Transcendence and pockets

I descend the hill and reach the threshold entering into one of my favourite places. The pavement leads me past planters and then to a crosswalk. Striding across the road I leave hardscaping behind and enter the park. These former hunting grounds are lush and green. In spring and summer the heather adds in purple.

As I climb further and further up the hill I start to feel more and more relaxed. The stress of grad school, my worries about finding a job and making a way in the world, and the drama of group projects melts away. I find a spot to sit and look out over the city.

It’s beautiful and peaceful here. I feel apart from my life, my troubles, I can almost relax. I don’t go often enough but when I do go it is the best part of my day.

Edinburgh had no shortage of viewpoints, hills that offer drama and views, transcendence as Ingrid Fetell Lee puts it in Joyful. While I am terrified of heights and Ferris wheels are my personal version of hell I do get the idea of wanting to have a view, the joy of being above.

I think about Nose Hill and Crescent Heights in Calgary, places where you can take it all in, survey the world below you. Or hiking atop a ridge line.

Perhaps prospect and refuge theory and something to say about this, why these places feel so special to us.

Reading “Transcendence” I also wonder about the need we feel to escape our lives and the places we’ve built. Planetary urbanism/urbanization would argue that there is nowhere that is actually untouched, even that ridgeline in a national park. I wonder about the insistence that we are apart from nature, rather than a part of it; that nature is somewhere else that we go to recover from our lives and the awful design of the places where we live our lives. What if our everyday included more of these qualities? What if our culture was less brutal and something that we didn’t need to go forest bathing to recover from being a part of? How would our the everyday landscapes we inhabit look different if we hustled less and meandered more?

It's everywhere

I’ve been reading Austin Kleon’s books, one of my potentially unreasonable library acquisitions — some of you hoard toilet paper, I freaked out about stationary and books. I know I won’t get through all of these but I feel better knowing I have some options while I am stuck at home.

He talks a lot about the creative process and I share his down to earth, process focused approach. Creativity isn’t mystical, it’s getting up every day and doing a small chunk of work. I’ve broken Set Your Watch to Moscow Time into sections and find that much easier. I can finish one chapter or one section of a chapter. I can wrap my head around that. And it adds up.

I didn’t get much writing done when I was having a lot of trouble sleeping for a few months in the height of job search anxiety but I’m back to it and hoping to find twenty minutes a day to work on it. If I do that I could have a submittable draft by the end of my program. It’s fun once I get the momentum going and stop thinking about how daunting the publishing process is. I want to keep working on it because I want pieces of myself that aren’t my coursework. I want to connect with that other side of myself.

I also want to just finish this project once and for all. I want to finish it within a decade of taking the trip so that I can move onto other things.

For now it’s the perfect thing to work on because I’ve finished a few drafts and just need to do edits and fill in gaps. Other things are in the gathering stage. I’m collecting quotes, ideas, facts, research, inspiration from different places and putting them into folders with the hope of gathering them together eventually. I’m not there yet but I’m working on it. I’m being patient and knowing that the things I come across now will become the books I write over the next decade. The second, third, fourth, fifths that come after Set Your Watch to Moscow Time and the lessons I learn working on it.

As I seek out certain things and want to collect them I start to find them everywhere. One of my top studio choices has a book about metaphors and stories as a text it is built around. I am working on a book about otters that is based around a metaphor/simile. I have a word document that is just quotes about metaphors.

I’m also thinking a lot about joy. It’s related to one of the metaphors in the otter book and I’m thinking of focusing on it for my graduate project.

For the first time in years I feel really good. Six years ago I started to feel more and more anxious while riding my bike. I was about to start my MSc in Urban Strategies and Design and was really into active transit. I was also broke so I rode my bike because a monthly transit pass was too onerous of an expense. I went from being a timid but relatively intrepid cyclist to hunching on the sidewalk with my bike perched on it’s kickstand frozen and unable to continue. I steadily became less and less able to ride a bike. I moved to Scotland and avoided biking with the excuse that they drive on the other side of the road but really I didn’t think I could do it. I went to Copenhagen and didn’t rent a bike because I was sure it would just freak me out a lot.

It felt like I was losing pieces of myself and that my world was getting smaller and smaller. Mental health issues that had been running in the background started to take up more and more space. The first time I went to therapy was to talk about my cycling phobia. It only took four years of doing exposures on and off but I can ride a bike again. I’m not worried about freaking out. I don’t spend more time walking my bike than riding it. Being on a bike and having it be a pleasant experience is a really simple thing unless you’ve spent four years working at being able to do it. Then it’s a big accomplishment. I am trying to enjoy being able to do this thing again, trying to relish the rewards of my work.

There are other ways my life is getting bigger too. Since being diagnosed with ADHD things that used to be overwhelming feel more manageable. I’m dealing with my to deal with folders instead of shoving things places because I have no idea how to cope with them. I feel calmer. I am actually finishing some of my projects.

I want to spend eight months thinking about joy, thinking about the small things that really add up to a good life. These are the types of things that I think are the answer to the problems we face. Joy isn’t frivolous. It’s an anchor, a north star, it’s the best of us. Now that I am looking for joy I see it everywhere. In the Schitt’s Creek behind the scenes episode on CBC, in a child playing soccer with his father at UBC, in running my hands through the tips of tall grass. It’s the feeling of gliding along main mall under the shade of aging oak trees with the wind in my face, my legs propelling me forward and my mind being at peace.

I used to walk up to the Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh in search of some respite from the stress of group work and my program. While I sat there perched about the city I felt like the world melted away, like my troubles didn’t matter. I think that’s a big part of what drew me to landscape in the first place.