a process I found myself in.

I think purgatory is a pretty good word for it.

At least it feels that way.

And there's this other thing, I don't know if it's just my age or it's my social group or what's going on, but I just feel like more than ever before my social connections and ability to kind of make friends is really lacking.

There's a couple people I've reached out to that I feel like are maybe going to work out as somebody to meet up with and become friends with, but I feel like as people get older, it's like most people don't do the thing I've done, where I've moved around so much, and they've just stayed somewhere for the ten years or whatever it's been that I've been wandering around, or at least for like five, or at least like two.

And in that time they found their set of people, their relationships, their job, and their stability more or less. And they have a hell of a lot more stability than I do, that's for sure.

Like for the most part, I feel like people of my socioeconomic class and race likely have a lot more stability than I have at the moment.

Very privileged, you know, and me as well.

So when I come around or am kind of lurking around the edges of social groups or whatever, it's like, well, you know, who's this guy?

Maybe if he lives here a year, I'll like run into him enough to be friends with him, but it just takes forever.

And, uh, it's really like I'm striking out.

In fact, I feel like to be a lone male of my age, it's almost just like suspicious because I'm single now.

So, it's like, well, what happened to you?

Oh, boy.

Today, there was a rare wind event that was really not that dramatic, but it happens from time to time when the dry sometimes cool but sometimes warm air blows from the interior of the state towards the ocean. The normal flow of the winds blowing from the west reverses and the winds blows from the east. And so today we had kind of a hot dry wind blowing all day. And now there's one kind of playing around through the grasses. And these scrub jays nearby seem to be having a discussion and the winds moving around and

I am walking around trying to figure my life out.

It's just been a lot that's been going on and this is really the only place I can talk about it without feeling like I'm burdening people. Because if you don't want to listen to it, you can just press pause and move on with your life.

So thanks for listening this far if you have.

It's really kind of you.

And I think things will get better.

This is quite the self-absorbed episode but you know honesty is important.

I have a friend who's a psychiatrist in residence and he always tells me that he really appreciates my honesty, and maybe more people do too.

I don't know.

I think honesty is really, really, really important.

And I think that if there's any type of resistance in a person about being honest, that is really a good place to start looking and kind of being curious about.

I just watched this Stellar's Jay fly out from this Ponderosa and grab a moth that was flying through the air and chomp it.

That was pretty cool.

It's nice to be in a natural area rather than just surrounded by tens of thousands of pounds of grapes.

As my friend Cedar calls it, the sticky job site.

Thanks for listening.

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🔘 Daily Notes chronicles my unedited thoughts at the moment, from day to day. This series will end at 1.0, or 10 total posts 🍵

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This is Hudson Gardner. Welcome to Walk Around.

Right now I am sitting in the shade. It's really hot today. So I’m sitting next to a guest house I'm living in, looking out across an unmowed, untended field. It's kind of like a little pasture. This is actually a place I've been coming since I was four or five years old. The first time I came here, I can't even remember. But it's my aunt's house.And it's such a beautiful place. It's one of the only places that has stayed the same for my whole life in terms of something that I returned to, which is really neat and rare for me.

I've been walking around a lot recently. Surveying for what some people call invasive weeds, walking the prairies in northeastern Oregon....

For full transcription & beautiful images, please visit the Walkaround.run website: https://www.walkaround.run/p/dont-worry

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Globemallow

Year after year after year

Smooth rocks smoothened

By water and even sand in wind and even wind

Juniper scrub grew to a tree                split and died

Remains as snag             mostly still alive

Rodent holes take refuge in sandy soil

Beneath the globe mallow crop waiting for the seven year piñon to drop

Seeds. Many young even

Oaks in little gullies of green grass meadows hidden pond and aspen stands big 

Mesatops catch the rain as if

Some rock giant has been slowly gardening

These clefts for a billion years

But groves of bright orange mallow and yellow and blue penstemon

Against the rain fingers touching the horizon, blurring the distance

And us journeying along an imperfect

Family group forged and beaten still smoking from the birth

Without a place to call home together so we wander, create traditions and stories, move onward to places never heard of

A group of young souls just born into the still smoking mud of which we feel the heat of what we were also molded from

And a rag of trash wound up in an ancient sagebrush bush that I take three stems from and show them to Todd for a sniff, stuff my

Mouth full of globemallow flowers and gain sustenance from the land and I’ll tell you 

I’ve given up on meaning and instead work with how I find feelings out in places both empty and full such

Moments of presence to convey a kind of resonance that doesn’t need these words for you to come close to it

But it’s like a fire stoked by attention only and it

Goes out and everything is dark in that realm that you don’t know or see into become like

The old ones who rest in the hills gardening their patch near the piñons and living with the

Least chipmunks and the mule deer and the visitor who comes for cota from the house over

Puts his feet up by the door and stares out at the rain fingers and the mallows and the piñons and junipers and rodents and distant cities and collapse and reforming and smallnesses and bignesses and the Colorado river and the lack of water in the lakes and he sits with his friend staring out and and says only for hours: after all these years…..

PS. Thanks for reading. Funds are tight right now so if you feel like it, throw a few dollars my way.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.walkaround.run

In many ways my experience is as vast or constrained as I allow it to be. I mused on this idea in this week’s show. My conclusion? Walk around, and look around. And maybe be slower to be define how something is, or isn’t.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.walkaround.run

It's rare to find a flow in life where all needs align. Usually, some needs have to be traded for others. And sometimes it's hard for me to even know what it is I really need.

Talking with my friend Blaine Benitez on this episode, I think he's someone who is working to understand the ebb and flow of life, pursuing his needs, and the discovery of them, in an intuitive way. And there's something beyond all that too, something impractical, purely biological, in the way and for the reasons he runs. To me, Blaine is an artist of movement.

To build an altar for something that others see as unproductive, to shape your life around that idea or pursuit, takes a lot of belief in that thing. It takes a kind of patience or endurance that is found all on your own. But the flow of motivation is a collaborative act. Blaine is inspired by his friends, the mountains he lives near, and the feeling he gets from running in them.

In the podcast we talk about taking it easy, but taking it. How the idea of running all 11,000 foot peaks in the Wasatch outside SLC came about, and what it was like to do that in one push. We talk about how we both go outside every day, how Blaine runs every day, about sleeping and napping, sponsorship and priorities in life, how endurance doesn't need to be an intense thing. We talk about how a mindful, content feeling can be accessible in the next breath, the next step, and the idea that resistance uses energy, and creates tension. And we end talking about running beyond reason.

Be sure to listen to the whole episode if you have time, it's really worth it.

And feel free to donate here to help me keep making things like this: Donate

Blaine's AccountsInstagramStravaYouTube

Index

* 3:50 - How Blaine found his way to Salt Lake City

* 7:00 - Figuring out how to camp for free, and how to travel to trial and error

* 9:40 - Making a living

* 12:10 - Stability vs flexibility

* 14:10 - How the idea of the Wasatch 11's came about

* 20:00 - Waking up on an 11,000' summit and running into work that same morning

* 21:00 - Memories of the Wasatch traverse

* 22:50 - Wasatch Traverse: Being present and easing tension

* 24:40 - Focusing on the next step, and having a healthy internal environment

* “A really mindful, content feeling is accessible in the next breath that you take, so it's nice to spend that long in such a vulnerable and physically demanding state”

* 26:16 - "Take it easy, but take it" - Running without suffering

* 27:10 - Gary Snyder - "Watch the ground below your feet speed by"

* 29:30 - "You can always take another step, you can always alleviate some tension"

* 30:10 - Asking hard questions about making things and being someone

* 31:20 - The use of the word endurance, and its relationship to patience

* "Endurance doesn't have to be an intense thing"

* 32:10 - Running every day

* 34:00 - Finding a flow in running

* 37:00 - Running as a way toward mental wellbeing

* Running is primarily a tool for me to navigate internal framework/mental health

* Instead of thinking about something, I turn myself outwards

* 39:40 - Going outside every day

* "Running outside is a biological need. I absolutely need it just like I need food"

* "Running is a way to fulfill biological needs and to fulfill a purpose"

* 43:30 - How running and athletic can be simple, and without goals

* 52:50 - Dan Price and living life on your old terms

* 54:20 - Injuries

* 59:00 - Getting sleep

* 1:05:00 - Hardest runs that Blaine has done, and the Bonneville Shoreline trail

* 1:18:00 - Traven's Dragon Wing Visualization in the Quad Lock (Rock) Race

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PmcNmzdjbE

* https://www.youtube.com/@EnduranceSlack/videos

* 1:21:00 - Fear and the unknown

* 1:38:00 - Sponsorship and priorities

* 1:45:40 - Running beyond reason

* When I'm at work or when I'm around other people I can be a lot more pleasant person around my coworkers

* 2:00:00 - How resistance takes energy

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.walkaround.run

Transcript

This morning I went for a run in the woods, on these really beautiful trails that are used by snowmobiles.

The organization that maintains the trails and works with landowners to allow access is called VAST - The Vermont Association of Snow Travelers.

I'm not really sure if you're supposed to walk on them, but I don't really mind it, I mean

I'm not a snowmobiler. I don't think it messes up the trails when they're really hard to walk on them, or to run on them. And they're really the only trails I could walk on right now without snowshoes around here. So I just kind of do it.

The run goes up the hill beyond the yard and down into a field and it crosses a little road. And then it goes into some woods. The woods are pretty young, I'd say between 10 and 50 years old at the absolute maximum of the trees. There are a lot of beech trees with this canker disease, they have some yellow birch, silver birch. And a couple of maple trees, paper birch, and once in a while there's a pine tree. Kind of a scraggly woods over there.

But the trail is nice, it goes up and down following the grade of a hill. And it eventually gets to this really large field that's owned by a family called the Mudges. And they are summer people, so they aren't here right now. There, the field opens up, the view opens up to something more than you'd expect in Colorado or something. There's a split rail fence and a grove aspen trees and you can see a far ridge with trees on top. If you took a photo of the right way, and people didn't really notice that you're surrounded by deciduous forests, you probably would think that you are in the Rockies or something.

And the magic thing about it is of course, besides the snowmobiles that sometimes go by, there's no one on the trail ever. Because, this part of Vermont is pretty remote. It's not really close to anything, it's about an hour away from everything. And that makes it nice in some ways, but also pretty lonely.

I ran up a steep hill after that through a different set of woods after crossing another road. And into this area that was a logging tract that's owned by owned by this guy named Hemenway who owned a couple thousand acres of forests around here. And he is a good forester type of a person. He contracted out to companies that just do very careful cutting. And so there's a lot of diversity in his woods. And he himself loved to walk in them. And there's been some memorials about him because he did such a beautiful job of preserving access and the woods themselves.

And so those woods are pretty nice, they're pretty well thinned, and some pretty old trees in there that he left, probably told the loggers to leave some of the old trees, which is really good for wildlife.

It's quite a steep hill over there, and running in the snow makes it really hard. And I think it's probably 500 feet vertical from the bottom to the top of it, maybe a little bit more. And the whole course is around 1000 or 1200. I would say it's about three and a half miles one way.

I was trying to run in a pretty decent pace today. But running is always weird. I just I never know how fast I'm gonna run. Maybe it's because I have a phone that's like five years old. Doesn't really record stuff very accurately. But anyway, it was a good run.

As I was coming back down to the big field. I started thinking about something that has been on my mind for a while. Which is this experience that I had when I got a vasectomy recently because this morning I had talked to my friend Beau, who's a Chinese medicine doctor, acupuncturist

and herbalist, Alexander Technique practitioner, Tai Chi practitioner, lots of different things he's, he's into and really skilled at, and I was doing a consult with him. And so something I wanted to ask him about was this experience that happened during the vasectomy that I just had. I went to the Planned Parenthood in Burlington because I've only had good experiences with Planned Parenthood. With my girlfriend's needs, different gynecological needs over the years. And everything went pretty well.

But there was this moment when I was on the table, when the nurse practitioner had cut the wrong part of some tissue, that was supposed to be the vas deferens. And the situation with this surgery is that they have to find the vas deferens by palpating them, touching them with the fingers, and then essentially using forceps or some kind of a clamp to pull them out of the pelvis.

And it's extremely traumatic.

I didn't really know that going into it. But it's like the worst pain I've ever felt, probably is like getting shot in the pelvis or getting kicked or hit with something really hard.

And so she had to do that sensation, where she grabbed the vas deferens with some kind of forceps like three times instead of just two. And it did some damage.

In the moment, what happened was I had what's called vessel vaso-vagal syncope, which means that you're fainting. It's like a state of shock. So what happened was, my hands and my feet started to go numb.

And I started to get really cold and the pulse and the pulse oximeter on my finger, which is those little clamp-clamp things that measure your pulse in your blood pressure and stuff. Actually started to stop working because there was no blood in the extremities anymore. It started pool in the organs. Basically what was happening is I was undergoing a shock—because I saw some indecisiveness in the nurse and I was wondering how long this procedure was going to be prolonged because it was extremely uncomfortable. And I was wondering if she had done it right. I was wondering if she had hurt me.

I have pretty good control over my physical reactions to things. But I guess this was a little too much. And I started to kind of go into that state of fainting.

And it was really strange because the nurse and her assistants just wouldn't look at me. I think they felt embarrassed or afraid. And so they didn't look at me. They looked at the monitor. And the monitor wasn't reading anything. And so they were frustrated with the technology not showing them my vitals.

And I felt disconnected from the experience.

And I felt afraid of course.

And in the end, what helped me was they said one thing I could do at the beginning was squeeze the assistants hand, so I reached out and took their hand and squeezed it. And it felt really warm and strong.

And that's what brought me back.

The nurse had me breath some oxygen from a tank, and that didn't really seem to do anything. But squeezing the person's hand, feeling that warmth and that comfort, was really what worked. And I remember at the end, standing up feeling fine. Saying something to nurse like, well, I guess this is a learning experience for all of us. Which probably wasn't the right thing to say. But I don't know, I can be kind of straightforward sometimes. And maybe she needed to be humbled a little bit. I don't know.

What I felt like when I was laying there was that I wanted to get away from the experience. Things flooded through my mind. Places that I've been beautiful places that I've kind of left a part of myself, so to speak. Places I've hiked, camped, slept, places outside in nature, really. And it was really interesting that my mind went to this specific meadow, in the Gros Ventre wilderness, in northern Wyoming. It's extremely unused and extremely remote, even though it's close to a couple of national parks. And my mind went there to that place in that moment of fear, which I found pretty interesting.

And then, as I recovered from reflecting on that experience, I started to feel bad about myself, I actually apologized to the nurses after the procedure, because I didn't want to inconvenience them, because I felt weak.

Now, weakness comes from fear, or fear, creates weakness, or fear is part of the feeling of weakness. Anyway, they're related somehow. And I've always felt weak. I've never felt like a strong, physically strong person. And so weakness is something that I've always battled with. Athletic activities and stuff have never come naturally to me. And I never really was fast or strong, or any of those things that that men and boys are often expected to be. And so I've always felt kind of weak overall.

And so when I was laying there, and I couldn't handle the pain, seemingly, of this operation, I felt weak. And I thought I had long ago left behind that kind of feeling. Because when I first left my home, which happened to be Nebraska, I started going on trips across the country alone in my car, and I wouldn't choose the direction, except West, and I wouldn't really choose a path and make a plan. And I wouldn't really decide on campsites or anything like that. My only rule was that I didn't want to pay for camping.

And when a person is 18, or 19, or are in their early 20s, and they're pretty young and inexperienced, the world seems like kind of a scary place. At least it did to me. I had a lot of anxiety about my car breaking down, or getting lost or getting stuck somewhere, somebody yelling at me and telling me to leave or—just kind of unfounded fears that have since I've learned about now, that don't make any sense, but they were there. And I've always wondered about where those fears came from. And now even though I'm perfectly comfortable with traveling like that now, not paying for camping, camping wherever I find a flat space, on bike or on foot or in a car or whatever, just finding some pull off and going into the trees—my favorite kind of camping now, which used to terrify me. I used to not sleep when I did that. But that kind of a fear I thought I'd gotten over. Yet when I was on the table, experiencing that shock from the surgery kind of going wrong—I realized I hadn't. Or at least that fear still lives inside of me somewhere because I still felt weak, which is really the source of where that fear came from.

In other words, I felt bad about myself.

I felt like I wasn't good enough or strong enough.

A friend of mine is a really good runner. I can't even explain how beautiful he looks when he runs. I've never actually seen him run in person just videos. Which makes me sad to say. But the fact is, if we ever tried running together, he'd just completely leave me behind. So it probably wouldn't be much fun for him.

But he's the kind of person that I look up to. Because he seems so strong. I know that he's probably got his own problems. Everybody does. But it seems like he's a representative of something that I feel like I'm never really going to be that good at, which is physical strength and endurance.

I've often wondered where that damage came from.

Because if I look at my genealogical history, I've come from very strong people.

One of my grandpa's lived to 92. And the only reason why he died is because he let his prostate cancer go untreated.

Another one of my grandpa's was 87 or 88, when he died, and he basically died of a broken heart because he was so he was a mountain of a man with a laugh like a volcano.

And he was a logger. And my other grandfather was a logger as well. But then he was a farmer. And then he was an insurance salesman. At the end of his life, like probably for the last 30 or 40 years or so. They're really strong old style dudes. They knew how to do everything you needed to do know how to do on a farm.

And then my dad ran many marathons. He grew up on a farm. He knows how to do everything that you need to do on a farm.

And my mom grew up on a ranch, raising horses. She knew most of what you needed to know how to do on a ranch. She also ran marathons. So I always have found it strange that I have not been as strong as my parents or grandparents.

And I've always been curious about that.

And I think that, for me, the things that I've struggled with in life have been emotional damage.

Growing up, my parents got divorced, which I had no idea—I didn't understand what was going on when I was seven, eight years old when that happened. But I can see that that influenced my growth or inhibited my growth in a certain way now.

And it made me addicted to things to try and escape that pain.

And I think it influenced me to this day. And I think that it gave me an anxiety disorder that I've more or less taken care of—through extreme amounts of effort, and care for myself.

But it's just so interesting to see how generations of people can be changed by emotional trauma.

What that can do to someone for their entire life at least, that's what I think my legacy is.

So to stop these endless digressions, I'll just read this poem now and call it done.

The title of it is Swallows from Capistrano, and it's about my grandpa on my mom's side.

Swallows from Capistrano

He had bright blue eyes, with an old-timers folded lidsthe blue that looks like cracks in a glacier, they glowedout from his stony countenance, his bear-like laughfilled the low room where he satwith his wisdom about everything.The scent of pine smoke hung even in summeraround the eaves, the fresh pine needle scent wafted toodown the hill from the hot sun, and he watchedin the spring the swallows who came backfrom the eaves of the mission in far south and hotCapistrano. My mom says she has a strange mind like him, seeselements as part of people, the rising of fire into smokeas a type of person, or a water-earth type, my grandpa,he must have been a volcano under a glacier—those blue eyesand his rumbling chest, pouring forth wisdom and lovefor sitting in the sun. Once everyone could handle him no morehe lit fires with diesel fuel and wet wood through the cold winterand in springhe sat and watched the swallows.

So I guess my hope is that by noticing what has hurt me, in life, I'll be able to heal certain things.

But I also don't think life is just about focusing on what's wrong.

I think it's about listening to what feels good to me.

And one of those things is being outside.

I think that's why my mind went there, when I was laying on that table, in the Planned Parenthood clinic in Burlington.

It's because that's my place of refuge.

And I'm lucky to have traveled to the places that are so unimaginably beautiful that they don't seem like they exist on the same earth as everywhere else.

And I'm also lucky to be able to find those places seemingly anywhere. It's more about how you inhabit them, maybe, then the places themselves.

My grandpa, both of them were tough guys.

Somehow, even though they sustained a lot of damage, they were very physically strong, despite all that.

I guess that kind of a damage that they got went deeper, and it changed their ability to listen.

Fortunately, I've become a pretty good listener. So now, through my running habit, I'll hopefully be able to become stronger physically too.

And heal all these things that have transpired.

Thanks for listening.

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A short episode about a piece of music by Dario Lessing that I have been enjoying

Elfe by Dario Lessinghttps://open.spotify.com/track/5DVGcnv54vwvqFxYg5rH7n

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.walkaround.run