Category Archives: Reflections

Garden, Reflections

Learning to accept imperfection through gardening (IndieWeb Carnival: Gardening)

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two overgrown espalier apples on a fence

Mistake: I planted these espalier apple trees too close together
Imperfection: I failed to prune these trees for many years, and when I did, I did it wrong
*** REFRAMING ***
Success: I’ve learned how to prune fruit trees, and still have more to learn
Success: these trees provide a pretty green cover for the fence

This post is a response to Mark Sutherland’s gardening prompt for the August 2023 IndieWeb Carnival.

For many years, I’ve been frustrated by my failings as a gardener. I step outside and see an endless to-do list. My mistakes stand out from the landscape, everything else receding behind the flaws.

But I cannot let my garden be solely a catalogue of mistakes, or it makes me feel resentful and guilty. I have had to learn to enjoy what is good about the garden while living with the mistakes and imperfections.

I’m working on reframing what I see when I look at my garden to also see my successes. While it’s easy to focus on my failings, I have to look past the surface level conditions to the longer-term process of building and maintaining a garden. Individual plants are less important than the whole. I need to remember my intent for the garden, and consider how it is meeting that. I cannot look at it through the gaze of an outsider — tidy suburban conformity is not my goal.

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Reflections

Why I enjoy photographing textures (IndieWeb Carnival: Joy)

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Shiny sheets of dark brown seaweed and kelp

This post is in response to James’ IndieWeb Carnival prompt “Moments of Joy.”

I collect textures.

This is, perhaps, an unusual thing to collect, but I have been gathering them for years.

On most trips I take, whether short outings or long vacations, I photograph textures along with more traditional landscapes. I take them in urban environments as well as outdoors, capturing the visual details that make up a place. So others can appreciate and make use of them as well, I’ve released 15 collections of natural textures photographed in the Pacific Northwest.

But over the past few years, I’ve essentially stopped traveling due to the pandemic. We’ve taken occasional day trips, but those have presented less opportunity for shooting textures. When I went to the beach this week, the visual variety inspired me to photograph textures again — so I shot the bedrock and kelp and eelgrass to create my first texture collection since 2020.

Even though I’ve previously released texture collections from the shoreline in Semiahmoo, Tofino, and Ocean Shores, I find each place offers a slightly different palette of textures. In collection, they reveal a personality.

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Reflections, Renewal

What makes a good day?

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Black tabby lies pressed up against white sealpoint on black blanket and white bedspread

I started reading Chris Bailey’s newest book, How to Calm Your Mind, and suspect I’m going to like it as much as his other books. Based on the first thirty pages, the way his thinking about productivity has shifted over time aligns with how my perspective has changed. In our success-oriented culture, it’s too easy for us to bind our identity up in what we do and accomplish, but life is so much more.

To help transition to a broader vision of a good life, he suggests considering what makes a good day.

For me, a good day often has several of these elements:

  • Writing fiction (productivity)
  • Blogging (productivity, learning)
  • Working on one of my websites (play, productivity)
  • Going on an adventure (sensation, movement, novelty, nature)
  • Taking a walk with a friend (connection, nature, movement)
  • Spotting a cool plant or pretty sunset or wild animal living its best life (sensation, novelty, nature)
  • Photography (nature, sensation)
  • Hanging out with my husband or friends (connection)
  • Learning something (learning, novelty)
  • Experiencing something new (sensation, novelty)
  • Listening to music, discovering new music (sensation, novelty)
  • Reading a book (relaxing)
  • Lounging around doing nothing with the cats or my husband (relaxing)
  • Baking a treat (sensation, movement)
  • Eating something delicious (sensation)

Besides writing fiction, these are the activities I’m trying to do on weekends to help myself enjoy my days off and refill my well. I’m looking forward to reading Bailey’s thoughts on restorative and calming activities.

Attuning to a simpler life

A lot of the things that make a day good for me now are home-based. In the past I think I would have put more weight on traveling or going places — I might have said hiking in the mountains rather than taking a walk, something that requires a lot more time and energy and effort. Today I can better appreciate a walk with a friend fifteen minutes from home by surface streets instead of trekking out to a hike an hour and a half up the freeway. The pandemic has helped me build a “smaller,” slower life that’s richer on a daily basis. My quiet little local life is satisfying and mellow; my days and weeks have a cozy rhythm, punctuated by bursts of inspiration and connection.

Before, my weeks were more harried as I drove half an hour each way to activities on multiple days — and more expensive because I needed to buy drinks or food there. I’ve reconfigured how I spend time with friends, focusing on getting together with one or two people at a time instead of a larger group, which gives us time to grow a deeper connection and means I can do something different with each person.

My husband and I haven’t been traveling, even in the smaller sphere of the Northwest that we’ve focused on in recent years. I miss the novelty of exploring a new place, but also recognize how exhausting it is for me to plan a trip: research and develop an itinerary aligned with our timing, research and book hotels and travel, plan activities in each location and make reservations as needed, arrange a cat-sitter, pack based on the weather forecast and activities. FOMO meant I’d pore over reviews and hunt for off-the-beaten-path hidden gems so I could be sure we got the most out of every minute. Though I don’t want to give up traveling forever, I’ve been enjoying an extended break from the stress of planning and traveling. Now that I am self-employed and my husband works remotely, I wonder if future trips could be extended to be less frenzied.

But even as many changes have improved my daily life, I still feel a need for novelty that I’m not able to fill now with experiences like travel or museum visits. Several activities I highlighted as making a good day are oriented on sensation and novelty; I’m curious to read Bailey’s proposal for a “dopamine reset.” He posits that culturally we’ve raised the bar of stimulation we need to be interested in activities and entertainment. That makes sense, especially in coordination with our lessening attention spans driven by a shift to shorter and faster-paced media. While I’ve stumbled into some simplifications on my own, I also have redirected more of my need for novelty at the internet. It’s helpful to remind myself of how many analog activities are fulfilling so I don’t always get swept away by the dopamine engine of the internet.

Reflections

Smoke on the water

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Hazy peninsula dividing pink lake from pink sky, awash in muted color from the smoke

It was 88 degrees on Saturday.

88 degrees. In Seattle. On October 15.

16 degrees hotter than the previous record high.

It didn’t rain in September. A light shower one day, maybe? It hasn’t yet rained in October. And this after an already wretchedly dry summer; the garden droops miserably.

And the forests keep burning.

We escaped the smoke in Seattle for most of the year, but September and October have been a trial of cancelled outdoor activities, scratchy throats, and hazy skies.

As we watched the setting sun on the water’s edge, crows streamed overhead, flying from across the lake to gather at the park before convening with the full murder for the night. This, at least, is natural, even if it looked like a portent against the smoke-stained sunset.

Will the rest of my Septembers be choked by smoke and barren of rain?

We will adapt. After a few smoky seasons, the shock has already dissipated, the resignation already cemented. We grieve our loss still, for now. But I hope we won’t forget that it wasn’t always this way before we can stop the damage. That we will still believe it’s possible to restore the glorious summers and precious early falls it seems we have already lost.

Orange sun blurred by smoke paints a bright line across the pink surface of the lake, a golden leaved tree leaning over the grassy shoreline

A glimpse of orange sun glows between the needles of a shore pine draped over the shining water's edge

Orange sun low over dusky Seattle hills reflected in Lake Washington turned pink with sunset through the smoke

Reflections

Not working, as a woman

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It astonishes me that it’s been three months since I left my day job — the time has flown! Along with editing my book, coding a new website, and planning for a consulting business, I’ve dealt with some overdue household tune-ups and projects that have been on hold. When I write that all out, it sounds like I’ve been as busy as I’ve felt 😂

I told my care team that I don’t know how I was keeping up with everything while I had a job occupying thirty hours of my time a week. Some of this, I’m sure, is that law about work expanding to fill the time available; but part also is the capitalist mindset of constantly pushing ourselves, the Puritan work ethic that devalues rest, and the consumerist culture that makes us feel like we’re not enough.

Three months is the longest break I’ve had in fourteen years. Day-to-day life has not been the biggest adjustment of leaving work; not working has challenged my identity (in a good way) and forced me to confront a conundrum shared by many women who have left the workforce during the pandemic: when you’re not working, what does it mean to be a feminist?*

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