works of wanderlust

Category: deeper thoughts

  • Welcome to the Fediverse

    please note: This is an archive of a post that the author has flagged as containing a site feature or technical update that may no longer be active or in use.

    December 16 of 31 December-ish posts

    I think it’s fair to say that for anyone who has been online this year, 2022 has revealed itself as another parade of madness in the growing poli-cultural mishmash that we call modern society.

    I’ve decided to take a year long break from corporate social media for my forty-sixth year on this planet. Understanding that (a) blogs are social media and (b) I write a blog, it becomes obvious pretty quick to most readers that I’m not taking a break from ALL social, just the big, morally-terrible ones.

    Y’know. Instagram. Twitter. Reddit.

    I was active on all of them before and into most of 2022, but then…

    Describe your 2022 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    This is supposed to be a blog about uncomplicated things, right?

    Last year I wrote on this topic about my massively inconsequential place in the universe and how that shaped most of my purpose-seeking mentality in 2021.

    This year, here I am again ranting about social media.

    Tho, I be ranting because it’s worth being ranty about.

    And the cray-cray for the nay-slay, as my teen daughter would put it, has me thinking more and more about how I can use this space over the next year to focus in on the stuff that brings joy and meaning to my days, and not focus on the absurdity of politics, culture, and the universe.

    To that end, I’ve been dabbling in other ways to connect with people out there in that universe through platforms that are not owned and operated by lunatic billionaires. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what the content I put here is going to look like in 2023.

    I may have started all this to write about running and cooking, but those are foundation stones for a life that has a lot of interesting stories to tell… I think so, anyhow.

    While I should have spent the last ten days or so doing what I promised, which was, y’know, reflective writing and posting here, I’ve actually spent that little bit of free time doing something a bit more promising. I’ve written some software, I’ve built some networks, and I’ve drafted a script for a weekly comic strip that I’ll be launching here in 2023.

    (I even have two weeks off work, starting tonight, to start drawing!)

    I’ve also plugged this blog itself into that great big interconnected not-twitter network called the fediverse, so you should be able to search for @bardo@castironguy.ca on your favourite platform, for example, Mastodon, and you’ll get updates from me right there in your feed.

    Politics and culture might be crazy right now, but I think my newly-remeasured reaction has been to start adding my less-crazy contributions to the mix, to attempt to balance things as much as I can help do that.

    A million rational voices whispering wonders about the amazing universe in which we live might just drown out the thousands screaming madness.

  • Cast Iron Convinced-ish

    After nearly nineteen years of marriage, I’d like to think I’ve learned something about not just my own spouse, but about being married in general. One of those lessons is that a good spouse is one who can keep the other in check, balanced, and grounded. And vice versa, of course.

    Introvert and extrovert. Left and right. Yin and yang.

    I can’t tell you when exactly I became a die hard fan of cast iron cooking. It came on gradually and evolved proof-wise from an ever-growing, ever-expanding collection of pieces and recipes that validated my obsession.

    I can tell you that my wife has been — tho largely supportive — mostly skeptical of the effort and has never fully jumped into the crucible of molten iron that is my cast iron fandom.

    Insomuch as she has enjoyed the results of my cooking efforts, there have been a wave of negs from the gallery, commenting on their weight, or the space they occupy in our cupboards, trotted out like a curious exhibit for visitors who get a peek into the cast iron cupboard.

    Then last week I found her cooking dinner having unearthed a Teflon frying pan from the depths of our pantry.

    Betrayed!?

    Or, yin and yang.

    “You’re using an old frying pan?” I asked.

    “I wasn’t in the mood for a heavy one.” She replied.

    Don’t get me wrong. She knows very well that there are jobs for which a cast iron pan is just a pan and others for which cast iron is king. This past weekend she led the charge for Father’s day, frying up a sizzling pan of smoked pork chops fried to a crispy finish in my ten and quarter inch Lodge.

    But her convinced quotient still leans the “sorta” column whereas mine is camped in the “fully convinced” lot.

    Her caution is the balance to my obsession.

    And for any stray reader who stumbles upon this website or post, perhaps googling a query like of “how to convince my wife to switch to cast iron” or “great reasons to buy your first cast iron pan” the advice I would offer is simple: maybe you never will. Maybe you never should. Maybe you only need to convince yourself and then just cook. The proof is in the pudding… or pancakes. And anyway, who cares if no one else does. Do you and find joy where you need to.

    We have a cupboard full of cast iron and I use it almost daily to prepare our meals, bake our bread, or grill up interesting things to share. Years on, my spouse still doesn’t quite get it… and maybe she never will.

    Maybe that balance is a good thing.

    It reminds me to enjoy and use the pieces I have, to keep learning new skills as to bring her closer to team “fully convinced” and overthink it all to maintain that balanced yin and yang of a good marriage cast in something probably much stronger than iron.

  • Monday Zen: Pulling Weeds

    In a previous post I mentioned that my vegetable garden has been sprouting through the spring in a particular state of ambiguity. 

    As all the little seeds I deliberately planted in May began to germinate and grow, so did the variety of weeds and volunteer plants begin to emerge from the soil.

    In many cases it was difficult to tell them all apart, good from bad, wanted from unwanted.

    In one particular case, the case of the neat rows of deliberately planted carrots versus the scattering of rogue dill weed, the new shoots looked virtually identical in their one and two leaf stages.

    Unable to tell the guests from the squatters, I left them all to be — carrots, dill, and a small assortment of other little plants turning the raw soil into a lush gardenscape of green sprouts.

    Then this past weekend something interesting (though not unexpected) happened.

    The dill began to mature into delicate, blue-green thread of delicate feathery leaves, while the carrots began to mature into paler green wisping fronds.

    In the matter of a couple days I could suddenly tell one from the other. Amazing! At last! And I knelt at the edge of the garden box and acutely began to pluck the invading dill from those neat rows of young carrots.

    Pulling weeds is not particularly interesting, but gardens, weeds, and all that sprouts in the spaces of those efforts makes for a well worn analogy for many aspects of living a well-cultivated life — pun intended.

    Being able to pluck the weeds from your own life, be that from the emotional or physical or whatever spaces of your day-to-day seems simple enough advice.

    But then again, just like the frustrating ambiguity I encountered with my carrots versus dill problem, sometimes deciding which bits are the weeds and which are the germinating seeds that you’ve planted deliberately is not always one hundred percent clear.

    The mind, the heart and the soul are fertile soil for ideas and thoughts and emotions, some purposefully cultivated with care and attention, while others drift in with the wind and grow of their own accord.

    Either can flourish, but it’s up to us with patience and practice to weed the gardens of beings and ensure what grows inside us is meant to be there and will yield the fruits (or veggies) that we want to harvest at the end of the process.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this process lately, both literally as a gardening practice and metaphorically as an act of self-care — and somehow coincidentally both tend to lead me to be on the ground on my knees in my backyard, hands covered in wet soil.

  • After the Storm

    Exactly one week ago, almost to the hour of me writing these words, I finally tested positive for COVID-19. By all accounts and on a severity scale of one to ten (one being no symptoms and ten being the most severe fatal variety) I would rank my infection experience at a 4 or maybe at most a 5.

    There were a few hours in the middle where I considered asking my wife to take me into the hospital, but that feeling was short-lived and a good-night-sleep later I was back to slouching it off on the couch and sick-napping through a Netflix marathon.

    This morning I feel almost normal.

    I mention here for two reasons.

    First, I feel like I need to explain why I haven’t posted in over a week. (Answer: I was sick.)

    But second, this was a blog (and now blossoming project) that was conceived out of the rippled effects of this global pandemic. I can’t say for certain, but I doubt you’d be reading any of these past three-hundred and twenty-five posts if it were not for COVID-19. That pandemic provided both the space and motivation for me to start a little more self-evaluation and personal reflection and refocusing of priorities… and all those fancy things that make one take stock and dive into a new hobby, or reinvigorate an old one… even if it was just me stanning on cast iron cooking and raving about trail running adventure.

    Living through the pandemic, which we’ve all done in some shape or another, has likely left an indelible mark on each of us, the scale and scope of which will only be understood in time.

    For me, living through the pandemic in the first year of that event was marked not actually by a personal infection but rather by being on the front lines of my job, putting in erratic twelve hour days, burning out, being crushed emotionally and physically by the effort and the decisions and the reactions and the uncertainty of it all. I pounded a stake into the metaphorical sand and anchored myself to words and ideas and a reinvented self that I projected outwards through this space. It may have seemed trivial to those who were reading, but this was me tethering myself back into reality and hand-over-hand pulling myself back towards normal.

    None of it is over. Many others have their own COVID stories to conclude, but I realize that by living through the actual infection, even a mild version I’ve kind of put a pin in my pandemic adventure, at least the first volume of it:

    Learning about the pandemic, going through lockdowns and panic and societal shift. Working from home to avoid catching the damn virus. Mountains of PPE, masks of every shape and colour. Three vaccinations. Symptoms and tests and dozens of negatives, false alarms. The slow toe back into the new reality of post-COVID life, work and play. Demasking and lowering defences and then finally getting the damn virus and taking it on the chin for seven full days of fever and cough and headaches and utter fatigue, until…

    Reaching healthy?

    And in the blur of that two-and-half-years-long story, learning a lot about my own self, what I believe in, cherish, value… and how I want to write the sequel to it all.

    The storm has passed. At least, my storm has, and I’m just pausing here for a deep breath — literal and metaphorically — as I look around and ponder where next.

  • Monday Zen: Simplification & Leaving Spaces

    Cultivating a less-complicated life and living the cast iron philosophy shouldn’t need to be an active, busy pursuit towards simplification. How would that even make sense, after all?

    I opened up my email inbox this morning to a corporate reminder that I had excess vacation to use up. Somewhere in a human resources database I not only have a number that represents a full year’s worth of unused vacation days but there is a second number that is reminding me of the days I neglected to spend last year.

    That second number represents nearly three weeks of time off.

    Combined with the first number, I could theoretically take the entire summer off.

    I say “theoretically” because realistically my work schedule and project due list is not so forgiving as to let me vanish for two whole months without consequence.

    I write this if only to note that as much as I evangelise here about that aforementioned less-complicated life and living the cast iron philosophy, it is a daily effort even for me to draw a clear line between the professional self that I so often am and my personal self whom I aspire to be.

    Working from home has blurred that line even more, eroding the old barrier between being at work and at home, on and off.

    How then does one seek to cultivate that philosophy, pushing against the momentum of a work-a-day lifestyle that comes with being a modern suburbanite and needing to pay the bills and save for retirement?

    It is like attempting to stop a boulder already rolling down the hill, and instead just following the routine and letting it roll.

    Apart from scheduling breaks, the existential mindset that seems to be necessitated by a carefree approach to simplification doesn’t jive with daily video chats at exactly 9am and thirty minute lunch breaks and commuting through jostling traffic.

    And as much as I have nearly two months of overdue vacation hours pending some confluence of opportunity and action and approval from a higher authority (in other words my boss) even setting aside larger chunks of time to be less “at work” doesn’t really shift anyone into a permanently new mindset.

    Actively thinking about it helps.

    As does planning to unplan. Preparing your world and your space and your mind to be ready when a bit of clear space opens up, for when an opportunity arises.  True spontaneity is rare, and almost impossible in the type of structured life that is required to hold down a forty hour office job.

    But a plan that leaves unfilled gaps is ready to help cultivate adventure.

    A simple analogy might be to think about the choices made when doing something as simple as parking your car or riding the bus. 

    Often we’re inclined to reduce the gap and park close or hop off transit as near as possible to our destination. Choosing a parking spot or a bus stop with a larger gap to where you need to be leaves a space, a space that might be filled by a meandering walk through a trail, neighbourhood or a park, and through where you never really planned to go.

    Cultivating a less-complicated life and living the cast iron philosophy comes from the same kind of planned lack of a plan “gap” and in leaving spaces between those more structured moments.

    I look at my weeks of unspent vacation and ponder how I can best make use of it.  Sure, I should travel (and I will) and sure I could take off a big chunk of time and do something useful.  

    On the other hand, those hundreds of hours of unplanned time could make for dozens of meaningful gaps in my life, gaps to be filled with spontaneity and simplification.

    Cooking. Campfires. Hikes. Runs. Or even just sitting somewhere and sketching a while. 

    Who can say? And that’s the point.