Renewal, Site News

Embracing transitions

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green leaves of a ninebark tinged by gold as fall approaches

Recently, I’ve been feeling a transition from one era to another in my creative life. This mirrors big changes in my personal life — leaving my job last summer, a shake-up in my friend group, starting my own business. The transitions aren’t all happening in sync, but they all reflect the ways I’ve changed over the past decade.

Two big pieces of my creative life over the past ten years have been Cascadia Inspired and National Novel Writing Month. Over the past decade, I’ve had a variety of goals for this blog, but none of them feel pressing any longer. I rarely travel these days, my creative work is less inspired by nature, and my attitude towards productivity has shifted drastically. I’ve also decided not to participate in NaNoWriMo this year — I’ve been working on creating sustainable writing routines, and I’m not going to mess that up by blitzing on a project someone else invented and burning myself out.

At the same time, I’m feeling the itch for a new creative project — like what drove me to run my Sense Memory project in 2021.

I benefit from project-oriented work, and Cascadia Inspired no longer feels like a driving project — creating for it feels more like a should than a want. A duty. A habit. Not a tool. However, it’s still taking up one of my “creative slots” in my mind since it’s an ongoing project, and keeping a loop of my creative energy hooked around a project that’s not inspiring to me anymore. My websites and creative projects are meant to be an empowering outlet and guide to channel my creative energy into, so it’s important that I choose the right places and platforms that reflect my feelings, thoughts, values, and interests. I was 26 when I launched Cascadia Inspired, with a totally different vision of my future and myself than I’ve reached now, at 38. The constraints I gave this project are chafing. So I’m going to pause this blog for a while and see if it feels like the right move, or if I miss it.

Meanwhile, I’m brewing up a new project to reorient and respark my creativity. I’d like a loose creative project that brings together my art, design, and non-fiction writing towards a new outlet — a space to be playful and experimental that inspires me to create on weekends, when I’m taking time off from fiction writing. Something that excites me and gives me energy, rather than drawing it down. A new gravitational center to orbit.

Depending what that project becomes, it could be a transformation of Cascadia Inspired — a reinvention with new “rules,” style, vibe, focus, and goals — but more likely it will be simply an outgrowth of what I’ve learned through this project. As a creative project I worked on for more than ten years, Cascadia Inspired will continue to influence my creative sensibilities, even as I move on. I value all the things I’ve learned from writing this blog for the past eleven years, and am excited to explore my next phase.

Excursions

Glimpses of history at Garfield Ledges Trail

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Scraggly trees at the edge of a huge boulder overlook a misty valley

A misty day at Garfield Ledges Trail

looking up at Garfield Ledges

Looking up at Garfield Ledges from the Taylor River (2020)

Garfield Ledges Trail is a relatively recent addition to the Middle Fork recreational area. For a last summer hurrah, we headed up for a hike over Labor Day weekend. The day was cool and misty — it seemed that fall had beaten us. Yet higher in the mountains, spring comes later too — we saw a faded trillium, bleeding heart just fading, and still-blooming fireweed.

The smooth trail winds up a steep hillside, at times ascending stairs. A second growth forest shades the trail, spindly trees growing close together over an understory of sword ferns. Everywhere you look, there are rocks — in the carved out edges of the trail, it appears the earth of the hillside is more rock than soil. Slabs of rock emerge from sheets of moss filigreed by red huckleberry.

Sometimes second-growth forests are dull, but this one was rich with history. Massive stumps dot the forest along the entire trail. Logged a hundred years ago, most have lost their bark and serve as a base for new trees and red huckleberry shrubs to grow. In some places, the felled trees appear to have been left beside their stump. Even on a gray day, the effervescent green of the red huckleberry glowed electric. Snags, too, stand amidst the living trees. The past and the present are intertwined; the long now of a forest is much longer than people’s. This is the magic of a mature ecosystem.

At the top of the short trail, a small rocky ledge reveals an expansive vista of the wide Middle Fork river valley, carved long ago by glaciers. An interpretive sign pictures the valley below when it was freshly logged in the 1930s.

Trailhead signboard at Garfield Ledges Trail including an area map showing trails and recreation sites

The Garfield Ledges Trail starts from a relatively new parking area at the start of the road to the Dutch Miller Gap

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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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A summer evening stroll on the Sammamish River

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bridge over the Sammamish River, reflecting in the still water

We crossed this footbridge over the Sammamish River, where a couple paddled lazily on the calm water, and strolled along the riverfront trail. The air was lightly hazy with lingering smoke, but not into unhealthy territory. This is August, now.

As families and commuters on bikes zipped past, we soaked in the fragrance of sun-warmed berries. Ripe blackberries: the smell of August in the Northwest. Fittingly, I’d enjoyed a blackberry basil milkshake with our dinner on a sun-baked patio.

A well-worn but unsigned dirt path cut through a gap in the foliage — following it, we discovered the Burke Gilman trail just a hundred yards away.

It’s been years since we last visited Bothell — well before the pandemic. The downtown has filled in with apartments and shops, with more under construction. Native shrubs erupt from a gap between road and sidewalk where a daylit creek runs through downtown. Art and artistic lighting decorate comfortably broad sidewalks. I was charmed by a sculpture of a baby bear set right outside the library as if peering in at the kids reading inside.

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