deeper thoughts – Page 17 – Cast Iron Dreams

2021-09-212021-11-02 episode 213

Last Day of Summer

And just like that the leaves turned yellow, the air felt crisper, and another summer drifted into memory.

In three short months we managed to squeeze in quite a lot of action, particularlly considering that the world was still fairly locked down with this pandemic.

We visited the mountains for two weeks across two separate trips, completed a modest list of hikes, kayaked on a couple mountain lakes, photographed glaciers, and enjoyed the wilderness.

We cooked outdoors on our new backyard fire pit, roasting a crazy variety of meats, a garden’s worth of vegetables, and too many marshmallows to count.

We hosted friends in our backyard, spending lovely afternoons or evenings with (on different occasions) family for elaborate meals, co-workers for beers, friends for campfires, and my running crew for a brithday party.

We met our neighbours in the park, new friendly relationships spurred on by the magnetic conversation starting magic of a cute puppy who makes pals with anyone and drags me into it at the other end of a leash.

We ran as I hosted at least a dozen weeks of adventure runs around and just outside the city, encouraging a dozen (give or take) of my running crew to join me in exploring new trails and unfamiliar routes, often with an ice cream or beer at the end of it.

We enjoyed our own backyard.

We toured our own city.

We lived in our space, not always by choice, but making the best of the situation.

The summer of 2021 ends in a couple short hours and it may not have been perfect, but it certainly was not wasted.

2021-09-202021-11-02 episode 212

Unpoliticalish

It’s not that I’m not a political guy. In fact, usually kinda the opposite.

But I’ve made a very deliberate decision to keep this space fairly free of politics and opinion that links (directly) back to those topics.

That said, it’s election day in Canada and today the nation was off to the polls to pick a federal government.

Traditionally, I pour myself a glass of whiskey, settle onto the couch, turn on the television and watch with bated breath as the results start to roll in.

With a country as geographically expansive as Canada, there is literally a rolling in of the results as we cascade east to west waiting for election zones to close down and start reporting results.

My region closed a few minutes ago and numbers have started appearing on the bottom of the screenful of commentators on the CBC coverage.

The glass of whiskey will either be a celebratory drink or a mournful way to drown some political sorrows.

As of now I don’t know which, so I’m sipping and watching and sipping some more.

2021-09-132021-11-02 episode 205

Daily Goals (and Such)

Back in January of this year I decided to re-invigorate a habit that I’d been neglecting for a long time, and start writing more frequently. You’re reading the results of that effort right now: after more than eight months of daily (with a small break for summer fun) blogging resulting in over two hundred posts to this space.

Daily habits seem trivial, but in my experience become a drumbeat of steady progress towards getting stronger, faster, better, or simply more attuned to the nuances of an effort.

Over that aforementioned summer break I took up a couple more daily habits that have been fitting into my waking routine and are starting to show progress and results.

The first of those habits has been a daily body strength workout, involving a minumum number of push-up and sit-ups and some other equipment free exercises. None of it is a proper workout, but the payoff after two months of, say, thirty push-ups every day has been a cumulative progress towards some creaks and groans that were developing after eighteen months of working from home during the pandemic.

The second (and more interesting) of my new daily habits, and something I wrote about a couple weeks ago, is that I’ve dug into my old (and bought some new) art supplies, and dedicated myself to daily sketching.

If the day has been busy and my time is short, might just draw a simple thing like my car keys, a pen sitting on the table or any other curious object laying around the house. Ten minutes with a pen and a paper.

Or, if I have more time and inclination, then all that inspiration from reading, watching, and absorbing the work of other artists around the theme of rough watercolour sketching turns into a more elaborate project. I’ll snap a photo, dig through my travel pictures, or prop up my notepad out and about in the city and draw a small scene.

The habit of exercising my artistic soul every day has paid off.

The work that I was doing a month ago was not terrible, but it was markedly weaker than just a few weeks of practice has left in its wake. (I won’t even post those early sketches.) I won’t claim to have found some kind of greatness or unlocked a hidden talent, but I am starting to get a feel for my own style and building a great deal of confidence around things I can bring to life on the page. I can only imagine that this will steadily improve over the next months and beyond.

All that (plus two hundred blog posts and some improved upper body strength) from a little daily dedication to a simple idea: habit building.

2021-09-102021-11-02 episode 202

Friday Finds: Pressed Flowers

Fatherhood is funny.

Finding honest and interesting things to do with a young child can lead one down all sorts of previously unfollowed paths of creative exploration and into all kinds of time-filling follies.

For (nearly) fourteen years I’ve been nudging my daughter to try new things, to explore her creative self, and find fanciful ways to fill her mind with fabulous experiences.

For whatever reason for which I can’t quite recall, I was recently exploring something far less fanciful: the closet in my office… which is in itself an archeological site dating back to my having moved into the space well over a decade ago.

Finding my old university textbooks was not surprising, but finding those same textbooks stuffed full of dried wild flowers was something that I had obviously done long ago but almost forgotten about.

Foggy though my memory was on the exact timeline, I recall spending the day with my toddler-aged daughter in the local natural areas of the river valley, filling our days with simple delights and effortless fun.

Frolicking through the tall grasses and between the poplar trees, I remember that we picked flowers and I’d promised her that we would dry them and “make a present for mommy.”

Fascination is an emotion so easily overwhelmed by impatience, especially for someone only three or four years old, and I assume the flowers were stuffed into some conveniently fulsome tomes, my old microbiology textbook for one, to begin the drying and pressing process, then…

Forgotten.

Fast forward to this week and the aforementioned archeological dig through the back corners of my closet revealed a small stack of flagrantly outdated text books filled with the feathered edges of wax paper pressings, and a dozen or so samples of decade-old dried flowers.

Finding something meaningful to do with these fragments of my shared history with a daughter who is growing up and out so quickly may be a fruitless effort, or…

Forcing some kind of nostalgia into something so fleeting, a single day from a forgotten timeframe shared by a father and daughter my prove old-fashioned to her teenage eyes.

Faithless as that may seem, I almost stuck those textbooks back into the dark corners of my closet to wait out another decade.

Flowers, dried and brittle, imbued with some kind of narrative for a long lost day would likely age further and form an even more fortified link to that flipbook past given a few more fleeting years of passing time, or…

Forgotten again.

Frail and lost to time.

Famous to no one but my fleeting recollection of a fragile moment.

Fatherhood is funny, and fumbling my forties with emotions and curiously fading memories in unforeseen forms on an otherwise quiet Friday morning.