Hey friends, I’ll be real honest here for a minute.
I’m in the middle of a serious session of riding the struggle bus - between a grueling work schedule currently and a ton of personal stress and anxiety, I’m just really having a hard time at the moment doing anything coherent at all.
I have had a few thoughts bouncing around in my head lately that I haven’t had time to properly think about or process so I can write about them further, so I thought why not share a few things in ‘rough sketch form’ because I do miss sitting down to write and chat with you.
I’m currently reading ‘A Sand County Almanac’ by Aldo Leopold and I’m struck by the care he took to observe, to really truly chronicle, all the details of nature around him. Be it tracking dates of the arrival of geese in the spring to year after year of noting the bloom of certain wildflowers, even noting the flow and cadence of birds waking on an early July morning - it all makes me wish I had read something like this as a teen and that I had formed the habit of this type of deep observation and journaling from that time forward. What a beautiful record of my life and this place I call home that would have been.
In an interview with writer Saul Bellow, I heard him state that the act of forgiveness is growing in popularity here in the US and his reasoning gave me pause. He says “Forgive, don’t be judgmental, they say. Where there is no fixed morality that’s an easy thing to believe in.” While the interview was from, I believe, the late 1990’s, it’s a bit startling when you view the levels of moral bankruptcy we are seeing in today’s world and then start to think hard about those that preach forgiveness the hardest. Is he right? Is it super easy to preach and beg forgiveness when you lack a strong faith and morals? Is “forgiveness”, as we know it today, given too freely and often unearned? Maybe it isn’t “forgiveness” that is needing be examined, rather the idea of not being judgmental - it seems this is where a breakdown of fixed morality seems to be impacted most. When everything is accepted and acceptable, can there be any true morality anymore?
Recently I was writing in my journal about how, with my current mental state and stress levels - coupled with the colds and strep throat and illness currently ripping through our house - I feel like I can’t focus on any one idea long enough to allow it to bloom into something bigger, something tangible. One would think that being in scatterbrain mode like this the ideas would be flowing at a trickle - yet it feels like someone is forcing ideas and thoughts through my head with a fire hose on full blast. Strange how that works sometimes, I only hope some of them stick around so I can go a little deeper with them when things settle down. Especially the multitude of memories surfacing like old friends that I really want to document - am I about to start working on a memoir of sorts?
My good friend Antonio sent me an amazing care package recently. Knowing I enjoy writing, that I also journal, he decided to invite me into his latest passion/obsession - fountain pens. We’d talked about them a bit in the past, and he decided to generously gift me a nice starter set of pens and notebooks. That was super kind of him, but the best part of it all was our three hour conversation that evening as he explained how they all work since I have no idea and then we spent the last 2+ hours of the call just chatting about anything and everything - it was great to just shoot the shit and forget about all the day to day stress for a bit.
While I’m greatly enjoying the unseasonably warm weather here in Minnesota, we’re firmly in drought conditions now and I fear for the wildfires just waiting to erupt.
I need to take some time to talk about some of my recent adventures out in the woods - nothing too crazy, but it has been enjoyable to be able to hike around everywhere in February and March with little to no snow anywhere in the woods. Normally in the dead of winter (January-March) we will have between 71-86 inches of snow on the ground - this year we might have had 6-10 inches total at its peak with most of February and now March seeing zero inches.
Shogun, the tv series adaptation of the popular historical fiction book from James Clavell, is really damn good. It started a little slow in episode one but each episode after has been better and better. I feel like a kid again as I was a huge fan of Samurai, sword fights and ninjas growing up. And no spoilers here, but the end of episode four…just WOW. They WENT for it in the violence and brutality department. A long-time friend told me this series might be as good as Game of Thrones was in its prime… while it’s not the fantasy tale of GoT, he’s not wrong.
While I continue to journey on the mental struggle bus here for a bit more(hopefully it’ll be a short trip!) I’d love to hear from you about what you’ve been noodling on lately!
Normally I like to close with a little look ahead - right now I have no idea what that looks like so I’ll leave you with a list of a few thoughts of what I either have in the works or at least on my list of ideas I want to put words to.
Scenes, stories, and memories of my younger days - particularly I’ve been thinking about summer fishing trips with my Grandparents up in Canada catching massive walleyes.
Glimpses into my journals/notebooks - it’s been a long time since I’ve pulled out something I wrote from years ago and revisited through today’s mind.
I’ve been slowly working on a letter to you about the popularity of slow living. Especially how it seems to be only women writing about it and how I love the idea of it yet find the reality of it might not be what I pictured it to be.
We’ll see what happens, who knows - maybe I’ll hit you with another list like today. Speaking of that, I listened to an episode of The Coode Street Podcast recently in which they were talking about Top Five Lists in the world of books. It’s a fun discussion that got me thinking about both the ridiculousness of online lists AND my love of online lists - including how much fun we had when we did our Listwise Podcast back in the day.
See you soon,
Dave
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Thanks for the mention. I hope the pens can help you with the stress a little. They do that for me.