works of wanderlust

Tag: blogging

  • three-sixty-five.

    I don’t want to say I’ve been saving up for this post, but after two years and two months of keeping a so-called “daily” blog, this — what you’re reading right now — is post three-sixty-five. One post per day for one full year. This should have been the post I wrote on December 31, 2021, but instead I’m writing it at the end of February 2023. A little more than a year late, and not exactly a great score for a “daily” writing plan.

    Obviously I missed a few.

    Yet, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of daily practice in the last couple months.

    For example:

    In February I’ve been trying to write every day. I’ve started a more succinct and back-to-the-daily-spirit and original intention of this site called “daily bardo” where I focus less on long-winded articles looking to have complexity and draw, and instead just write something every day. But I’ve also been writing a bit of fiction every day (not here) and flexing my creative writing muscles this month.

    In March, I’ve decided I’m going to try and do something call #mARTch wherein I’m hoping to draw and paint and sketch and do art every day of the month. Daily art. Most readers who pass through here probably don’t know but I’ve got a couple blogs that I write on, and one of those I started mid-last year and is very much an art and creative digital studio site where I post much more about that personal journey.

    In April, with my knee almost fully (seemingly) healed, I’m hoping that a few things come together with respect to my fitness and state-of-injury and the weather and I can work towards a daily run. Running every day seems obvious and a lot of people ask me if I already do that. “Do you run every day?” No. Of course, not. There are people who do, who have, run daily for years. But I can usually keep it up for twenty or thirty days before the body just goes “ugh” — tho, ultimately the payoff is worth it with the increase in fitness at the end. I’m going to try to do a daily run streak in April, all factors cooperating.

    I haven’t given much thought to the rest of the months of the year, but I’m sure something will occur to me to take on as a daily challenge for May… June… maybe even July and beyond.

    Daily practice isn’t about volume, nor output, nor streaks, and neither is it about simply filling a calendar.

    Daily practice is about doing something on repeat, routinely, no matter the mood or state of mind you happen to be in or the place you are at physically, mentally, emotionally, or whatever.

    Daily practice is about building a creative muscle that performs whenever you need it, not just when you feel like it. It’s about controlling the creative process, the writing mind, and the physical being — and being able to call upon it at leisure, and not merely building a skill that requires an external factor to be present and available and in control of you.

    Also, I like the idea of daily because you can go to bed each night fulfilled in accomplishing at least one thing. And tomorrow is always just one sunrise away.

    I originally set out to write the Cast Iron Guy daily. I started this blog in January 2021, in the middle of the pandemic and in search of something normal, simple, fixing me towards sanity, something to write about, think about, every day grounding me here. Ultimately, it took me over two years to write a year’s-worth of daily blogs, and I’m fine with that. It’s not a failure. It is 365 posts after all. It is 281,000 words and over 28,500 visitors. It’s something rather than nothing. So? Here’s to the next three hundred and sixty-five.

  • daily

    December 31 of 31 December-ish posts

    Oh, rich. Coming from the guy who couldn’t manage a daily post in December, huh?

    Daily?

    One word that sums up your theme for 2023.

    Daily.

    Yes. That’s it.

    It’s New Years Eve. Again. And rolling into 2023 leaving 2022 behind I got to thinking of how I want to spend the year.

    As it turns out (I find as I have two weeks off work and have time to think about these things) I’m happiest when I’m creating, y’know, anything.

    Oh, maybe I won’t be posting a blog article every day, or whatever, but my mind was churning on what it means to be creative and productive for every single day of a whole year.

    Writing. Drawing. Photographing. Video…ing.

    And not only the net results of daily effort but the meta-results: creative output about daily creativity. Like, making posts or videos about “How I Painted One Picture Daily for a Month!” or “What Daily Cycling did for My Mental and Physical Health” and sharing those.

    Daily.

    Daily stuff.

    Daily reflections.

    Daily.

    Tomorrow morning will be the two-year anniversary of this website. I set out on January first of 2021 to start writing a daily blog. We were in the middle of a pandemic (arguably we still are) and I had no idea that we would spend two more years slowly getting back to normal. I had assumed (like most of you) that 2021 was our year to climb back out of it and by, say, mid-summer we’d be camping and hiking and cooking on firepits with our friends. I was going to document that. Daily was my theme for 2021. And I almost did it.

    My perspective was wrong, though.

    I wanted to bring you all into this adventure and create a wonderful site full of amazing ideas. What it turned into was a journal of a guy trying to do that.

    If you’re still reading, or just recently joined, you may be a bit disappointed with my effort in 2022.

    I wrote about some of that yesterday and how I’ve been in a bit of a funk because of a knee injury. It sucks. And I know it. And I think I can will myself to do better.

    I keep telling myself that (a) since I’m not trying to make money off this blog then (b) I don’t need to follow any particular set of rules from all those pro-bloggers out there with their tips for maximizing traffic, so (c) this site can be whatever I want it to be.

    In 2021, it tried to be a daily blog about outdoor life, cast iron cooking, and running adventure.

    In 2022, it was a journal of healing and reflecting on a tough year.

    In 2023, I think I want it to be about that idea of daily. Creating daily. Living in the day. Being present and enjoying the moment each and every day, even if just long enough to capture a bit of it as art or photos or video. You’ll see more of that starting tomorrow. If you come along for the ride, or if you’ve been along the whole time, thanks. We’ll see you on the next day… and the day after… and the day after that.

    Happy New Year.

  • 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.

  • December-ish (but still November-ish)

    Every year I tend to get a bit sentimental and reflective when December rolls around.

    As I close in on the end of my second full year of this blog, I’m hoping to channel some of that sentimentality into some productive creative motivation here (and also in other online and offline spaces I’ve been inhabiting lately.)

    Following my strict-ish rule of trying to keep this blog as fuzzily attached to my real persona as possible, I won’t point you in the direction of those other creative pursuits, things like posting a daily watercolour painting, writing fiction every day in December, and taking one photo per day. But I can let you know that I’m opening up my creative floodgates here too, particularly so, and plan to relaunch my December-ish daily blogging effort once again and fill your December reading with some of that aforementioned sentimentality.

    Each day I’ll try to write and post a little something on this site based on the same prompts that I wrote to on the same day of the month as last December.

    And if you are clever, like I know you are, you can find when you click on an actual post (like this one and not just the front page or an archive list) on the side bar (or bottom if you read on a phone) there should be a little widget called “on this day” that points you at the post I wrote on the same date but in previous years. Handy right?

    It’s cold outside right now. I walked a couple city blocks outside this morning and the wind was gusting and biting a raw cold that is hard to explain unless you’ve felt it. Walking in minus twenty five degrees Celsius is like touching a frying pan that has cooled enough not too burn yet is still far too hot to hold… that, but with cold. And with your face.

    It’s a good kind of weather to sit inside and dream of warmer days and write.

    So, stay tuned. Here comes December. Ish.

  • Un-Wounding

    I hate blog posts that are just excuses for not writing.

    That said, I have been quiet for quite a while.

    That deserves at least a little excuse for not writing.

    The summer was a bust. Back in July when I wrote about my knee I was still moderately hopeful that whatever my self-diagnosed ailment turned out to be, that it would (at most) result in a couple weeks of healing and I’d be back at it. Hiking. Running. Doing things I loved to do.

    What I didn’t expect was that finally seeking some medical intervention would set me on a path that has sidelined me for what is now almost exactly four months.

    It turned out that yes, I damaged my MCL, a ligament that runs up on the inside line of the knee, but no, it’s not a simple injury. I’ve been going to physiotherapy and have severely reduced my participation in the things that would have brought me a bit more balance this past summer through work and life stress. There have been days I can barely walk. Sleepless nights. Urgent calls to medical professionals. And a lot of frustration and…

    It’s been a tough span. Nor one I wanted to remember, let alone raise up and publicize online. Thus… no blogs were writ.

    I mean, there was not much for adventure either when you’re injured, to be honest. Some car travel. Me limping around the local park to make sure the dog was walked. Watching the weeds grow in a garden I couldn’t bend down to deal with. Getting fat off sourdough bread.

    That’s my little excuse.

    Like I said, I’ve been pushing through physiotherapy … and things are improving. Slowly.

    I’ve started running a bit. Mostly short thirty second or one minute intervals until the pain builds up and I need to stop for another day. My physio has me working towards a big goal, running the Chicago Marathon, which I (reluctantly) signed up for as I had a free entry leftover from a deferral from the 2020 race cancellation. That’s next October. Eleven months from as I write this. I’m hopeful.

    And then the weather arrived in force this week. It started snowing on the second day of November and hasn’t really stopped for more than a few hours here and there. It went from a mild autumn to a blustery winter in the span of a single night.

    Winter adventure is a thing, right?

    I haven’t written for a while, and that’s my excuse. Not a great one, but an excuse nonetheless. And now I’ll keep writing. I haven’t left. At least… not yet. Hopefully not soon. Stay tuned.