Using some of my photos from yesterday and last Thursday, I got started on a new mini (5×7) book. In order to guide myself along, to give myself phocus (sic!), I’m springing off templates and a class from Jessica Sprague.com

Here are my first two pages.

Alone

Beautiful

Post-run, I walked out onto the little “peninsula” and watched the rapids beat furiously against the land on one side, while the other was a sheltered bay of calm and peaceful waters – perfect for a duck family to enjoy an outing.

From Japan Rider: The Blog

I, of course, did not have my good camera with me, so I snapped a few shots with my iPod Touch. You can’t see it clearly at all, but the ducklings are so young that they are pale green in colour!

I snapped a couple of other photos – one of a very relaxed and beautiful red-breasted bird, the other of a majestic crane, but they are far to pixelated and out of focus to bother posting.

However – I am sufficiently inspired! If the weather is even remotely agreeable tomorrow, I’ll head back to the same place, only this time I’ll have my Nikon D90 in tow!

I try to get out and do a little something on most days – and now that I”m blogging again, you’d think I would have taken a photo! But no – I complete forgot to stop and snap a shot or two.

I’ve gotten out of the habit of shooting or even seeing good photo opportunities. This afternoon would have provided ample subject matter – calm river, pretty light-house, fluffy white clouds, people walking hand-in-hand… But I didn’t even think of a photo.

And so, I realize, that before I can just take more pictures, I have to remember how to see – truly see – with a photographers eye.

This hopefully won’t be too tough – just bringing mindfulness back to my daily life, remembering to look at the periphery of what I think is a main subject, visualizing the art.

But for now, I’m just feeling very happy that I have, in fact, started to post again, and to start gaining momentum.

Because – starting this blog back in February of 2005, was the best thing we ever did.

I look back at old entries often, either in a hunt for photos, or to refresh my memory about what I did in a certain Golden Week holiday, or to get a phone number or website for some minshuku or other that we stayed in.

This blog is our little shoebox of memories, and it’s one that I want to keep adding to. So what if not all the entries are enthralling? Life, sometimes, has dull patches, and as many valleys as peaks. And so I plan to blog on, and Brian has mentioned that he, too, would add some tidbits!

AT the start of my third year in Japan, just after I moved to Susono, someone gave me a small Pachira plant. I didn’t know what it was at the time but still appreciated the gift. I appreciated it even more when I learned how resilient that little plant was. In fact, Brian, too, has a pachira – and both plants grew tall and strong over more than ten years, despite infrequent waterings, being beaten by wind, transplanted only once in a blue moon…

Of course, you can’t carry plant life from Japan to Canada, and my plant was so big there would have been no way to hide it – so I left it behind.

But on Sunday, when I walked into my local depanneur (convenience store), I saw – unbelievably-a slew of pachira plants for $9.99 each. I grabbed one up along with my litre of milk and loaf of bread. Now every time I see my little plant (which I transplanted yesterday!), it makes me feel happy, like maybe I’m starting to get myself back a little bit.

I’ve been working quite an early shift for the past few months – out the door by 5:30 a.m. to start work by 6. In the dark and cold month of February, this was not an easy task. LEaving and working in the dark was energy-depleting. But now, with daylight savings time, I enjoy the early schedule.

Sunrise today was 5:59 a.m., but the sky was starting to get light even as I drove to work. But sunset – ah, sunset! – that will be at 7:48 p.m. tonight – but the sky stays light until well after 8 p.m. having 5 hours of daylight AFTER work is amazing, and I try to get out everyday, either for a run or bike ride or even just shopping or visiting friends.

This warmth and daylight is finally helping me to move back toward the healthier lifestyle (and even shed a few pounds!).

Right now, I am again concerned with the bureaucratic part. I jumped through some hoops when I first returned to set up bank accounts and, much more tryingly, to transfer my Japanese drivers’ license to a Quebec license (more on this in a future post).

And now it is time to file my income tax for the first time in… um… more than thirteen years for sure!

My situation is simple at least – no complex savings plans to list, no multiple sources of income, no dependents. However – nothing in Quebec is EVER simple when it comes to the government. So I wonder whether (or, more likely, when) they’ll come at me for the past thirteen years. What kind of hoops I’ll have to jump through to prove that I was not, in fact, a resident of Canada in all that time, etc etc.

But worrying about what might (will?) happen is not productive, and doesn’t change the fact that I will be filing my taxes by the end of this month.

I’m reading Sarum – the history of Salisbury, England. And Sarum, too, experiences the Dark Ages – where humanity lost all the intellectual gains they had made before and during the Roman occupations, where they seemed to regress.

It seems so sad, yet I realize that we all have a “dark period” in our individual lives – a period where we sort of fade from the enlightenment, shrink back, take time to recuperate; and I think sometimes that is necessary. But in the process we lose a little (or a lot) of what we had gained.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my Dark Age. But I feel like stretching again, like re-learning the things I’ve forgotten, like greedily drinking new things, and, above all, taking risks.