works of wanderlust

Category: wandering & thinking

  • A Blogging Good Anniversary

    I occasionally allude to an interesting-to-me fact: I’ve been posting my thoughts online in the form of blogs for a long time.

    To give that claim some context, as of today I have been a blogger for twenty years.

    That’s right.

    On April 20, 2001, twenty years ago to today, I posted my first dispatch post from a hot little apartment in metro Vancouver shortly after moving there for a post-university job.

    I don’t want to sour this post in any way with recollections of why I shelved that blog or mourning all the other little temporary websites that lived for a time online before fading into the obscurity of a backup file on my computer. Needless to say, the digital road from there to here has been long, rewarding, introspective, emotional, and likely worn out more than one keyboard.

    I’ve been read by lot of people for too many reasons to list.

    I’ve been scraped by content farms stealing my words and photos.

    I’ve been recognized by media and linked from news articles.

    I’ve been hacked.

    I’ve been awarded for words, design, and concept.

    I’ve been undermined by people I had trusted for things I’d written in good faith.

    I’ve told stories.

    I’ve had regrets.

    I’ve corrected mistakes.

    I’ve learned, grown, shared, and opened myself up.

    Literally millions of words have appeared online at times, and as many of those words as I have cared to keep are safely archived and privately backed up in safe digital spaces for my personal future reference.

    If you have been reading and enjoying this blog, thanks. It is the latest in now-twenty years of efforts to share my words and thoughts and creative soul online. It has been a big part of my life, mostly for good, and always interesting… well, at least for me.

    It has been an outlet and an inspiration to step out of a pandemic-based rut (an even more significant thing to say today as my age-group eligibility for a vaccine starts this morning!)

    I write and post, and I write therefore I am. And while this blog may still be young and new, for me personally this is a blogging good anniversary worth pausing to blog about.

  • Douglas Fir

    Look up but watch where you’re going.

    On a recent trip to the mountains I was reminded of the diversity of the forest and the interesting world of trees. I may not work in the field, but I have a four year university degree in biology which included more ecology, botany, and entomology coursework than any normal lifespan should have to contain.

    Even though it didn’t turn into a job, those four years earned me an immovable respect for the natural world and a firmly entrenched fascination with the diversity of living things.

    I was looking up at the trees, but not really watching where I was going.

    Of the many of varieties of trees I was looking at, and among the dozens of species that make up the mountain forests, there is one that has held my interest for a very long time: the mighty and curiously-named Douglas Fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. It has held my interest not because it is necessarily an interesting tree, which it probably is in its own right, but because when I learned about this tree as a kid my best friend’s name was “Doug” and I always felt a bit jealous that he had his own tree.

    Yet, the Douglas fir was most definitely not named after my school chum, Doug. It was in fact named after a nineteenth century Scottish botanist and explorer named David Douglas. He is credited (in the narrow bandwidth of European science) with first cultivating the fir which would later bear his name. He did this in his twenties. In his twenties!

    I certainly did not discover or cultivate much of interest in my twenties. Though in my thirties I helped cultivate a daughter who is now a teenager and who is anxiously contemplating her future education. We spent nearly an hour last night having a heart-to-heart conversation, me trying to bear witness to her struggles to find a meaningful life path, and also empathize through recounting my plight of squandering a university education in an interesting field for which I still have passion but most definitely no career.

    She is young and still looking up at those millions of trees in the forest and their possibilities.

    I’m getting older and often watching my feet, trying to remember to look up occasional and admire that world around me.

    Look up.

    David Douglas died under mysterious circumstances at the age of thirty five, but the officially documented cause was still interesting. Like a cartoon villain in a Gilligan’s Island rerun, he fell into a trap hole on a Hawaiian island and was mauled to death by an angry bull while his dog watched from the edge the pit. I suppose it could be said he, being a young and ambitious guy, spent a lot of time looking up at the trees and what was under his feet ultimately got him in the end.

    The moral of the story is that if you’re always looking up at the trees someone might name one of those trees after you forever securing your legacy… but also don’t be surprised if you fall into a hole to your immediate doom.

    The parenting lesson is that I need to give my teenage daughter the ability to look up and admire those trees, take her to the forest (both literal and metaphorical) but that I also need to be a good dad and keep my eyes on the ground for her. Maybe those four years of university weren’t a waste of time after all.

  • 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.