☕ saturday mornings - june 24, 2023

building character, innate knowledge & waterloo park poetry

Tommy Dixon

Jun 24, 2023

Happy Saturday!

I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.

What I’ve been up to:

I spent the week at my cottage but returned to the city for the weekend. It's crazy how my sensitivity to stimulus changes. After two weeks in the quiet country, sirens sound louder, concrete feels harder, car horns seem harsher.
I caught up with good friends from Write of Passage. I haven't quite reconciled how to remain digitally connected and support writer’s work, without being terminally online and flooded by information.
Somehow I stumbled my way into training for a marathon. Supposedly, I'm running 16km Sunday...

Here's an inside look at the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.

Enjoy.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Canadian photographer, Yousuf Karsh, on the value of adversity:

"Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness."

Obsessed with thinking, modern culture has forgotten the innate knowledge of the body.
How its signals are a guide, how it knows what it needs to be healthy. How it can tell you if something is right for you or not by the way it feels.
We must learn to read the subtle tracks of the body, the way it relaxes and opens when something feels right, the contraction and tightness when we are not where we are meant to be.

― The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life by Boyd Varty

As N told me this week, he made one of the best (and scariest) decisions of his life, through feeling the visceral contraction and tightness in his body if he didn't make it. (Despite his rational brain's resistance).

💡 idea from me: waterloo park poetry

Long was the way that fate them bore... — The Shire by Alan Lee — The Shire (Alan Lee)

I took a walk through Waterloo Park the other day.

Summer was just deciding to make itself known again.

Sun radiating an unfamiliar warmth. Clouds like cotton-candy, passing lazily overhead in no hurry to get anywhere. Vibrant green all around, rustling in the wind.

I tried to trace the familiar path I had walked so many times while in school.

Memories flood back. Walks with J for statistics study breaks, sundrenched sets of shoeless spike-ball, fall football games.

Parts of the park had been closed for a while. To reconstruct, reshape, rebuild. Barricaded by tall orange fences, crowded with heavy machinery, filled with the clattering of construction. A constant parade of dump trucks marching in and out.

Now, it had reopened.

I follow the gravel path. Round it over the hill.

There stands a megalithic metal playground, neon green and blue, towering over trees. Wide expanses of green grass now smothered by sparkling white cement. Massive metal butterflies erected by massive metal poles loom as decoration.

Pens for the petting zoo, once livened with chickens and peacocks and goats and llamas, sit eerily empty. The nearby forest and field look forgotten.

I make my way to the new boardwalk, surprised by the smoothness and spring of the plastic wood. I circle the recently excavated pond, now devoid of ducks that used to mellow in the shady marshes.

I continue walking, back to the older part of the park.

My favourite place, the garden, was once lush with life and coated in green. Flowers bursting with colour. Ivy draped over a wicker gazebo in the centre. Cool and cleansed from the hot sun. An enchanted amphitheatre for birds to perform proudly.

It now lies withered and brown, soil cracked and hardened, flower beds forgotten. The gazebo a sickly skeleton. My skin ripples with a feeling akin to visiting a cemetery. Seeing a relic of an older time.

JRR Tolkien weaved his worries about modernity into his writing. He had a deep love for the natural world. But to Tolkien, modernity was characterized by the coercion, domination and reformation of the earth, through the use of the machine. He saw the English countryside of his childhood ripped apart and ruined. It was not the way he wanted the world to be.

This is not to say the world is doomed. I'm unflinchingly optimistic for the future.

It just makes me wonder what we prioritize. Why we replace the complex beauty of nature with the manmade. What we miss by living in a constructed world, away from the ancient wisdom of wilderness.

It just makes me wonder.

❓ question i’m asking:

Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?

When stumped by a choice, I’m trying to choose “enlargement” over happiness.

📸 photo of the week:

No description available. — Main Bookshelf

In the past year, I've been interested in bookshelf design: the organization of books with other objects I love to create some sense of aesthetic pleasure.

If the spirit moves you, send a pic of your bookshelf! I'm always looking for inspiration and I love to talk books.

Ps - I made the 'Simplify' sign myself. If you know how handy I am, you'd know that's quite a feat...

Thank you for reading! It means a lot to me :)

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Much love to you and yours,

Tommy