Since hearing some aspirationally pro-campers swear by camping in Temagami, it has become a bucket-list camping destination for us. From naïvely attempting Crown land camping in 2021 (failing miserably and swearing never to go to Crown land again), to portaging through Algonquin’s Tim River in 2022, to backpacking through Killarney’s La Cloche Silhouette trail 2023, we finally felt prepared to tackle Temagami… we would be coming full circle from our newbie Crown land days!
“Something needs to be said about Rosa Parks other than her feet were tired… Lots of people on that bus and many before and since had tired feet… lots of people still do… they just don’t know where to plant them”
— Nikki Giovanni’s “Harvest” (quoted from Rosa Parks with Princess Weekes on You’re Wrong About)
At the risk of being completely reactionary and petty, speaking ill of my ancestors, and altogether regretting this, here is a curmudgeonly blog post in response to a WhatsApp message that irritated me. Because a blog post in response to a WhatsApp message is what “discourse” (or therapy, rather???) looks like these days.
Just like mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of healthy fungal networks, paintings are the fruiting bodies of my solitude. Disturbing solitude has the same effect that tilling soil has on fungal networks: bad.
My biggest takeaway from Machiavelli is that every virtue is a balance between two equal and opposite vices: vice of deficiency, and a vice of excess.
It’s a virtue to be timely.
It’s a vice of deficiency to be a procrastinator.
It’s a vice of excess to be a precrastinator. <-- That's me, I am a precrastinator.
“Painting and magical powers seem very much the same. Sometimes I’m unable to paint a thing. … I tried and tried, but nothing I did seemed any good. They were copies of paintings I’d seen somewhere before … and not very good copies either.”
– Ursula, Kiki’s Delivery Service
I always cringe at the practically inevitable “What gives you hope?” at the end of an interview, and then double-cringe at the, “Well, I’m an optimist at heart~” that so often follows.
Here are two tidbits I’ve come across recently offer some anti-cringeworthy, if you will, responses which I will be savoring.
I’m working from home, but it’s also the most social I’ve ever had to be for work. In the time of corona, I feel oddly entitled to having alone time, and having to take phone calls has felt uniquely invasive. Phones are basically designed to reach into the confines of my home to sap my precious energy in the very place (and at the very times) I expect to recharge. Oh, how I resent them.
It turns out we’re really good at staying at home. Like really good.
Let’s say we’ve established that the world sucks and we are thus motivated to do something about it. Let’s accept that resisting sucky forces is a way of “doing something”. One of my preoccupations is to reshape my own notions of resistance and subversion from something that is loud, in-your-face, and angry to something that is more quiet, mundane, but still angry, aka. something I have the capacity to participate in.