The Seeds are in the Mail – a timeline

Following up on the first in the series, The Love is in the Mail, the second installment recounts the story of the #ds106 seed circle and how some loops can take years to… come full circle. In my story, it has taken eleven years. 

As you may recall from the previous segment, I received several correspondences in the mail in 2022. Three of them, as a matter of fact. Today I am writing about the #ds106 seed circle package. The letter was one of gratitude and friendship from one of my besties, and I am not ashamed to say it brought me to tears. It was so touching, but beyond the heartfelt words, it contained a small package (not a real seed bindle, mind you, but a package nonetheless) of sunflower seeds. Their history and meaning were a blast from the past and a blow to the chest at once. Lets back track a decade or so and I will bring you up to speed.

It was March 2013 when I published the video “Sunflowers Seeds and Sharing,” (on Vimeo), chronicling a project where I bribed readers to leave comments on my blog by promising to send them sunflower seeds in the mail. If I do say so myself, I went over the top on the project. It was a contest where the first ten comments would receive some seeds. I sorted my participants, acquired their mailing addresses (in private chat, not in the comment section), made custom seed pouches with hand-drawn artwork, posted updates, and there was photo sharing (on Flickr). It was wonderful. Open-sharing of your media was more quaint and more community in 2013, and it is astounding to me seeing that the services I used then still have retained this media documenting the project all this time.

Planting Seeds

(… and yes, you read that right. A video of me from eleven years ago still exists on the Internet! Clean-shaven. Looking young. I mean, it is eleven years ago, after all.) 

I had to dig a little to find the passwords to log in to these old accounts. Flickr, in particular, which I stopped using around 2017, needed some attention, especially if I wanted to share the original pics from that site in the new sunflower timeline tool documenting the growth of the sunflowers this year, in 2024, which I do. Of course gaining access to the site nudged me to browse through my photo collection and reminisce over the MANY pics I had saved there over the years. My first pics were posted there in 2004.

This post is digressing hard. I was planning to stay on the topic of seed sharing, ‘planting seeds’ and timelines and how seeds can come back to you years later. I also wanted to show off my super-tall sunflowers this year. But with all this nostalgia and old videos of me, it is appropriate to drift from theme to theme a bit.

I have been thinking about aging a lot lately. My aging and that of those around me. Seeing that video of myself from over a decade ago and doing a quick comparison in the mirror, I notice some mileage has accumulated in the facial area. Overall, I think I’m doing pretty well, but I can’t help but think how I am perceived by others. I have never been one to make efforte to ‘look younger’, I have always felt I looked younger than I was. Nowadays I am thinking about that more. Some friends have mentioned that the beard I currently wear adds about ten years to my age. It could be even more from a younger person’s perspective. It could be EVEN MORE from a younger, hiring manager’s perspective, if you know what I’m sayin. This is why I am looking into dying the grey out of my beard for my next interview. 

Soooo, getting back on track, I had the brilliant idea this year to do something with the seeds that came back to me in 2022, courtesy of this guy. (Thanks to Flickr I have access to some of my old publicly shared photos, and thanks Scott <3)

Plant them.

Honestly, the last few years have been rather turbulent. A lot of moving. I can share a timeline with you, a little personal project that I have been keeping of my life. In the master ‘lifeline’ I call it I have documented my entire history, the places I have lived, loves I have had and lost, jobs, offices, employers, that sort of thing. Here is just the ‘places I have lived’ segment for the past eight years.

A timeline of our moves

A timeline show the years 2016-2024 with labels of cities for each place I have lived.

I have been ruminating on a post for a while now to document our journeys in photos and such, there have been so many adventures and we have been fortunate to even have the capacity and resources to pull it off. In general, we have been moving every year since the pandemic began. Before that, I had a couple more moves to boot, and by the records I have kept above that is eight moves in eight years. Needless to say, there has not been much time for growing things. We have been in one place for an entire growing season here and there, but often we would relocate at such inopportune times that setting up a garden never made sense. 

This year, 2024 was different. We moved into a location in a city we have chosen to live in and stay in. We may not be in our forever home, but having moved at the beginning of March allowed me some time and space to invest in the garden. It’s a rather small yard with a north-facing aspect, so it’s not the best for sunshine, but I dove into the soil with vigour and the seeds I had received. 

Once I realized the seeds had germinated and were growing, I wanted to document their progress, so I began taking pictures. I am posting them in Flickr of all places.

Once I realized they were going to be super-sized, I wanted to share their progress, so began building another timeline, this time using H5P.  As with many personal projects I take on, one thing led to another, I ended up spending hours going through my old Flickr photos, reorganizing, editing reminiscing. I reviewed my lifeline, both of moving and my old project and here we are. I have documented some of the technical background of the tool I used to make the timeline over on my professional business website.

I will leave it here for you to follow along.

The sunflowers timeline

I plan to continue documenting the sunflowers growth this year, and who knows, there may even be another seed sharing project to come out of it. I am already getting inspired to make some art and send it to people in the mail.

I honestly I thought I was going to have more to say about “planting seeds”, it is such a lovely metaphor but perhaps that is best left for another post.

2024 One way. 2018 She said yes. 💖 ⬅️

Jenny and Jason’s five years, five cities, five seasons. 5X5 💖 ⬅️

As February 14th rolls around each year, my Jenny and I have an extra special reason to be romantic: it’s the anniversary of our engagement 💖 ⬅️. We celebrate our traditional wedding anniversary date as well, but on Valentine’s day now, six years ago, we embarked on what would be the grand adventure and love story of our lives. To be honest, it was close to midnight the evening BEFORE Valentine’s day that I actually proposed, but that is a whole other story.

Who could have expected the places we would go and the things we would see over the past six years?

It would be impossible to summarize even a fraction of our experiences in a single post, but the image I shared here captures some of our journey from the

“Top of the mountain, valleys below
Skis on our feet, paddling to the flow.”

Jenny and I collaborated on putting this collage together for our 5th wedding anniversary last year. It was meant as a personal reflection activity at the time, and we did not get around to sharing it. Our “J.J. roadshow 5X5”. Five Years. Five cities. Five seasons. 

  • Years: 2019. 2020. 2021. 2022. 2023. 
  • Cities: Vancouver. Summerland. Kamloops. Kelowna. Victoria. 
  • Seasons: Winter. Spring. Summer. Fall. Moving. 

I can’t imagine any other person with whom I would rather be on this journey.

My Jenny! 💖 ⬅️

As I was going through my blog, I looked for pictures I may have posted when we were falling in love, courting, being engaged and all around icky to our friends and family on social media and was surprised to see none. Everything I had shared publicly was posted on social media and was now part of the digital identities companies are clamouring to own or charge us for. I was just thinking, “It’s about time my love was shared on my site!”, when I stumbled upon it, a DRAFT BLOG POST from 2018, almost exactly a month BEFORE I proposed marriage. It was a New Year’s reflection for 2018; I will let you read it yourself,  “2018… One way.” for some insights into my excitement then. I published it today but with the original date of my last revision of the document, January 8th, 2018. If memory serves, I had written this IN ANTICIPATION of making my proposal, but I was still not sure exactly when that would happen, and never got around to publishing it after the fact. As you can read, I had a sense of confidence in my plan. 

It was funny to read this six years later and realize how much we have done and how full circle we have come. Thinking about my goals for the year ahead, not to mention our upcoming next move, It is hard not to be overwhelmed with confidence and love once more. Our journey has really just begun. I love you Jenny! 💖 ⬅️

The Love is in the Mail

I thought I would get a jump start on my year end reflections, get started on my new year’s blogging and take a shot at de-cluttering some of the drafts in my WordPress dashboard. These pesky little unfinished posts have a way of just… sticking around, like the various post.it’s on my wall ‘gently reminding’ me each day the drafts are still sitting there, waiting for their day to shine. I think this one was particularly easy to procrastinate about because it leans into sentimentality, nostalgia, and genuine connection with other human beings which can sometimes be a scary thing to write about on a public document with your name on it. At least that was the story I’ve been telling myself. This is also going to reference a concept called “analog life”, which in the ever increasing and overwhelming digital world might be considered going against the grain, particularly from someone like myself who has spent so much of my career trying to be an expert in technology and education.

Before I go too off the rails here, I have to explain the title of this post. “The Love is in the Mail”, because “the mail” is exactly what I was planning to write about. Snail mail. Posted letters and cards that are addressed and sent physically from humans to other humans, by humans. With a fair amount of machinery and technology filling in the gaps no doubt, but essentially the service has been unchanged since it began as far as the sender and receiver are concerned. The user experience, as it were, has changed relatively little. The sender assembles the package, labels it with the address and purchases the necessary postage. A bunch of delivery stuff happens. Then the package arrives on the doorstep of the receiver. The magic never gets old. Today our mail delivery system is dominated by consumption and capitalism more so than human connection, but this is not a post about that. This is about the other thing, that messy magic of authentic human connection and the business of being real in ever increasing artificial and virtual reality. The love is in the mail!

"love in the mail" a collection of correspondence sent to me in 2022. letters, seeds, art.
I was fortunate to receive so many lovely correspondence in 2022. There is nothing like the feeling of receiving a letter with your name on it.

My original idea for writing this post was to acknowledge a trifecta of mail I received about 1.5 years ago all within a few weeks of each other, a total anomaly. This was at a time when I was dealing with a high degree of work related stress and I was yearning (without realizing it) for some professional/personal contact that reminded me of the work that I love doing. Three packages from three friends who took the time to assemble their contents, purchase the necessary postage and send it on its way to little ole’ me. I was inspired enough at that time to begin writing this making this post already 1.5 years in the making and assemble the contents I received in the above photo. I mean, just look at this stuff. Drawings, art, activities, letters, words, seeds. Meaning. Promise. I have to go through them one by one.

Fast forward to today, quite a bit has happened since I got as far as the three paragraphs above (Last Modified 2023/11/22). Specifically, we have entered a new year and it is 2024, so most of the timeline I mentioned above all needed to be edited. Seeing how far I’d gotten on this entry previously, and as I attempt complete this now for my first entry for the year (and not the last since I have made it a goal to write more in general), I will NOT be going through each of the packages I received one by one as I originally thought, but rather spreading them out over a series of posts. I think this will give me a better chance of success. I should mention, because it ties in nicely with my first reflection that I have an upcoming ‘micro course offering’ for BCCampus called, Please Share with the Class — Creating Online Gallery and Portfolio Spaces in which I will be discussing how to create an online media gallery or portfolio for educators, so this this seems like the perfect opportunity to both promote the event and demonstrate some of my techniques. That’s not asking too much of single post is it? On to my first, Love is in the Mail reflection!

Katarina Thorsen. Kat first captured my attention while leading a small drawing workshop for the “Vancouver Draw Down“, in October 2016. This was a ridiculously inspirational time for me, meeting an incredibly diverse set of artists and participating in their drawing activities, exploring so many new techniques. It was also the first energy blast that really set me up to put together the Sketching in Practice Symposium, in which Kat would become a regular presenter, and treasured alumni. I am adding my first image gallery below of the photos I took of our first drawing session together. These were downloaded from my google photos collection, and uploaded to this post using the simplest technique WordPress has to offer, the “gallery block”.

Jason at drawing Owls with Kat. Vancouver Draw Down 2016

You can check out this larger collection of images of the Draw Down event from my google photos collection here https://photos.app.goo.gl/PSboLtBUNuYFuNWi6

So, Kat and I stayed in contact over the years, after I left Vancouver to explore life in the Interior, having the odd zoom call, perhaps meeting up when I was back in town. But getting this package from her was another level of connection entirely. The mail she sent was an early sample of her upcoming graphic novel project which she will be releasing this year (2024) Remember, I received this lovely artifact in the winter of 2022. It was one of the first prints of her ‘broadsheet’ format newspapers she was using in the project and an early outline of the issues she was planning. The last time we had connected she was SO excited to tell me about the Newspaper Club she had discovered to get these printed, how awesome a format it was for her since she primarily works on newsprint, even when we had our first workshop together, and here is was, in my mailbox and in my hands. WOW.

The love really is in the mail, is all I can think of to finish this rather rambling, unedited, un-grammarly post.

Thinking about mailing things, making art, and sharing it with others, led my wife and I to make and send our own Christmas cards this year. Something we have been talking about for several years now. I have a back log of friends and colleagues that I want to connect with in this way, and I’m going to do it! More so now than ever. I see possibilities here for making connections with loved ones, promoting activities and events, and even in the realm of teaching and learning I have long been curious about using mail to support students, particularly in these days of digital, virtually electronic communication. How quaint, eh? What about you? What mail have you been holding off on sending? When was the last time you bought a stamp? Are the kids these days even interested in this form of connection? Do they know that the mail can be so much more than saving you a trip to the mall? It must seem so foreign. I will be back here to continue with the next reflections, as I am about to hit PUBLISH and go have some soup.