Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Post #3302: Getting warm
This week I cleaned the spiders out of my outdoor sauna, readying it for its season of use. Since then, I’ve been in it three times already, trying to ward off the chill that’s blown in with the rains. I’m not sure if it’s age or the lingering effects of having had COVID in the spring, but I feel colder than usual these days. It’s become clear that I need to take my wool layers and woodstove more seriously (and earlier in the season) than I used to.
It strikes me that this is true of so many things now. Skip a workout, and my joints complain for days. Forget to drink enough water, and I wake with the dull ache of dehydration low in my back. My body, once forgiving, now keeps a close accounting. The onset of winter only amplifies these small reminders, sharpening them into something like instruction.
A reckoning perhaps? I’m not yet in the November of my life, but I am far past the part that passes for spring. The corporeal work is no longer about new growth, but tending to the present: layering on warmth before I’m cold, moving before I’m stiff, resting before I’m spent.
In our North American culture, November is a time of remembrance. Between Samhain, the Day of the Dead, and Remembrance Day we are called to reflect on our losses, as the last colours of autumn are leaning into low grey skies and first frosts. Today I have dahlias in the garden, but they are sogged with rain and won’t stand against the turning season much longer. Noticing them as I pass by, I’m reminded that endings ask as much attention from us as beginnings. It seems to me that the work is in staying present through the fading light, and finding what beauty exists in the gloaming season.
In creative work I am shuffling around the studio, using the summertime flowers to bring bright colour to life in the dye pot and winding skeins of thread onto bobbins for later use in textile projects. My fiddle practice similarly brightens the gloom as I bring myself to the instrument daily — warming both my hands and the room as I learn new tunes for some future social gathering. It is the glow I seek as this season begins — the brilliant autumn sun after a night of pelting rain, the flame against the glass of the woodstove, the bright spark of new tunes in an otherwise cold room.
What do you look for in these days of waning light?
Post #3301: Life in the trees
I went for a walk in the woods yesterday, for the first time in quite awhile. Since having covid in the spring – I’ve been cold a lot and also a bit lazy. I’ve never had anything like “long-covid”, but both times I’ve had the virus it’s taken about six months for my energy and core body temperature to return. I did not swim much this summer as a result, and I have not wanted to walk outside in the cooling autumn much either.
But yesterday, the weather was reasonable and I felt the need to get a workout outside of my little gym – so I went out and up the hill in the forest, across Wild Cherry into another forest and then down to my house again. On my way into the second forest, I spotted the no trespassing sign at the head of this post – at first glance believing it to be vandalized (which most no trespassing signs on this piece of woods have been) – but then realizing that the tree itself had done the damage in response having a sign embedded in its bark! Ironic and oddly delightful!
When I was at our cabin outside of Princeton in mid-October, I found myself taking photos every day. Part of the reason for that is it’s a special place for me, and especially in its fall splendour – but also because when I’m there I make an effort to get outside every day. At home on Gabriola, it’s a little too easy to sit at my desk and then slip downstairs into the garage gym rather than engaging with the outside world – especially when the weather is bad.
So embedded in that are two efforts I would like to return to my life – getting out and about more on a daily basis, and documenting my life no matter where I am.
Thus, my return to this blog. I’ve missed having a place for everyday life things! The Comfort for the Apocalypse substack is too formal for the random bits and pieces, and I’ve found it overwhelming in terms of the sheer volume of stuff I feel expected to read whenever I open up my app (I’m working on that by unsubscribing from things). It’s great for getting an audience, but I’m not sure that’s what the daily ordinary of my life demands. This blog feels like a better spot for the quiet record-keeping of days – and if folks stumble onto it (or I remind people it’s here) and they wish to read about me – great! But it’s mostly just for me.
So, here I am, with some photos and words about the small discovery of a mangled sign in the woods and not a lot else to say about any of it.
Post #3300: My word of the year is study
I’ve been intentionally quiet in this space for a few months while trying to decide whether or not to roll everything I write into a single Substack account, or keep both the blog and the newsletter going. For the last couple of months, I’ve posted in neither place — but in breaking my silence, I find its here I want to return first. This May will mark 20 years of writing here at Red-Cedar, which has been a chronicle of my life through many things. I have not been consistent in frequency of posting, but I have been constant in the sense of keeping this up over many years and experiences.
I will keep the newsletter also, but that feels a little less personal, a bit more formal and somewhat less about me than this space does. At some point soon I will resume writing there as well. I can feel it welling up inside of me.
It occurs to me that if you are anywhere in North America at the moment, you are probably freezing like I am. Although it’s warmed up considerably where I live, my studio doesn’t like anything below zero, and so I am very chilly in my workspace today despite the fact I am wearing lined jeans and a worsted-weight wool sweater. I just pulled on some fingerless mitts and a wool shawl in hopes that it helps my hands stay operational on the keyboard today. Thankfully, I see rain and six degrees in the forecast for later this week.
As the title of my post states, I have been working with a new word for this year. Last year my word/phrase was “making do” and it really served me well given all the things that came up and had to be dealt with, plus it gave me a focus on using what I have rather than purchasing new materials in the studio. I intend to keep making do this year, as it’s a good habit all round.
In order to choose my annual word, I open up the question inside myself in December without thinking about it too much – and let whatever comes guide me. Sometimes I try to wrestle the word or idea into shape, but mostly I just work with what appears. For 2024, the word that came to me while meditating one morning, was Study. At first I was curious about that. Study what? With whom? What does this word mean to me? And in that inquiry I realized how much I miss being a student with a program of study, a focus, a defined set of material to read and so on. I am always reading and absorbing and experimenting, but there is something about being a student that demands more commitment of the self to those activities. It also requires starting from the place of “I don’t know,” or even “I need help to know more.”
Now, I’m not in a position to go back to school, nor do I know what I would want another degree in, so that is not in the works for me. On the other hand, I have felt a deep pull towards Zen study in the last couple of months. I’m also really interested in learning more about colour as it applies to painting and textiles, as well continuing to learn to draw.
Thus, one of my big projects of the year will be studying the Shobogenzo, the seminal work of Soto Zen founder Eihei Dogen written in the 13th century. This will include reading key fascicles, as well as commentaries by modern teachers in the form of dharma talks and written articles. This is a huge undertaking, and not one that I will finish in a year, but it provides a point of departure for exploring the history and philosophy of the spiritual lineage in which I practice. Because Zen is embodied in practice more than it is studied, I will likely spend some time in the Zen practice house in Vancouver (Bring Stream) this year and will definitely do at least one residential retreat (if not two).
For the colour study, I am working on a weekly colour palette derived from photographs of moments in my day-to-day life. This helps me study colour theory, watercolour mixing, and brush technique. I have thus far produced three of these and am trying to figure out the format I like best for documenting them. I’m making two of each palette, one to go in my writing journal weekly, and one that will go in a final collection all together at the end of the year. As for the drawing, I have no real program for continuing to learn except for doing it regularly and using books and other tutorial material to help me figure it out.
My textile and community projects will, of course, continue this year, but I do have to eke some time out of those activities for the Shobogenzo study in particular (it’s time and mind-consuming). I expect that I will choose a new weave structure or technique to study this year once I see how the other study subjects are taking off. And in the fall I’ve got a music recording project planned with Brian that I need to put some real thought to as well.
Since there is no one to read my final papers, or test me on my study subjects, I expect I’ll be posting here instead. I do have Zen teachers who I will be talking to about the Zen stuff, but mostly I’m on my own for this year of self-directed study. So far it’s been strangely energizing. We’ll see how far that takes me before the feeling of hard work sets in.
Hope all of you reading have entered the new year with some grace and good cheer, and that it gets warmer wherever you are right quick!
Post #3299: To stay or go?
Last week, I discovered my WordPress subscriptions page, something I haven’t looked at in years. Apparently there was a time when I actively found new blogs on this platform and subscribed to them. According to my subs history, 2009, 2011, and 2015 were spates of adding a lot of new follows. But because the reader and writer environments here aren’t linked up very well (so much so that I forgot about my subscription page for years), I didn’t follow anyone all that rigorously even though I had gone to the effort of adding them to my feed. There were a few I read avidly, but I had those ones bookmarked for easy access.
When I clicked through the links to each of my subscriptions, I discovered that 95% of them were no longer functioning. Either the posts stopped somewhere around 2012, or the links took me to broken pages of php code. Of those frozen in time, it was apparent that many of these small-time blogs had tried to monetize using Google Ads shortly before they were abandoned completely. We all remember the era of famous bloggers such as Dooce (Heather Hamilton – recently deceased) who rose to fame in the early 2000s and at one point was reportedly making $40,000 per month on banner ads off her site alone, I’m sure. This kind of success reported in the blogosphere encouraged many (with few to no followers) to believe that somehow their blogs might become a source of passive income. Google Ads capitalized on this fact by partnering with WordPress to make it easy to do. Looking at some of those defunct properties now, it all seems a bit naiive, though there *were* some people who made big money through these channels, and we can all hope right?
My favourite blog-niche was “personal” blogs by non-moms (mom-blogging was similar, but focused on the antics of children and difficulties of parenting which I didn’t relate to). I can’t remember the specific names of any of them now, but there were several I read and commented on with regularity. I was not interested in aspirational content so much as I wanted to hear real stories and reflections from women close to the same age as me. I might be a little jealous of their particular life circumstance, or intrigued by choices they had made – but these were mostly women I might be friends with if we happened to live in the same geographical zone.
It was all very pre-social media, which explains why a lot of this type of blogging dropped off entirely by the 2010s with the rise of Facebook and then Instagram. These days, the blogosphere is dominated by sponsored content (sponcon) which seems mostly to be generated by Chat GPT. There are a handful of WordPress blogs I read on the regular, but these days I get my content and connection elsewhere on the Internet. Ditto social media like FB and Instagram – I drop in for brief periods, but I don’t spend much time there engaging (liking or commenting) with folks other than my friends, and I try to steer clear of anything that smacks of “influencer” content aside from a few people who make me laugh. I am a sucker for reels, unfortunately, which is why I can never go near TikTok as I find the whole format time-wasting to no real purpose.
More and more I find myself drawn to communities within Substack publications. Substack really is the natural evolution of something like WordPress, but better. As a creator, it’s way simpler to use, free, and allows direct monetization through subscription fees set by the creator. Substack makes it’s money through taking a 10% cut of all subscription fees. Though it does not penalize those of us who publish for free, the platform promotes monetized newsletters at a much higher rate than non-monetized ones (which makes sense from a business perspective). As it has grown from being the newsletter platform it started out as, SS has added a lot more features that support community engagement such as pod and video casting, community forums, notes, and recommendations (which looks a lot like the old blogrolls of the past). It’s really become the all-in-one blogging platform over the last couple of years – one that I log into daily for reading and writing projects.
This leaves me wondering what to do about this blog which serves an entirely different purpose than my Substack, Comfort for the Apocalypse which has a focused publishing schedule and categories of interest (recipes, textiles, the ongoing collapse of civilization!) Red-cedar has always published in the meandering and personal vein, something I do not want to give up – but I wonder if I’d be better served as an author to have content that is more discoverable, on an easier-to-use (and free) platform. I’ve often wanted to do an audio-segment to companion this blog, which SS facilitates seamlessly. I can port my twenty (!) years of content over, as well as my domain. What I would lose are the comments and likes, as well as the ability to really customize my blog interface (but from a usability perspective the minimalist interface of SS works way better for users, so I’m happy to abandon the templating system of WP which isn’t very good for people at the lowest level of the payment structure).
As I write all this out I realize that I’m going to at least experiment with porting my content over to see how it translates – I’ve talked myself into it as I’ve written this post (I rarely know what I think until I write it out – here is evidence). This might lead to some other aspects of this long-term project shifting, or it might not. But I’ll not be giving up on Red Cedar either way, as it has always been a blog in the truest sense – a log of my days and years, a journal, a place to share what I think whether it’s polished or not.
Post #3298: The external process
It’s probably no surprise that our bathroom isn’t done yet despite my confidence of last week; the plumber showed up 5 days after our scheduled day, but at least we have hot water again, plus the shower and sink plumbing has been upgraded a prepped for the installation of the shower and fixtures. We are now ready to install the shower stall and door, before moving onto drywall repair and baseboards.
A couple other items I have moved on this week include getting the household go-bags stocked and organized (up until now, I have only had one kindof pathetic bag for the two of us), and finding a roofer who will come replace our roof later this fall. Writing about my household procrastination problem last week seems to have helped me confront my to-do list and make some headway on it. Hooray!
Earlier this week I came across the concept of extroverted processing over on Austin Kleon’s Substack (paid post, sorry). He includes it in a list of old notes to himself and says “I never really felt like I really had that much going on in my head — I need to make things with my hands and talk about things with my tongue in order to process them properly. Most recently I’ve discovered that art isn’t just a way of uncovering what I think, it’s probably more valuable to me as a way of discovering how I feel.” This really jumped out at me because that is 100% what most of my talking and writing is about – discovering what I actually think and feel about things. I just don’t come to a lot of conclusions inside my head without some kind of output to get there.
I first understood this tendency way back in a college Canadian literature class when I was twenty-one and I started speaking about a text we were reading. I remember feeling a bit amazed with the interesting connections I was making in the discussion, that I hadn’t previously thought of. Back then, there was no Internet, and so it took me years before I came across the term “verbal processor” which is essentially a person who speaks in order to clarify thoughts. As I have spent more and more time writing over the years, I have come to understand it in the same way, that writing is a way for me to uncover what I actually think. I do not think things and then write them down, the writing itself helps me think about my ideas. And for whatever reason, sharing that externally is an important part of the process – hence I’ve had a blog for 20 years, and a newsletter is part of my current output. This is what moves me, from simply being a “verbal” processor to an “extroverted” one. I don’t simply need to talk it through, but no matter the medium I work with, externalizing it is key.
I think this orientation is often misunderstood as classic extroversion more generally, something I’ve often been confused about in my life. For while I tend process externally, I don’t necessarily get more energy from being with people, then being alone (which is what separates the ‘verts from one another). When I was younger, I think my extroversion, which manifested in my teens as a desperate need for connection with others, was a way to heal from a somewhat alienating childhood. But as I’ve aged into a life I truly choose, I have discovered I am much more an ambivert, with a tendency towards introversion (I recently took an online personality test over at 16personalities which strongly suggests I am in the camp of introverts).
Crazy, I know! This does not square with what people think of me since I throw a lot of parties and dinners, and host musicians and all that. But the truth is, I’m happy alone working in my studio or the house, most of the time. It’s where I feel most at peace, and most productive. I have increasingly recognized (after reading Enchanted by Katherine May who discovered this tendency in herself to be linked to autism) that to be comfortable in my social world, I rely on alcohol to help me get in the groove with others – which means that I’m almost always drinking when I spend time in the outside world. At home, alone or with Brian, I almost never drink because I don’t feel the need to loosen up in order to allow others in (which is a whole other set of issues I’m working on in therapy). I do not love this about myself, but I’m starting to understand where it come from, and it suggests something about where I am most at ease. On the other hand, without social engagement, I would have nowhere to process – which is pretty essential to my intellectual and creative capacity. It’s no wonder that I spend a lot of time orchestrating social engagements that bring interesting/smart/creative people into my life – my own output depends on it!
The other day, Brian and I returned home from a social engagement with some old activist friends and I found myself making a list of all the people I could talk to about my book project. People who would get where I was coming from, and be able to argue with me where I might be off in my thinking. I’ve never consciously made a list like that as an approach to my writing before, but it seems to me very important that I create a circle in my life with whom I can have an ongoing conversation as one way of staying on track with my book. My friend Jill is my creative coach, so I’ve got her in my corner already, but I think I might branch out this time and find more focused conversations to fuel my work, particularly as I start to really unpack my ideas in writing.
Self-discovery for the win? I will let you know how it goes.
Red Cedar 