It has been a tough few years for us all. But really truly, I feel nothing but blessed and feel so very sorry for those who have experienced so much hardship and loss. Any petty inconvenience and feelings of stress, anger, despair, and frustration, feel paltry in looking at the larger picture of issues in the world. I am so fortunate to be finished with the long careers of my life, teaching and coaching, and I can’t even imagine how being still in the thick of that would feel in my life as it has for two of my four adult children. Or being a first responder fireman and paramedic like my oldest child, who is on the front line of danger both seen and unseen that lurks every time you go to work.
When I retired back in 2015, my main idea, and one I would share with anyone who would ask of my future, was to find artistic pursuits. That is what I have done. And 2020 and 2021, though challenging every day, was really no different. I have realized in these years, a lot about my mental and emotional health, and very often my real savior was to escape to be solitary in nature. It became my coping opportunity to slow down and feel the quiet and peace that seems so far from the problems of the world around us. It also pushed me to really hone in on the beauty of the Pacific Northwest so close in every direction from where I live. Every couple of weeks or so as I could, I would head in different directions with destinations near or an early morning rising away. And although very few people would see them, and I had very few sales over the time, I think it became the most consistently creative time in my life. I was in fact doing creative pursuits.
Along with a steady effort to do these escapes, I also, in an effort to self quarantine after visiting my granddaughters for three days and then later to sell for four days at my hometown’s Scandinavian Festival, I did some social distancing week long trips first to the entirety of the Oregon Coast, and then later to Oregon’s beautifully remote South Eastern Oregon where the coyotes and antelope greatly out number the human population.
Now looking back on these years as we are beginning year three of the pandemic in 2022, I realize in wonder, how much I have seen and learned, both in perspective and craftsmanship in my hopefully unique way of seeing my world. Below I have attached two collages of some of my favorite scenes from each of these years.
This post also marks the beginning of a restart to this blog. After putting in some work in creating and publishing my first entries in late 2019 and early 2020, I pretty much suspended this blog because #1 no one seemed to be looking or reading this, and #2 I thought I might be able to attract more interest on Instagram. What I learned is, yes, Instagram gets much more views than this blog, and nothing has changed in that I may, in very true fact, be merely writing this only for myself. But I have decided in 2022, to just simply choose not to care and plan on posting a minimum of one blog post per week. I will try very hard to promote traffic to this by creating high quality posts, but I think this is mostly just a good thing for me to do, solely for my own self growth, to write on topics that are important to my goal, which has never changed….to create artistic pursuits.
I hope if anyone ever discovers my posts, that they contain some value to you. And if you would like to leave an encouraging comment, or even better subscribe so that I know you exist, well even better.
Stay safe and take care – Gary
