1. For the first time in way too long, I returned to the Health and Wellness Trail over near the hospital and huffed and puffed up the trail to where the picnic tables sit. It actually went pretty well. I stopped and caught my breath a few times, took advantage of both benches on the trail and sat for a while, and stayed hydrated. I thought a lot about my inward will and why it took me until today to will myself to go through the difficulties I experience on a hike after not having done it for a while.
So, yes, I suffered a little bit today, but, on the whole, this hike today, even though it's not that long, energized me and helped me feel much better both mentally and physically.
Now to will myself to stay at it.
2. After doing some housework and paper organizing, I tuned in once again to the Criterion Channel's collection of boxing movies and watched a documentary released in 1970, a.k.a. Cassius Clay.
Simultaneously, and, I'd say, inevitably, this movie documented both the African-American history of the USA from about 1960-68/9 as well as the emergence of Cassius Clay as the world's best heavyweight boxer and his conversion to the Nation of Islam when he became Muhammed Ali.
When I was a boy, I pretty much experienced the rise of Cassius Clay and the emergence of the boxer and political activist Muhammed Ali through the eyes of my father and his adult friends.
They were, to say the least, turned off by Clay/Ali's clowning, his rhymes, his proclamations ("I am the greatest!"), and his predictions. They were especially outraged by Ali's refusal to be inducted into military service and his political and spiritual affiliation with the Nation of Islam and, more specifically, Malcolm X.
So, today, I found it very interesting to watch a movie made during the most controversial years of Ali's life that, I thought, was doing its best to understand Ali from within him. All of my perceptions about Ali, when I was young, had been judgments of him from the outside. I never heard anyone try to understand Ali's mind, heart, or soul. In private, as a young guy, I tried to understand him as best I could and had I seen this movie when it was first released, it would have helped me in my young efforts to understand not only Ali, but the complex world I was growing up in.
Let me be clear: this movie is about Ali as a boxer, his technique, his strategies, his growth as a boxer before he was banned from the sport. At the same time, it's about Ali's place in our country's culture and history. It had to be that. Ali was a lightning rod, a highly public figure, who was outspoken about the war in Vietnam and about the experience of being black in the USA.
3. At 7:00, I tuned into Bill Davie's weekly online presentation, Poetry Break. Both Bill and his wife, Diane, have been recovering from a persistent case of Covid. Bill didn't do his show last week and tonight he sounded better than he had last time we Zoomed, but he continues, after two weeks, to be a bit hoarse, prone to some coughing, and feeling the effects of fatigue.
Bill read poems he's written while ill.
He then turned to poems listeners have sent into him, including a prophetic Marge Piercy poem, "Right to Life", a couple of excellent works by Seattle poet John Gorski, the superb poem "The Journey" by Mary Oliver, and the poem often known as "When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple", but is actually titled, "Warning" by Jenny Joseph.
Bill read the Mary Oliver poem as well as the one by Jenny Joseph as a way to commemorate Diane's retirement, not even a week old yet.
Congratulations to Diane!
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