The wheres and whys

This morning I walked Reggie first thing upon awaking, recognizing we both feel better when we begin our day on foot. Reggie rests more quietly–he’s less antsy–after he’s been walked, and I feel more alert and alive after our strolls. Taking a walk makes it easier for me to come back home, have breakfast, and then write in my journal, even if I haven’t seen anything on my walk worth writing about. The simple act of getting out and getting moving pulls me away from my laptop’s virtual world and pushes me into my neighborhood’s actual one, and that’s a good thing.

Mark posted from India today about blogging and diary-keeping, and I posted a lengthy comment in response. I think it’s natural for bloggers to occasionally ask themselves why they started (and continue to keep) a blog: why keep a blog when it doesn’t seem to be accomplishing anything? Yes, some bloggers become famous or at least popular via their online writing; some bloggers get book deals or make money from their sites. Most of us, though, do not. Blogging is something we do primarily for our own satisfaction; if we were looking for something else from our online writing, we’d give up, discouraged, the moment we discover New York literary agents aren’t pounding down our doors with book deals and expensive pens in hand.

The only reason I continue to keep both a journal and a blog is I see each kind of writing as being a spiritual–not a commercial, professional, or even practical–practice. I write journal pages and blog posts the same way I sit in meditation: the act of writing or sitting is its own reward. Any positive consequence of sitting, writing, or blogging is an accidental side-effect: a result (good or bad) that’s beside the point. Long ago, I gave up any hope or expectation of achieving “enlightenment,” figuring that sitting quietly, breathing, and lightly gazing at the floor in front of me isn’t a bad way to spend an occasional half-hour. I’ve given up, in other words, any hope or expectation that meditation will give or get me anything remotely practical; instead, I figure if I’m here in a human, breathing body, I might occasionally spend some time simply experiencing what it’s like to be breathly and embodied.

Writing is the same kind of practice for me. After eating breakfast in the morning, on most days (when I’m not in a frantic hurry) I don’t have much better to do than sit a spell while I finish my morning juice or tea. Given I’m typically in no hurry to attack my to-do list right after breakfast, I might as well do something rather than nothing with that time…and scribbling into a notebook is the “something” I’ve chosen. You might reach for the newspaper while you finish your morning coffee, or someone else might flip on the television before showering and getting dressed. I reach for notebook and pen: nothing special.

Were I a perfectly faithful journal-keeper, I’d have no need for a blog…but an online audience keeps me honest. If I skip a day or two, a week or two, or a month or two in my journal, no one but me will notice. But if I disappear without a post or picture for several days or more, presumably someone in cyberspace (I tell myself) will notice. On many days when I just don’t feel like I have anything to show or tell here, the expectation of an awaiting audience (whether they’re actual or merely imagined) makes me show up rather than slacking off.

Ultimately it is that fidelity and discipline–that entirely quotidian commitment to show up more days than not–that keeps me blogging. Practicing anything (meditation, writing, or other) by oneself is no less fruitful than practicing with a community, but many of us are more likely to show up consistently if we know other folks–including folks whose names and stories we know–will be showing up as well.

So these days, I blog about Keene to remind Mark what it’s like here while he spends his academic sabbatical there. The rest of the time, I blog about my environs to remind myself time and again what it’s like to be “here” even as I remain close to home, steeped in the here and now.

This is a more-or-less exact transcript of this morning’s journal pages, written after I’d walked Reggie, made a quick check online, and ate breakfast. If you’re interested in this topic of blogging and journal-keeping, I’d highly recommend Mark’s post as the push that set my mental wheel in motion.

 

Sitting pretty

It’s hard not to snap a photo of a bird that’s sitting pretty and all but posing for you.

I find it fittingly ironic that mere days after arguing the utter artlessness of the photos I post here, Hoarded Ordinaries took home two Blogisattva Awards, both of them for visual rather than literary merit. According to the folks responsible for this year’s Blogisattvas, which recognize “excellence in English-language Buddhist blogging,” Hoarded Ordinaries is noteworthy for its “Clean, Straightforward, Unaffected Design” and “Creation or Use of Graphics in a Blog.”

I should promptly point out that the presumably clean, straightforward, and unaffected design of this blog has nothing in particular to do with me: Hoarded Ordinaries looks the way it does because when I moved my site to WordPress last year, I picked an off-the-rack template designed by Vanilla Mist (a.k.a. Patricia Muller). I don’t know if Muller is a Buddhist, but I think she deserves more design credit than I do for any presumed “Buddhist” virtues underlying the look of my blog.

I also find it amusing that my “creation or use of graphics” here on Hoarded Ordinaries should be deemed somehow inherently Buddhist: two years ago, when I was creating and using graphics exactly as I do today, one of the folks behind the Blogisattvas pointed out that Hoarded Ordinaries didn’t actually qualify as either a “Zen” or “Buddhist” blog. I wonder what has changed between now and then to make the “look and feel” of Hoarded Ordinaries seem suddenly (and award-winningly) Buddhist? Have the pictures I post suddenly become more intrinsically Zen-like, or does the fact that I now have a category tag pointing to Zen posts make my site more overtly Buddhist? Perhaps I should ruin the presumably clean, straightforward, and unaffected design of Hoarded Ordinaries by tacking a label at the top proclaiming that it now boasts “New and Improved Zen Flavor,” given how the word “Zen” makes even household cleansers seem cool.

I never was one of the popular girls, I’ve never understood the politics behind awards ceremonies, and I certainly have never entered much less won a beauty contest, so this year’s Blogisattva Awards and the suggestion that the look of Hoarded Ordinaries is downright pretty has left me a bit flummoxed. I guess the appropriate response is to smile and thank the Academy, Buddha, and all the little people who stood beside me on my way to the top. For good or ill, it seems that as a Buddhist blogger I’m more effective (or at least more award-worthy) when I’m choosing blog templates and posting pictures than when I’m actually talking about Buddhism. If nothing else, I guess these two awards go to show that when it comes to the Zen of Buddhist blogging, silence is better than holiness, especially if you’re lucky enough to sit pretty.

 

More than a day late and much more than a dollar short

I’ve been woefully lax when it comes to observing my own four year blogiversary, which happened on December 27. In previous years, I’ve marked the day by writing a retrospective entry that included links to my top five or ten favorite posts from the previous year. This year, I was preoccupied instead with compiling links for the New Year’s Festival of the Trees post, so the day came and went without me as much as mentioning it.

In past years, I’ve tried to summarize what I’ve learned from X many years of blogging. This year, I’m not sure I’ve learned much of anything. When I first started blogging, I had idealistic notions of how my blog could and would reach lots of readers, change lots of minds, and ultimately Change The World. Four full years later, I’m less idealistic. Four years of more-or-less faithful blogging later, I’ve given up on reaching lots of readers, changing lots of minds, and ultimately Changing The World. These days, I realize the world is the world whether I like (and blog about) it or not. Rather than trying to change myself, my readers, or the world at large, these days I mostly try to content myself with what is.

So this year, instead of trying to decide upon a handful of favorite posts from 2007, I’m taking a “Festival of the Trees” approach. Here is a whole forest of links, clustered into loose categories: a retrospective that is more than a day late and much more than a dollar short.

Posts about blogging:

Bloggers love to talk about blogging, what keeps them from blogging, and what they hope to attain or achieve through blogging. In 2007, I didn’t refrain from such meta-bloggery.

Futuristic contains within it a post titled Ad infinitum, which discusses the challenge a long-time blogger faces trying to re-see the same world in different ways, day after day. Sustained attention features my thoughts on place-blogging as inspired by the ASLE conference in Spartanburg, NC this past summer. Plain Jane mundane is as close to a Hoarded Ordinaries Blogging Manifesto as I’ve ever written, which is why it has a prominent spot on my “About” page.

Day trips:

One of the things I love about living in New England is the sheer number of cool places there are to explore here…and one of the things I love about blogging is the excuse it gives me to wander with a camera and a double-dollop of curiosity.

In Spring fling, I take a trip to the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA; in Hannah, get your axe, I explore the Hannah Dustan monument in Penacook, NH; and in Unwind, I visit the original scroll-typescript of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road during its exhibition in Lowell, MA. Madonna with musket focuses on the statue of Molly Stark in Wilmington, VT; The sphinx’s riddle describes a walk in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA; and The sky’s the limit chronicles a trip to the JFK Library in Boston, MA. With destinations like these so close to home, this past year I hardly needed to venture to places as far-flung and diverse as New York and Spartanburg…but I did anyway.

Zen:

“Open your mouth, already a mistake.” This Zen saying points to the utter ineffability of the present moment that Zen practice seeks to capture: as soon as you’ve described This Present Moment, it’s already past. This, of course, poses a problem for a blogger who practices Zen, and in 2007, I made many “open-mouthed mistakes.”

Birthday Boy describes an April visit to the Providence Zen Center to celebrate Buddha’s birthday. Open meadow mind focuses on the formal meditation practice I do when my schedule allows, and Black Friday describes the walking meditation I do whether or not I have time for formal practice. Strength describes my favorite fruit of meditation practice, and Instead of apple picking talks about the Zen of literal fruit.

Life as Lorianne:

One of the coolest things about blogging is the way it provides you with your own personal time-capsule. For many years, my Mom has kept a diary in which she writes a one- or two-sentence summary of each day’s events; whenever she wants to know when a certain thing happened, her diary is the first place she goes. For me, my blog serves as an electronic diary: one way I as a writer keep a finger on my own psychological pulse.

Probably the biggest change in my personal life in 2007 was the baby-step I took toward leaving Keene, NH, which I described in Bipolar. In The end of an era, I talked about another rite of passage in my personal life: the long-overdue demolition of my favorite abandoned factory. No escape describes the panic attacks I sometimes feel in crowded places. Soft in the middle features me letting it all (or at least my belly) hang out as I talk about my shifting attitudes toward my body.

Love, marriage, and not-always-happily-ever-after:

One of the things I’ve chronicled over the years I’ve been blogging is my 2004 divorce after nearly 13 years of marriage. When I first separated from my ex-husband, someone told me it takes three years to get over a marriage…which means 2007 was the year of my “getting over it.” Although I can’t say with certainty whether a person ever fully “gets over” nearly 13 years of water under the bridge, I did in several posts re-visit what I learned from a dozen years in an ultimately unsuccessful marriage.

Three years looks back on my post-divorce experience, Until death describes my unsettled reaction to a friend’s engagement, and Don’t do the math offers some learned-the-hard-way advice to the soon-to-be-married. Wholesome offers my thoughts on older, long-married love versus the younger, newlywed kind.

The sporting life:

With the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series, the New England Patriots remaining undefeated during the regular season, and the Boston Celtics finally back on top in the NBA rankings, 2007 has been an amazing year to be a New England sports fan. In June, J and I traveled to Atlanta to see the Red Sox; in December, we saw both the Celtics and the Patriots. In between, we’ve been to a handful of hockey games, with Hat tricks describing fan behavior at a Boston Bruins game and More than a few good men describing a collegiate match-up between Boston College and Northeastern University. And in Field of dreams, I explore the love affair many of us have with America’s pastime, this time played by a summertime collegiate league.

Ways of seeing:

This last category is the catch-all for posts I couldn’t classify elsewhere. When you come down to it, all of my posts are about “ways of seeing” in one way or another. There’s the literal seeing I do through my camera’s view-screen, then there are the ways that regular writing can sometimes lead to insight. After you’ve kept a blog for four full years, you learn to appreciate the everyday world as it transpires over time.

Four years later, I’m still exploring the backsides of buildings, as I described in Like a weed, and I’m still fascinated with the fall of light on my living room floor, as I explored in A certain slat of light. Four years later, I’m still walking the dog in woodsy places, as I described in Stalking; four years later, I’m still fascinated by mannequins and shop-window reflections, as illustrated in Holiday reflections. I’m still traveling to new places and trying to find my perceptual feet, as I describe in Out of proportion, and I’m still snooping in other people’s yards, as I explained in The leaves of others. Four years later, in other words, I’m still doing the same thing I did when I began blogging, regardless of whether I’ve learned anything or remain consistently idealistic about the experience. At the end of the day, even if you’re a handful of days late and a bucketful of dollars short, I guess that itself matters for something.

If you’re in a retrospective mood, you can read my inaugural blog entry, where the experiment began. I’m not sure what exactly I’ve learned from four years of experimenting, but you can read previous retrospectives here (2004), here (2005), and here (2006). If you follow any of today’s links, you might notice that I’ve recycled photos for this entry: a Lazy Blogger’s approach to an illustrated post.

 

Festival of the Trees, #19

It’s a New Year, so what better way to celebrate the 19th edition of the Festival of the Trees than by looking back on the trees that were. Marja-Leena offered an arboreal version of the year in review by posting the trees of her year. In a similarly retrospective vein, Granny J shared images of dead and dying cottonwood trees, and sarala touched on another kind of arboreal loss in a review of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce focusing on the tragedy of North American deforestation.

While we’re on the topic of deforestation, Kilroy has moving (as in video!) proof of how professionals topple trees without destroying nearby buildings (or crushing nearby video-bloggers). And if loggers are going to fell trees to make paper anyway, Julie Dunlap reviews a handful of books about trees that belong on any tree-hugger’s shelf.

Trees felled by age, storms, and even foresters’ axes are one thing…ornamental trees attacked by college students are another. Here in New England, December, 2007 began with news of an arboreal hate crime masquerading as a college prank. You’d think that in the typically tree-hugging People’s Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts, college kids would be more “green”…but apparently Ivy League pranksters have no particular fondness for Japanese maples and crabapples.

An article from the Boston Globe suggests, though, that it may be unnecessary to be kind to individual trees in an age where we can genetically design their replacements. O brave new world, that has such trees in’t!.

Picture perfect trees

Poised on the cusp of several seasons, December was an image-rich month for trees in the blogosphere. Fotokew shared an image of lingering autumn leaves, Anthony McCune shared the secret (or perhaps we should say squirrelly) lives of trees, and Arboreality shared images of snow while educating us about the annual phenomenon of leaf marcescence in oak trees.

Dr. Omed’s Tent Show Revival continues to be a source of inspired images, first a pair of pictures showing burr oak parts (the second of them looking enough like a Buddhist mudra as to make for an apt arboreal altar icon), and next a series of Tulsa trees toppled by an ice storm. Wandering Around Kansas also illustrated the effects of ice storms on trees, and CBS News featured video on efforts to save the “Survivor Tree”–a nearly century-old elm that survived the Oklahoma City bombing–from similar ice damage.

Elsewhere in the December blogosphere, 3rd House Journal shared pictures of New England birches while Jean Morris featured the same species across the pond; Jean also blogged a photo-mosaic showing a tree’s twiggy complexity. Similarly breath-taking (or breath-inspiring?) are FrizzyLogic’s images of solstice tree moments, and Kim Nixon shared a similarly lovely moment in mist woods. Trees serve as the literal backdrop of several closeup images of bracket fungus appearing on A Passion for Nature.

In the category of “trees over time,” A. Decker blogged a series of images showing the many moods of two trees. Through the deft wielding of an artist’s pencil, Ester shares the shaded nuances of a couple of bonsai trees. Urban Extension featured a trio of tree posts: two about otters and oaks, and a third about an ancient walnut.

Festive trees

December is a bittersweet time for trees. Denuded of fall foliage, deciduous trees here in the Northern Hemisphere are no longer the focus of visual attention; featured in holiday celebrations, evergreens typically have to die to become decorative. QAZSE laments the violence inherent in the Christmas tree harvest, and other bloggers suggest more eco-friendly alternatives. Here in New England, the village of Waban features a live evergreen as its Festive Holiday Tree…and Universal Hub posted an image I’d snapped of this same tree reflected in a puddle of snowmelt.

Elsewhere, bloggers snapped images of other creative re-interpretations of the traditional Tannenbaum. The Jersey Exile, for instance, shared an image of a Gloucester Christmas tree made from lobster traps while Blaugustine posted two pictures of a live urban tree bedecked by sunlight for the holidays. (I can’t seem to permalink directly to Blaugustine’s two relevant posts, so you’ll need to scroll down…or click here and here for pictures alone).

Evergreen mortality notwithstanding, Jim Hession shared the frustration (shared by many of us) of erecting the perfect Christmas tree. And when it comes to perfect Christmas trees, GrrlScientist posted proof that New York City’s Lincoln Center Christmas tree might take the prize, at least by night.

Poetic trees

In the realm of poetry, Dave shared translations of five tree poems from Renaissance Spain, which struck me as being both tree- and mother-centered. Apparently if you Love Your Mother (whether she be Mother Earth, the Virgin Mary, or dear old Mom), loving trees is a natural corollary (a lesson lost on certain Ivy League pranksters?) Kim Nixon compared the hurt of poems not making the cut to the woodpile left in a tornado’s aftermath. 3rd House Journal illustrated in words and pictures the connections between trees and neural networks. And Beloved Dreamer shared the sense of loss and longing evoked by a memorial wreath fading at a crossroads: even evergreens eventually point to mortality.

Mythic trees

There are real trees, there are trees in our dreams, and then there are trees that take root in both worlds. Karen Dowell shared the rich folkloric history of the rowan tree, also known as mountain ash or caorunn. Terry* featured an article by Nalini M. Nadkarni on unsung arboreal heroes. Pat Doyle explored the Feng Shui connection between trees and spiritual healing. Artistic Journeys has featured an ongoing re-vision of the traditional Tarot deck, many of the cards depicting trees such as this image of strength.

In the realm of American history, EHT of the American Presidents Blog shares the story of Presidential trees…and the connection between Presidents and trees goes far deeper than that legend about George Washington and an ill-fated cherry tree. And blogging from Malaysia, Lye Tuck-Po recounts the transformative experience of entering a rain forest for the first time. In the natural world, the mythic one, and the histories that transpire in between, trees loom larger than life. That’s a lesson we can carry from any year into the next.

The February, 2008 festival of the trees will be hosted at Ginkgo Dreams. Please send any and all tree-related links to kelly (at) ginkgodreams (dot) com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line, or use the automated submission form. The deadline for February submissions is January 29.

 

Green with…

I’ve been feeling like I’m stuck in a blog-rut, alternating between not having much to say and not having much time to say it. This morning, looking to prove my theory that there’s something about summer that puts me in a writerly funk, I clicked my own blog Archive to see what I was saying (or possibly complaining about) this time last year. And wouldn’t you know it, right around this time last year I started posting longer, more intellectually involved posts after lamenting that I’d fallen into the habit of posting too many quick, photo “postcard” entries.

This week, all I’ve had the time or motivation to blog have been quick, photo “postcard” entries: when I’ve had an idea for a long, more intellectually challenging post, I haven’t had time to write it up, and when I find myself with free time, writing a long, intellectually challenging post falls somewhere toward the bottom of my list of “wanna do’s.” When I first started blogging, I didn’t have much expectation of what my posts should or shouldn’t be: when I first started blogging, in fact, I think I set myself a rough 10-minute guideline, reasoning that if I couldn’t say it in about 10 minutes, I didn’t have time to say it.

When I participated in a blogging panel at the ASLE conference in Spartanburg, SC this past June, someone asked Jo(e) how long she spends blogging each day, and she said nearly all her posts are written in half-hour chunks, on her laptop, while she waits to chauffeur her kids to or from various extra-curricular activities. I found myself strangely conflicted when I heard Jo(e) say that. On the one hand, her approach sounded so incredibly liberating: “Wow, what could I write–and what time might I have for other things–if I treated my blog like a creature that had to be fed regularly, but quickly.” On the other hand, though, I knew that my Inner Perfectionist would have a difficult time blogging as if I were a laptop-toting mom: I will and do take longer than a half hour to write the posts that I consider my best ones, and my Inner Overachiever wants to write more of those posts, not fewer.

So when I realize it was right around this time last year when I spend more than a half-hour to write a substantial post about embodied faith, I find myself looking at my own blog archive with more than a touch of Blog Envy. And when I read the kind of posts Jo(e) writes in a half-hour, that Blog Envy only grows, as green and greedy as a weed.

 

A tangled web

What better metaphor for the tangled web of interconnections created by this curious phenomenon of blogging than a picture of three bloggers–Jo(e), Rana, and Yours Truly–sharing a single hammock at last week’s ASLE conference in Spartanburg, SC. Apologies for the abundance of hair, lack of identifiable features, and confusion of limbs: both Jo(e) and Rana blog anonymously, and I’m not as comfortable as Jo(e) is about displaying my unclad form online, so semi-clothed and tangled on a hammock is as close to the traditional nude photo as I get. As prior precedent proves, however, I’m not complete averse to displaying an occasional bare belly or my dirty, unshod feet, so here is a flesh-baring shot of three tangled bloggers raising toes to trees.

Jo(e) and Rana were two of the conference participants who presented along with me at the blogging panel I’d mentioned last week; Chas also presented but didn’t join us in our hammock. The blogosphere is a vast and varied place, and individual bloggers each follow their own protocols when it comes to disclosing personal information online. How much does a blogger which to reveal, and how much does she or he choose to hide?

Whereas Chas and I blog under our real names, both Jo(e) and Rana write pseudonymously; whereas I use first names, initials, or an occasional nom de blog to refer to friends and acquaintances, Jo(e) comes up with witty nicknames like Philadelphia Guy and Artist Friend to protect the innocent. I’ve blogged before about the problematic philosophical questions that arise when you share even a part of yourself online: perhaps it’s easier to untangle semi-clothed bodies in a hammock than it is to sort out the ethics of online self-disclosure.

As for Jo(e)’s account of our in-hammock blogger meet-up, I’m not sure I can identify (with) the High Energy Writer she mentions even though I have been known to talk about sex toys. Sometimes it’s more alluring to disguise a blogger’s real identity rather than showing her or him unmasked. When it comes to bloggish show-and-tell, sometimes you can protect the not-so-innocent by showing them as ghostly blurs or in the shadows. As in the nude photography that Jo(e) is so familiar with, discretion is sometimes as simple as the strategic shielding of significant bits, an eye-level railing going a long way to shroud the identity of three porch-rocking writers.

And when it comes to protecting your friends and sources, sometimes you have to disguise the non-photographers who have been cajoled into recording your not-quite-anonymous mingling. The blogosphere is a tangled web where even a Philadelphia Guy can enjoy his fifteen minutes of faceless fame.

Thanks to Philadelphia Guy for juggling three cameras in order to take the first and third photos in today’s post. Perhaps the title of today’s entry should be “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

 

Sustained attention

It is the nature of academic conferences that you have lots of “Gee-whiz, let me write that down” insights…but those “a-ha moments” that sit you bolt-upright in your seat are rarer and more precious.

This morning, at the very end of the Q&A portion of Orion Magazine’s plenary panel on “The New, New Environmental Writing” featuring David Gessner, Ginger Strand, and Jordan Fisher Smith, Ginger Strand make a remark that brought into crystal-clear focus what I’ve been trying to do for the past three-plus years on Hoarded Ordinaries. In noting what’s good about the “old” nature writing of a writer like Henry David Thoreau, Strand said it was his “sustained attention” to lived experience: his life, the world around him, his ever-active mind.

It was that phrase “sustained attention” that zinged me like a lightening bolt…and that phrase also resonated with a Keene State colleague who sat next to me during this morning’s plenary panel. If my sometimes-personal blogging about place isn’t about sustained attention, I don’t know what it’s about.

On Saturday morning, I’m participating in a session titled “Grass Roots, Web Logs, and Virtual Moss? An Ecocritical Look at Blogging.” The presentation title I’d proposed is “The Personal Is Ecological: Locating the Self in Place-based Weblogs,” and I’ve been struggling all week with what to say on Saturday. What I want to talk about is the way that many so-called place-bloggers actually focus as much on so-called “personal” matters as they do on so-called “environmental” ones: in my mind, the line between “nature writing” and “personal writing” is hopelessly blurred on blogs such as mine, and I consider that a good thing.

What I’ve been struggling with, though, is with finding language to explain why I think it’s a good thing to blend “the personal” with “the environmental.” In my vague grappling toward articulation, I’ve reasoned that habitats consist of particular places combined with communities of interconnected creatures, so blogs that ground a specific person in a particular place are “ecological” in depicting these interconnections. But until Ginger Strand uttered the worlds “sustained attention,” I didn’t have a narrative “hook” to hang my intellectual “hat” upon.

Like several of the participants in today’s Orion Magazine panel (most memorably David Gessner, who addresses this very issue in his book Sick of Nature), I resist the “nature writer” mantle. Yes, I mention birds, trees, and other natural things here…but I show just as many pictures of pick-up trucks, graffiti-covered walls, and other human-made objects. In selecting a masthead image for this newly formated version of Hoarded Ordinaries, in fact, I intentionally chose one with bricks. Yes, there’s some leafy green foliage at the top of my new blog-home, but the leafy-green left is juxtaposed against a brick red right. Here’s the place, ladies and gentlemen, where “nature” meets “culture” and “place” is something “personal.”

As David Gessner listed the kinds of things he wishes he could see more of in so-called “nature writing”–references to booze, shit, and machines, written by people who have real-world jobs and aren’t “white guys from Harvard”–I kept thinking of the place-bloggers I read and know: folks with whom I’ve actually drank and shot the shit. The “New, New Environmental Writing”–prose that breaks free of the “gentle strait-jacket of genre” that Gessner decries–is being written and read…it just isn’t necessarily found in the “quiet magazines” that Gessner claims to be so sick of. “We’re here,” I wanted to shout from the back of Wofford College’s Leonard Auditorium, “but we aren’t writing and publishing in the places you’re looking!” Panelist Jordan Fisher Smith pinpointed the precise reason why conventionally published nature writing–the stuff you read in books and quiet magazines–is so homogenous: as a product sold primarily to urban audiences, nature writing is marketed as “epiphanies from pretty places,” and much of what place-bloggers such as Dave and Beth and Fred are offering isn’t always pretty or neatly epiphanic.

I find it hugely ironic that the name of the journal Gessner founded, Ecotone, is the same as the now-defunct place-bloggers wiki were I first found my feet as an online writer. There already is a community of “new, new voices” who are writing and publishing genre-defying nature writing…we just tend to fly under the conventional market radar. Because we deliver our writing straight to our audiences without the middle-men of journals, agents, book publishers, and the like, we can push the usual generic boundaries, offering “nature writing” that is sometimes pretty, sometimes dirty, and always personal. What remains constant, regardless of what we call the writing on our blogs, is the process of how we produce it. Whether I’m blogging a conference in South Carolina or the graffiti-covered factories in my neighborhood back in New Hampshire, what I do when I sit down to write is try to pay Sustained Attention to where I am.

UPDATE: A two-part podcast of this morning’s plenary panel is posted here and here. Enjoy!

 

The view

Opponents of wind power often argue that ridge-top windmills are an intrusive eyesore, an obvious sign of human encroachment in an otherwise natural landscape. This past Saturday, on my way to watch the Keene Swamp Bats play (and lose) a ballgame in Rachel’s neck of the woods, I passed a roadside cemetery along a sleepy stretch of Vermont’s Route 8 where inhabitants weren’t visibly bothered by this artificial impediment to their eternal view.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about views and The View…not the daytime TV show, but The View of my world that I share via this blog. When I started keeping a blog back in December, 2003, I didn’t post photos; instead, I started Hoarded Ordinaries as a place to showcase my writing. At the time, I started blogging with a vague notion of making HO a “place blog”: an online site concentrating on sites and what it means to be “sited” in a particular place. Somewhere along the way, my focus on “sited-ness” became a fixation with sight: an attempt to show you, in word and image, what it’s like to be Where I’m At on any given day or at any given moment.

And there’s certainly not anything wrong with any of that, but…

A handful of posts around the blogosphere (as well as the natural ebb and flow of my own life) have led me to question my vague notions of what I’m doing with this blog and The View it offers. Over on Via Negativa, a blog which began right around the time HO did, Dave recently remarked about the difference (or lack thereof) between blogs and the mainstream media:

The blogosphere has been billed as an alternative to the mainstream media, but in many ways, it�s just as superficial. The emphasis remains on speed rather than accuracy, sensationalism rather than nuance, and two-sided conflicts rather than the full complexity of life as most of us experience it in our daily lives. Even for us non-political bloggers, there�s a great temptation to simply post our latest snapshots, with a few accompanying sentences of breathless prose, and move on to something else. To try to see anything more fully, to observe it attentively and then take the time to describe or depict it with as much care and effort as we can muster seems almost counter-cultural. But if the bloggers I tend to read have anything in common, it might be precisely this, that they are dedicated to documenting what Barbara Brown Taylor refers to as �alternate reality.�

The sentence that hit painfully close to home was Dave’s observation about “us non-political bloggers” and our occasional over-reliance on form rather than content. It’s quick & easy to slap up a snapshot and say “I’m done blogging for the day”; it takes a bit more time, care, and attention to detail to craft a meaningful post that actually says something.

In my early days of photo-blogging, I justified my “quickie” photo posts by telling myself they were like postcards: although we all love to receive long, carefully-crafted letters, it’s also great to get short postcards that assure us “The weather is great; wish you were here.” In my mind, a frequently updated blog is more valuable than one that only occasionally posts new (albeit carefully crafted) material: in the blogosphere, frequent snacking seems to be “healthier” (and more popular with readers) than the bloggish equivalent of occasional elaborate feasts.

In skimming my recent posts, though, it bugs me that I’ve been heavily relying upon postcards more than letters: now that it’s summer, I tell myself, I “should” be writing longer and more “meaty” posts. That I have the time to write but largely haven’t been suggests to me at least that there’s something else going on: why is it, for instance, that I’m dragging my feet when it comes to returning to my writing blog and am completely inert and lifeless when it comes to my meditation blog?

Blogs, like lives, have a natural ebb and flow, surging to unanticipated high-points at some moments and shrinking to shocking shallows at others. Just this week, Annette announced she was pulling the plug on her award-winning personal blog–a site that’s about four months older than mine–in order to focus her offline time on a PhD and her online energy to a business blog. It strikes me (and others) that three years marks a kind of turning point in many bloggish lifespans: after three years of faithful posting, you’ve presumably found your voice and are starting to ask “what next?”

As if Dave and Annette didn’t already give me enough to think about, the calendar is giving its own sort of nudge: this weekend is the Progressive Faith Blog Con down in New Jersey, where I’m scheduled to lead a Saturday morning meditation service and break-out sessions on the Buddhist blogosphere and blogging meditation. Although I’ve plenty of experience leading meditation sessions, the thought of mixing and mingling with folks who actively blog their religious convictions has me a bit stymied: as I’ve discussed before, Hoarded Ordinaries isn’t an explicitly “Buddhist” blog even though, yes, I’m an actual Zen teacher with all the qualifications to make it so.

Today Rachel blogged about ministry, that sense that we’ve found the One Thing (or perhaps a patchwork of things) we were put on this planet to do. I guess what I’m currently grappling with–or continuing to grapple with–is the question, “What is my ministry?” We Zennies don’t talk much about “ministry,” but we occasionally talk about Right Action, Right Livelihood, and the Right Direction that leads us to ask “How can I help this suffering world?”

In the time since I disbanded the Zen group my ex-husband and I used to lead, I’ve been sitting with a specific question: what exactly is a Zen teacher without any students? As a senior Dharma teacher in my Zen school, I’m the Zen equivalent of a Christian deacon: a lay clergy-person who is trained and qualified to lead practice, give consulting interviews, and otherwise help newer practitioners. And yet without a group to guide–without a group to guide me–what good am I making of an otherwise empty credential? In a word, what good is a lay clergy-person if she has no congregation, no ministry?

As much as I try to tell myself that my coaching is a kind of ministry, I still have the nagging sense that I could be doing more, that my recent reluctance to Dig Deep here on HO points to an underlying sense that I can and perhaps should be doing something different here. Although I have no intention of hanging up my bloggish hat, I’m beginning wonder whether I might resurrect several other hats, making a conscious effort to blog more about meditation and spirituality, about books, about writing and creativity…about, in a word, the Deeper Things that I’m really passionate about.

A teacher ain’t nothing, it seems to me, if she ain’t teaching, and I’ve let myself spend far too long scribbling bloggish postcards while there are more meaty matters to attend to. In a world where people are driving themselves crazy looking for spots of tranquility, why have I kept relatively quiet about my meditation practice: am I loathe to proselytize, or am I simply too scared to step into my own expertise, hiding instead behind some Zennish excuse of “beginner’s mind“?

I don’t expect The View here at Hoarded Ordinaries to change drastically in the days to come…but I am starting to question my own perspective of that view. At a certain point, every writer asks herself, “What do I have to say that’s unique to my background and expertise; what do I have to say that needs to be said?” On the one hand, I don’t want to become a cliche-spouting windbag who pontificates about Zen and creativity; on the other, I don’t want to hide my spiritual light under a bushel. I guess these days I’m trying to watch which way the wind is blowing, trying to admit that everything, blogs included, change over time, with there inevitably being a time to be silent as well as a time to speak.

 

Health

Today’s Photo Friday theme is Health, so here’s a shot of some mental health food that Leslee, Dale, and I enjoyed during our trip to Montreal earlier this month. Everyone knows that chocolate is good for the soul…and by my reckoning, the berries in a fresh fruit tart provide enough nutritional value to justify a taste of decadence.

 

Show & tell

Sometimes the best photographs happen by accident. This weekend in Montreal, I carried both digicam and pencam: the pencam for rainy shots, the digicam for sheltered ones. The entire weekend as I was snooping and snapping, though, I had no idea which if any of my pictures would turn out: there was no need for me to visit Montreal’s famed casino as I was by necessity engaging in my own sort of photographic gambling.

If you’ve read this blog for long, you well know my penchant for meta-photography, the art of snapping other photographers in the act. Since all but two of the bloggers I mingled with this weekend have digicams of their own, my time in Montreal was an infinitely self-referential web of photo-connections: one photographer photographing another photographing another. When I snapped a Saturday night pic of qB photographing raindrops on a reflective sidewalk cafe table, though, I had no idea that what I’d capture would be the ghost of Ms. Frizz.

Years ago on a trip to Sedona, Arizona, I saw photographers charging hefty fees for so-called aura photos: portraits of the spiritual nimbus that presumably hovers around each individual person. Although the photographers I saw advertised presumably possessed special photographic equipment to capture each subject’s individual essence, it occurs to me that blurred and badly lit images might do something similar. There is something about qB that is breezy and ethereal…and there’s something about a silhouetted shot of the Velveteen Rabbi that captures the numinous mystery of both human personhood and indwelling divinity.

Anyone who keeps even a remotely personal blog has necessarily grappled with the question of what to reveal and what to conceal: how much self-disclosure is too little, too much, or just right? This vexing question is made even thornier when you add blogger meet-ups to the mix: having spent a weekend with a bunch of other bloggers, which secrets should be shared and which sheltered? In some ways, an accidentally blurry picture of animated conversation offers a perfect compromise, offering curious viewers a glimpse of the kind of gestures and gesticulations even the most reticent among us were lured into revealing.

The last time I saw Dave, for example, he was mugging for the cameras…now, he’s behind a camera of his own. Photography is one way of diverting attention from oneself: the person taking a group photo is never present in that photo, and holding a camera in front of one’s face is a socially acceptable way of maintaining distance, the lens sheltering as much as it shows.

Usually, human interaction is a mutual phenomenon: we look at someone, and they look back. When you hold a viewfinder to your eye, though, that normally mutual gaze becomes one-sided: I as photographer can see you, but you as photographic subject can only see my lens. Digital cameras with photo screens make photography a bit more interactive: some new digicams, in fact, don’t even have viewfinders, forcing photographers to rely entirely upon lit digi-screens to compose shots. In an era where even cell phones are photo-enabled, it is possible to take pictures at literal arms’ length, holding one’s gadget out or up to snap photos of oneself or others.

Even bloggers without cameras have ways of mediating life through art. Who can resist a shot of Tom watching while Dale produces another work of napkin art? Neither Tom nor Dale had cameras with them this weekend: both of their blogs rely upon words rather than digi-pixels to create images. And yet regardless of the medium, I think we all are striving toward the same result: a glimpse of life as it happens, time slowed to the ticking of individual moments with images told like clicking prayer beads.

If blogging is a way of capturing personality–a way of sharing with virtual strangers how lived experience looks from my perspective, now–it makes sense to extend our definition of “personality” to include groups as well as individuals. Each of the bloggers I met in Montreal has her or his individual style and personality, and there’s a sort of synergism that happens when you juxtapose those personae. What do you get, for instance, when you throw vagabond Tom in a car for a long roadtrip with via negativa Dave, or when the mysterious Abdul-Walid goes teddy bear shopping with qB? These alluring questions can be answered only in person and in the moment; there’s a certain numinous There-ness that defies the limitations of word and image.

Ultimately, the point of meeting up with bloggers isn’t the stuff that can be blogged. Montreal wasn’t a means of stockpiling more (and more tantalizing) blog-fodder, although presumably we each drove, trained, and flew away with plenty of that. Instead, the point of Montreal’s meeting was the alluring and irresistible chance to put a face behind the blog. Have you imagined Cassandra’s eyes? Well, I’ve seen them, and now I’ll shield them, the most precious part of any conversation being those parts which you’d never share as mere gossip.

For although I have no qualms about showing my face online, I’ll go to great effort to shield the faces of those who wish not to be seen, cropping and angling to capture a corner of a must-see umbrella while hiding the visage of its holder. There’s more to my favorite bloggers, after all, than their pretty faces, and the best parts of any meet-ups are those un-photographable, ineffable moments of which you later say, “You had to be there.” The slogan “Shit, it’s raining” perfectly describes a drizzly Saturday in Montreal, but it would have taken more than rain to dampen the spirits of those of us who’d gathered to show and tell.

As my blog-buddies arrive home and get settled in from our whirlwind weekend, they’ve begun the gradual process of blogging the weekend’s festivities. Be sure to check out Rachel’s offering as well as Leslee’s two posts. Since we never agreed that “what happens in Montreal stays in Montreal,” the possibility for incriminating stories and photos is nearly limitless.