July 2, 2021

Thoughts on Being a Dad

“The nature of impending fatherhood is that you are doing something that you’re unqualified to do, and then you become qualified while doing it.”
—John Green

Writing about what it means to be a father is a difficult task. Holding Arlo and Mae as newborn children was nothing short of terrifying and awe-inspiring at the same time. There were these intensely contrasting feelings of awe, wonder, excitement, and hope, pitted against fear, fragility, pain, and doubt.

Thinking back on having Arlo just three years ago, I realize just how wholly unprepared I was to be a father. And yet this seems to be the paradox of becoming a dad. I’m the type of person who likes to feel like I know what I’m doing. Most of my life, though, is realizing that I don’t know what I’m doing, and instead being humbled in the process of becoming. I think that this is the way God intended things—for us to look to him in all that we do, and to have a Father to walk with us in all that is life. In this way, being a father is not much unlike being a child.

When I became a dad, I suddenly had the realization that I would be a father for the rest of my life. Questions raced through my mind: Will I inevitably wound my children? What wounds am I carrying from my own childhood? Will I be a good parent? Will I fail? And what does that even mean? What if I don’t have what my kids need from me? With the birth of our daughter Mae this past winter, the same questions inevitably rose to the surface again, but with a new sort of shape. With Arlo they were baked into fear. With Mae I’ve realized that these fears are real, and that they’re simply the realities of being human in the world. I am a broken human-being. Yes, I will wound my kids, and I do not have everything that they need. And yet at the same time I am continually being shaped into a new creation.

“No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, what anything means, until he has a child and loves it.”
—Lafcadio Hearn

Being a father (so far) has been nothing short of a daily process of giving oneself; of sacrifice, apologizing, asking forgiveness, and receiving grace. And yet in this there is deep joy. To be made new over the course of a lifetime in the presence of my kids is God-glorifying; it is to taste and see that the Lord is good; that he favors love and change over stale pride and hardness of heart.

The beautiful thing is that I have so much still to learn. In all there is to know, learn, and experience about being a dad, I am like a child. My prayer is simply that I would remain as one instead of trying to pretend like I know everything or have it all together.

December 18, 2020

Listening to Records

Arlo has picked up a favorite hobby in the last year: playing records. I love it. As soon as we come downstairs every morning, he wants to pick one out to play during breakfast. One morning it might be The Byrds; another it might be the Dirty Projectors; another John Lennon. After breakfast, he’ll pick a new one while he plays in the living room. When I go down to our spare bedroom/studio to work, I can hear him switching these out almost all day with Katey. During our time at home this season, his joy in our record player has cast a warmth throughout our home—there is almost always music playing.

When I was in high school, I loved combing dusty record store shelves and thrift stores for a good jazz album. The hunt is part of the fun of building a collection. Before we had Arlo, Katey and I might play a record every few days if we had a night in, or might put one on during dinner. Even then, Spotify was often an easier choice since we’re constantly holding our phones and can just pick a song and set it on the dinner table. But with convenience there’s always something missing, and I think we both recognized this when Arlo took up his own listening habits.

Back in October, we decided to divert our $15 budget item for music (for Spotify Premium) towards buying records and music directly from artists. It was not only because Arlo spurred us to love our collection again, but this article from NPR that I had read. While Spotify is convenient and simple to use, we decided we’d rather pay the artists and labels we love more directly, and to build our collection over a longer period of time. For the most part, we’ve been purchasing vinyls directly on Bandcamp, digital albums from Apple Music, or just heading over to Last Exit Books or Square Records.

Being able to own a tangible artifact produced by creative artists and musicians is a joy—album artwork is half the reason I wanted to become a graphic designer before going to college. But most of all, I love that we get to listen music together more often (which often means at least one person doesn’t like what’s being played). It’s a small, daily occurrence now, and will perhaps even become normal (in some ways, switching records all day for a toddler is certainly tiresome), but I think it will also become a cherished family activity.

December 18, 2020

Practicing Advent

This year we decided to put up a small advent calendar in our kitchen made of small pieces of paper and clothes pins. Each day has a small corresponding activity, like hanging stockings, making clementine candles, or taking food to a pantry. Even though we’ve kept the activities relatively light, my favorite part is that this calendar has put time into perspective, and has built anticipation for the celebration of Christmas, Immanuel. I think God meets us in the daily aspects of life, and this calendar has taken me by surprise in that it places focus on both the daily tasks at hand and on the waiting.

July 10, 2020

The Sense of Wonder

“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. ”

—Rachel Carson

During my freshman year of college, I started visiting the Cuyahoga Valley National Park on a more regular basis. I loved finding new hikes, and being out in nature provided a space for reflection and solitude. I spent hours upon hours hiking all of the trails, identifying trees, looking for foxes. After a year or two of visiting, my enjoyment of nature began to fade—maybe I was preoccupied with school or other life happenings, but I started visiting less. When quarantine began this spring, it provided a pause, so I decided to pick-up wildflower and bird identification again—primarily as a way to rest and occupy my mind from the anxiety of everything going on.

Over the last three months of searching for birds and flowers though, I feel that God has given me an entirely new joy for the natural world. There is so much beauty that he is making during the summertime in Ohio. Living near a lake provides direct access to plants and wildlife that would normally take more time and effort to get to: the purple martins (some of which migrate as far as Sao Paulo, Brazil for the winter) and tree swallows as they chirp and swoop over the water lilies and pickerelweed on the edge of the lake; swimming beavers; the call of a red-winged blackbird; the flight of a great blue heron over the water. There are other wildflowers I typically don’t notice on my commutes, too: bird’s foot trefoil, chicory, day lilies, sweet clover, queen anne’s lace, red clover, or wild parsnip.

I recently listened to an audio version of Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder about introducing children to nature. Her thesis is that being in nature ought to be fun, and full of wonder, and that in turn this would lead children to want to learn about it—rather than going into nature with children to “teach” them. As a new parent it’s a profound essay, and one that I will surely return to often. I hope that as Arlo gets older, I'll be able to enjoy the wonder of nature with him. Already I see this inborn sense in him that Carson discusses—the desire to go outside, to explore our backyard, to run freely when we go to parks—there is a freshness and newness to everything he's experiencing. I remember for myself how quickly this dimmed as a child. There is one instance I remember in particular, probably before middle school, where I was angry at my mother because she wanted me to play outside rather than in our basement playing video games. In one sense this responsibility is invigorating, while in another, daunting. Who am I to teach Arlo about nature when I don't know very much myself? Anticipating this, Carson responds, “it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.” My hope that this time of childhood will be a time to prepare the soil for this sense of wonder.

There is a small thread which connects this sense of wonder and daily life. I have been reading Liturgy of the the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren, and in a chapter about savoring daily moments of beauty, she quotes G.K. Chesterton on the child-like wonder of God:

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

As each flower blooms, I imagine God intricately making each one with care and craftsmanship with a deep sense of joy. I hope that I will learn how to more deeply appreciate these things as if a child. It is a deep privilege to “bear witness,” as Marcia Bonta calls it, to this beauty, and to approach nature as if knowing nothing about it—with a sense of wonder at the hands of a good maker. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, the use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world” (Psalm 19: 2–4). I think that children might inherently know this, but maybe I have forgotten and need reminding. I have become impatient with what I deem monotony as an adult. I think it's no mistake that Carson ends the quote at the top of this post with the word humility. At first, it seems that there is so much to teach children about nature, but I think if we're careful and observant, there is so much for them to teach us, too.

June 21, 2020

I Made a Skateboard

In the film 180° South, Yvon Chouinard talks about how climbing is essentially a useless act: “You get to the top of a wall, there’s nothing up there. Lionel Terray, the great French climber called it ‘The conquistadors of the useless.’ Yeah, the end result is absolutely useless, but every time I travel, I learn something new and hopefully I get to be a better person.”

I love this observation about climbing, and I think it reflects the way I’ve always viewed skateboarding. In many ways, it is a useless act—but in the same way art is a useless act. In a culture which centers around work and pragmatics, doing something purely for the sake of enjoying it can be refreshing.

I started skateboarding back in elementary school. My uncle Kevin had grown up skating himself, and gave me a couple of his old boards right before I started middle school. I would spend hours skating around in the street, and eventually it became a primary activity with friends throughout high school. While many stereotypes of skateboarders exist in America, it might also be seen as an art form and as a craft. We were often kicked out of locations, or viewed as burn-outs with nothing to do. But I think my friends skated for the same reason I did. There is a beauty in carving down a hill or feeling the wind in your shirt. When I started college, skating eventually faded out of my life. In an attempt to find a few personal projects in the midst of the pandemic, I decided to reuse the trucks from my uncle’s old board, bought some new wheels, and shaped my own deck out of an old cabinet shelf.

My uncle Kevin’s old board.
Using a paper template to trace a shape onto the board.
Cutting out the main profile with a jigsaw.
Putting on the old trucks.

May 12, 2020

Quarantine + Emptiness

We’ve been living under a quarantine for a little over 2 months now, and it’s had me thinking a lot about stillness, idleness, and pause. When I first heard of the possibility of a lockdown in any sense, my first thought was: “but what will we do? How will things just… stop?” I think in one way or another, this has to feel the same way for the rest of the globe, too. Each day of the news is filled with empty streets, airports, coffeeshops, and train stations. Everyone is stuck at home—some alone, some with loved ones—in some amount of idleness. Many have lost jobs and are not able to work. Others are asked to work from home and, maybe like me, are feeling tired and and unmotivated. Either way, our country is facing a large moment of stillness, of pause: economically, socially, culturally. I think there’s so much we can learn here.

In the world of design, one of the most common terms we throw around almost aimlessly is negative space. It’s the space in between objects, foreground and background, which allows our eye to move around. Massimo Vignelli has even pointed out that the letterforms we design with have black space and white space—and that often we focus on the black imprint of the letterforms, when really it is the whitespace around each letterform which gives shape to those letterforms. Similarly to music, it’s the space between the notes which defines the succession and emotion of the song. Robert Poynton, in his book Do/Pause: You Are Not a To Do List relates negative space to the way we use time, the way we pause. Our society is used to hurrying, and to productivity. I find it to be such a strong idol in my own life, an I think this is because it is so acceptable to work hard and to be proud of it—especially in the midwest! I know that in my own work, I often become sucked into the idea of completing tasks—of getting to the next thing. And not only at work, but at home. Whether it’s things to do around the house, or how I spend time with Katey and Arlo. But Poynton asks an important question:

“…our children can easily become just a stream of endless tasks: feeding, dressing, getting them to school or football practice or dance class, doing homework, bedtime story and so on. In the midst of all that, do we allow ourselves time to actually be with them, to enjoy them? …In general, we don’t pay much attention or give importance to the spaces in between all the tasks.”

Certainly amongst this quarantine, thinking about this space between is one of those things which I feel blessed to have found out. These moments of space, whether cooking, reading with Arlo before bedtime, or taking a short walk can be smaller pauses within this larger pause of quarantine—breaking up space and allowing for pockets of rest and reflection. My own heart is learning how to enjoy this new slowed down pace. But Poynton takes a nuanced approach to exploring the idea of pause, and clarifies that the idea that we must choose between fast and slow is a bogus choice, and while doing so we can miss the many possibilities of understanding how pause relates to our cultures and habits, or how it can be used as a tool. I highly recommend the book. There’s so much here that’d I’d love to write about, but it’d be better for you to just read it.

Kenya HARA, in his book White explores a similar concept of emptiness. Yet in the prologue he clarifies: “This is not a book about color.” Instead, White is an exploration of HARA’s own culture, an attempt “to find the source of a Japanese aesthetic that produces simplicity and subtlety through the concept of white.” In many cases a blank, white page in a book denotes the concept of emptiness. It is not filled with anything—not even a page number. But HARA points out that emptiness doesn’t mean “nothingness” or “energy-less”, “rather, in many cases, it indicates a condition, or kaizen, which will likely be filled with content in the future.” He provides another example:

“A creative mind, in short, does not see an empty bowl as valueless, but perceives it existing in a transitional state, waiting for the content which will eventually fill it; and this creative perspective instills power in the emptiness.”

How do we see this quarantine? Is it a negative state? A gap that takes place inside of our “normal” course of life? Is it capable of being filled in a meaningful way, like an empty bowl to fill with fruit? In my own life, I find that want to fill the bowl quickly because I’m afraid of it being empty—that I might then be forced to see the inside of it. So I fill it with gardening, writing, yard work, house projects, or watching movies with Katey. And while these are certainly valuable things in their own right, I feel challenged to take a step back to consider how these moments of pause can be carried with me no matter the circumstance. I think these examples of pause and emptiness from Poynton and HARA are important not only because they reveal the reality of these concepts in our country’s current state, but because they reveal the beautiful potential of this time to be filled in a meaningful way.

May 23, 2017

West Coast Road Trip

For our 3rd anniversary, Katey and I took a road trip on the West Coast. We flew to Sacramento, CA, where we made our way up the coastline to Seattle, WA over the course of about two weeks. There is so much that I could say about our trip, but I think the photos will say more. Katey and I planned our trip by looking up the National Parks we hoped to visit, and made highlights on a paper map that we bought in the cases where we wouldn't have cell coverage, but we ended up using the map the entire time (a first for us), and it was a fantastic way to travel. There was a lot of planning and saving for the trip as far as which roads to take, where to stay and when, or what food we'd eat—but it was all worth it, especially once we were out on the road in places we didn't know. We were so fortunate to have taken this trip, and we hope to do another out West again.

I've always had this draw to the Western half of America. I've taken classes about it. I've watched and re-watched the Ken Burns documentary. Its size alone has been a part of America's history, a manifest destiny that has drawn people to its open spaces. Traveling it was much different than I imagined. I think that there are so many aspects of the West that are overly romanticized. And yet I can see why people are drawn to its beauty and size. The West is so big, and beyond comprehension.

May 16, 2017

Cleveland Anniversary

Photos from Katey and my anniversary spent exploring the Cleveland Botanical Gardens and visiting Mentor Headlands State Park.

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