works of wanderlust

Category: deeper thoughts

  • pihêsiwin ᐱᐦᐁᓯᐏᐣ

    I need to get serious for a post.

    I had a tough conversation at work yesterday about racism.

    One of my coworkers had been slurred while out walking in our otherwise beautiful trails… because of his visible ancestry.

    Really. I mean… *ugh*

    I have a lot of conversations like this recently. Simultaneously not enough talk but sadly too many instances. I guess I should feel good that a work friend feels he can confide, and give me an honest ask of “as a white guy… what the heck is up?”

    (Not that I have an answer.)

    I try to use this blog to write about positive things. After all, like me, I’m sure you have all had enough of folks veering ever-more divisively on political topics throughout your social feeds. But here’s the thing: I go for many walks in the woods, through the trails, around my city, and rarely do I feel fearful. Learning that anyone, but maybe today and particularly a guy who I work with, who is essentially my professional contemporary in position, age, and education, feels threatened walking through those same spaces… that sucks. It compounds the negative and works against the vibe I’m trying to create here.

    This morning yet again I was reminded of this.

    In a meeting someone suggested, as a election approaches in the fall, that we learn to pronounce our ward names. Over the last couple years, Indigenous Elders and urban Indigenous community members worked to tie some historical indigenous naming to what was previously a numbered collection of electoral districts.

    I now live in a ward named pihêsiwin.

    Pee - HEY - sa - win

    The name pihêsiwin means Land of the Thunderbirds and was given to this ward because from an aerial view it is shaped like a pihêsiw (thunderbird).

    These trails I explore, that weave through and between and among the places I work and play and live, they have a long history. My ancestors may have come to live here many, many years ago but on cultural timescales it has been such a short time that I’ve been a part of this space. I share this Cree word, pihêsiwin, because it reminds me of a bigger story hidden among the poplar trees, swimming through the river, and swooping through the skies above me.

    I may spend my entire life here. I may live here and call it home. I may hope to shape it and build in it, and enjoy it, but like everyone before me and everyone after me, I’m just passing through. I hope I can leave something of a mark upon this space, but only if that mark builds upon all the great stories that preceded it and made this space what it is today.

    More importantly that story takes everyone to write no matter your history, shape, colour, or philosophy, all of us shaping it together. And I like it that way.

  • One Hundred Daily Posts

    It’s Saturday, and while there are a dozen other things I could write about this morning I wanted to pause for a moment and reflect on a milestone.

    One hundred posts.

    I started this blog on the first of January and keeping apace of a single post each and every day since New Years Day means that this and the previous ninety-nine daily blogs account for exactly one hundred collections of words, images, links, and other miscellaneous thoughts published and shared here.

    I don’t want to get particularly introspective or navel-gazing on the process of blogging.

    Rather, I simply want to make a note of where we’re at: just getting started.

    Inspired By Others

    I also thought it was a reasonable-enough excuse to share some links to some of the YouTube channels that I‘ve been watching. Part recommendation, part inspiration, part this is what I’ve been spending my time thinking about and where my mind is at these days, here are some other folks putting out great video content and who seem passionate about their subjects.

    Watching the energy that these folks put into their chosen niche topics makes me want to participate in the creative side of the internet. With folks like these as role models, writing a hundred daily blog posts has been a snap.

    Beau Miles
    An Australian filmmaker, outdoorsman, runner, father, and all-round interesting guy, Beau publishes quirky documentaries about his relationship to his world by posing questions no one else thought to ask, like what if I ate nothing but beans for a while, or what if I walked eighty kilometers to work and survived on what I found along the way. If we could all live by the Beau Miles philosophy the world would be a happier place.

    TA Outdoors
    Mike lives in the UK and seems to spend an enviable amount of time with his dad in the woods camping, building cabins, drinking good beers, testing out various survival techniques and generally being adventurous. He comes across as genuine and inquisitive and amplifies my own interest in these same things to the point that I ask myself why I’m not making more time to be like Mike.

    Glen & Friends
    Just down the road a few thousand kilometers here in Canada, Glen is a skilled cook and professional food photographer who produces a high quality cooking channel with his wife that spans the breadth of the culinary landscape while staying practical and interesting. It is very “Canadian” in style and tone and my wife and I often joke that now we don’t need a YouTube channel because Glen’s got us all covered.

    Simone Giertz
    Inquisitive soul Simone makes my list because she inspires both my daughter and I to try to be more inqusitive ourselves. While her niche doesn’t exactly overlap with any of the topics on my own blog, I am curious about many of the things she does in designing, fabricating, engineering, repurposing, refunctioning, and generally being creative from inspired places. You may have seen her work turning her Tesla into a truck or building quirky robots, but there is so much more to discover from someone like Simone who seems genuinely curious about the universe.

    Claire Saffitz
    My daughter and I were fans of Claire at her last YouTube gig and still are with her own channel. With my daughter owning a copy of Claire’s cookbook, the kid is determined to be like her hero and bake all the desserts. We watch Claire’s posts multiple times then invariably out comes the stand mixer and bag of flour and the the house smells like lemon or cinammon for a while.

    Primitive Technology
    Even though my wife recently bought me John’s book and despite watching hours and hours of his channel, I don’t know much about him or where he’s from. His elaborate, wordless videos show him working as he spends time in a jungle of some sort building with his hands primitive tools which he uses to forge primitive kilns which he uses to bake primitive bricks which he uses to construct primitive huts and so on and on. Watching John work is a special kind of peaceful and meditative experience.

    To At Least One Hundred More

    I hope if you’ve been reading along with this jumble of things I’ve been posting you’re enjoying it. Cooking, travel, outdoors, and cast iron are things that swirl around my days and fill my mind and it has been a pleasure to write and share about these things here.

    That said, I have no plan. No end game. No ulterior motive.

    Posting one hundred blogs over the last one hundred days has been a mind-clearing experience, has given me more direction for the summer and some reprive from the groundhog-day existence of living through this pandemic with all of you.

    What else can I say? Thanks for reading this far… and stay tuned the year is just getting started.

    (Now I’m off to bake some bread!)

  • Season

    Three months into writing daily missives here on this blog and it occurred to me that there is one particular word woven through my stories to which I have not given much thought. It is a word with multiple, distinct meanings, and that fact should have been obvious for a guy who writes about the outdoors, cooking, and cast iron cookware.

    SEE - zunn

    Simply, to flavour or preserve food with salt and spices.

    Or… simply, to ready a cooking surface through the application of heat and oils.

    Or… simply, the delineation of winter from spring, spring from summer, summer from autumn, and autumn back into winter.

    Trees, Mountains, Sunshine, Snow

    Maybe not so simple?

    The etymology of the word season seems to come from the Latin satio, which is itself entwined in the word to sow, or to make something ready.

    One readies food to be eaten or a pan to be cooked upon.

    Nature readies the world to grow, blossom, produce, and come to life …and then resets itself to make ready all over the next year.

    Seasoning is an act of maturation and preparation.

    It is purposeful conditioning.

    To season is to make something richer and more ready.

    These concepts strung together clearly form a broader theme for the things I’ve been thinking about and writing about and sharing here. Three months in, ninety disconnected posts, and some forty thousand words spent has distilled down to one not so simple word: season.

    To season. To be seasoned. To welcome the changing seasons. To ready the heart and mind. To sow a space for good food in one’s home. To mellow the harsh cold iron of a skillet against the delicate organic surface of food. To flavour life as one ages one’s mind and soul against the cyclical reset of the universe. To season.

  • Sundog

    The horizon-hugging sun of autumn and spring passing through the crisp, frosty air often whistles to her a pair of trusty companions: sundogs.

    SUNN - dawg

    Simply, sunlight refracting through ice crystals in the clouds creating a lens or halo effect in the sky.

    Listed among my favourite words is sundog.

    We had finished our recent Sunday Run and had gathered (socially distantly, of course) in the parking lot to chat and chatter. In the frosty sky to the east the glare of the sunlight through the wisps of clouds highlighted a pair of sundogs punctuating hours of the long spring dawn.

    With similar optical physics to how a rainbow appears, I suspect, the photons of light of our sun scatter in a predictable path as they pass through the billions of billions of microscopic ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. The sky itself acts as though it is a miles-wide prism or lens, and the illusion that meets our eyes is a pair of visible flares approximately twenty-two degrees to the left and the right of the sun itself.

    Or more poetically, the sun tracks through these cool spring skies with her sundogs by her side and surveys the world as it thaws beneath our feet.

  • What counts as a “visit” when traveling?

    I have a rule about traveling.

    Specifically, I have a rule about how I talk about traveling.

    When someone asks have you ever visited a place then my response is often… well… technically, that depends… sorta… kinda… here let me explain…

    A night shot of a European hotel.

    So, here. Let me explain.

    I’ve been poking through a lot of travel blogs lately. Thanks to the Twitter algorithm and the types of things I post I get recommended so many accounts that are hashtag-travel, and (I assume) vice versa, because that’s a good fraction of the folks who follow me first. Those blogs tend to fall into two categories:

    a) bloggers for money, who are (or who are trying to be) social media influencers, posting lots of gorgeous photos and extensive articles on very specific vacations, and

    b) bloggers for passion, who are (often) folks or couples in their 20s living their best life and writing about it while having this goal of “visiting 10 new countries every year” or “visiting 100 countries before I turn 30!”

    This second group tends to make me think about my own definition of what constitutes a visit.

    To clarify, an example: about five years ago the family and I spent 10 days travelling through Iceland, stopping at numerous small towns and moving on the next morning, eating, drinking, spending, taking lots of photos. Two years ago we had a layover at the airport in Iceland, ate some breakfast at the restaurant there, bought some snacks, and left a few hours later. In my mind, we’ve only visited Iceland once. I don’t count an airport layover as a visit.

    Another example: In 2006 or so we did a bus tour of Eastern Europe, one of those Contiki party trips where they shuttle you from city to city, hotel to hotel, bar to bar, and you take lots of pictures, drink yourself silly, and remember the blur twenty years later. Between a hotel in Budapest and a hotel in Krakow, the bus stopped for lunch in a small city in Slovakia. Can I tell people I’ve visited Slovakia? I had a delicious pizza lunch in an old town patio that I still don’t know how we successfully ordered from the waitress who spoke almost no English, but I honestly don’t claim that I’ve “visited” Slovakia. I don’t tend to count it on my list of visited countries.

    So this brings me back to my rule about how I talk about traveling.

    What counts as a visit for me?

    Personally, it’s a basic rule: an overnight, a meal, and time on feet in the street.

    If I count a place visited it means I’ve slept there, eaten, and wandered about. None of this “I drove through and stopped for coffee” or “I had a layover at the airport there once” stuff.

    What do you count as a visit?