while I worked…

…and my daughter had the day off from school, she baked.

Tomorrow is Pi Day. March 14th. 3-14, if you write it out the proper way to look like the first three digits of the mathematical constant pi, 3.14…

She baked a pie.

It is an apple pie, with ingredients she found stuffed away in various cupboards, pantries, and freezers.

While I worked the smell of fresh apple pie wafted through the house.

Tomorrow is Pi Day.

Tomorrow.

There is a fresh apple pie on my countertop filling the house with lovely apple pie smells, and it must wait until tomorrow.

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 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.

Local Adventures: Hiking Jura Creek

It’s a long weekend in Canada and so with neither work nor school for anyone on Monday we skipped off to the mountains for some nordic-style fun in the alpine climate.

We travel out there quite often. To relax. To hike. To just be somewhere beside home.

And we always try to squeeze in at least one hike, though hiking in the winter is often a bit more challenging than hiking in the summer.

The week before we left town I hunted down three pairs of crampons, over the shoe ice spikes with steel grips two centimetres deep and enough grip to walk us up any icy path the tourist-grade hiking scene could throw at us.

So we bundled up, packed some snacks and water, stuffed a couple cameras in my backpack, and drove about fifteen klicks out of Canmore to an off-the-beaten-path trailhead for Jura Creek.

In the summer, I assume, Jura Creek is a flowing mountain creek washing down the side of a mountain. The creek bed, frozen during out visit, made for a great short day hike in winter. We hiked up through the water channel, climbing up and over a few small rocks and then out into an open vista with views of the mountains around us.

Jura Creek is apparently named for the false “jurassic” fault line that greets anyone who is able to hike the approximately four klick gradual climb to the first waypoint. As it turns out it is neither a fault line nor appropriately attributable to the jurassic era. Instead, the rock formations which resemble an exposed fault are something else entirely, including a layer of ash from some ancient volcano. It was still pretty, though.

We made the round trip, grateful as always to be back at our car, and refuelled back in town with some local amber-coloured recovery fluid.

Check it out if you’re ever in Canmore.

vision, start line

Since my modest and cautious update on my knee injury a couple weeks ago, I’ve actually been making some measurable progress in both healing and beginning my re-training.

Then a few days later I went to a tour showing of the Banff Film Festival.

I’m not clever enough to make a proper film, but I do think I have an interesting story to tell as I recover and train for Chicago in October.

So I made a video:

The first of a series, I hope. The introduction to a happy conclusion, that too.

It’s a commitment to try and publicly document something difficult like training for a marathon. But it also commits me to training and trying harder to compete the story.

It’s gonna be a crazy year!

Check it out and give it a like to help me get some interest.