To blog or not to blog, that is the question (5/11/2016)

If you are a blogger and read my posts, I have an interesting and a somewhat important (to me that is) question for you.  Why do you blog?  I am not one hundred percent sure why I blog (or actually I have 8 reasons), and that is probably why I have not broken through as this world famous blogger that is making a lot of money with my blogs.  Actually, I don’t even advertise on my blogs, so I have yet to make a penny on them, and really that's not why I do this.  But reading the newspaper this weekend about this famous stay-at-home mom blogging about her trials and tribulations raising kids and everyone following her and making money hand-over-fist, I wonder, am I missing something?  Or should I just quit?  Maybe I miss direction?  I am a dilatant, I know a little bit about a lot of things; l write about nature, training, sailing, stormwater, the environment, human communication and now this kind of stuff.  On top of that I try to show, what I think are pretty pictures that I took during my travels.  On top of that I sometimes mix all these things together together to make my and my reader's heads spin.  Look at the labels on the side of my blog, it is absolutely crazy!  A key word for everyone.  Maybe that's why I have only 100 to 200 or so readers every month.  But who cares?  So why do I do it?  Do I do it for the readers and the followers?  Or am I just egotistical?

To tell you the truth, these are the 8 reasons why I blog:

1. I started out to share my photographs and dig a little deeper, different and more philosophical than what I can do on my Facebook site or my Instagram site,
2. The blog became somewhat of a diary, but not a superficial "what did I do on vacation type diary" like Facebook that I share with friends,
3. I tried to share my passion for sailing and share some of my experiences of fixing up my boat and sailing with the sailing community,
4. I wanted to show the beauty of some of the far out-of-the-way areas in Virginia that I visit during my extensive travels in the state,
5. I wanted to share my passion for the environment,
6. I wanted to share my passion for teaching,
7. In my first writing class I took in college learned that you need to practice writing and for me the blog hopefully is helping me with my writing skills.  I sorely need this, since I am in the process of writing a book, and 
8. Finally, this is a good distraction from all my other writing and creative efforts; it is a different way to let my creative juices flow.

So the question remains, if you are a blogger, do you have similar reasons why you blog or are they different?

But that last point, creativity, that is important isn't it?  Why is it important to be creative?  For me it is one way I can enjoy life; a way to look back on a day, on an event, and be:

1. Grateful for the experiences I have had during the day and during my life.  It is important and fun to record them in words and photographs; to be happy about them and share them,
2. These experiences, the memories and writing about them nourish the soul,
3. I’m having fun writing,
4. It just inspires me,
5. It makes me think, reason and figure out things like sentence structure and logic,
6. In some sense it gives me the feeling of human connectedness with you all out there that read my blog, although I don't known you, and 
7. While it is not part of writing, the getting outside gives me exercise, takes care of my nature deficit disorder, and when I describe it I get to relive it.

Yes,a lot of this harks back to a lot of self improvement books that I've read about purposefull living, such as Dr. Sood's book in my reading list.  But I mean it.  My blog is an expression of gratefulness for being alive (after some of my life experiences), for being in love with my wife, my daughter, and happy the majority of the time!  Yes, I have to remind myself to be grateful when I'm depressed and down.  Dr. Sood teaches us to mention 5 things we are grateful for when we wake up in the morning before we get up out of bed.  Well, I usually write about about them in my blog.
  

On the other hand, if you are a regular reader, why the heck do you come back to this blog?   Because you never know what to expect?  Because of the photography (sorry guys no pictures today)?  Because you are a friend, family or a follower?

I realize that I wrote about blogging before (click <here> to see that entry), and hopefully this is an addendum to that blog and brings it a little further (Just an update, the photography class is well received and I am still having fun).   But yes, there are times I need to soul search,  look inside and try to figure out what I'm doing and why and hope to help you on your way as well!

Travels in Virginia's Appalachia (April 2016)

April was spent in the far western part of Virginia; in Abingdon to be exact.  I have either had people who expressed their sorrow when I told them this, or their envy.  For example my buddy Ben at the yacht club told me that if Abingdon was on or near the ocean and he could sail there he would move at an instance and I think I would too (but I guess and hope ocean level rise will never make it there).

I tend to stay away from selfies on my blog, but ok, I took this picture on the very first day in April that I arrived in Abingdon at the beginning of the Virginia Creeper Trail.  Amazing that people who take selfies have these terrible grins.

I spent three weeks of April in Abingdon, and yes it could be lonely living in a motel room, away from home, but the first day of each week was with someone from my office, so that was great (most of the time).  On Wednesdays the Wolf Hills Brewery (the local brewery in Abingdon) has trivia night and the first night I was there, two young couples adopted me and I played trivia with them.  We actually won and they got a $25 gift certificate for the tasting room.  So you guessed it, I was adopted by them the two following weeks as well, and every time they saw me I was greeted by them as a long lost friend.  Nothing better than getting a hug from two mid-20-ish (female) school teachers and handshakes from their hubbies, while being away from home.  I don't think you see that happen in a big town.  Abingdon is just fun small town living.

Tasting room at the Wolf Hills Brewery

It was there that I learned that one of the teachers had a run in with the police the weekend that the NASCAR race came to Bristol that weekend in April.  She was tased and cuffed; truthfully not something I would have expected to see happen to this small (5'4" maybe 130 lbs maybe) school teacher.  The three cops let her go once they figured out who she was and what her profession was.  But she had the bruises and the taser mark to show for it.  This well educated and what appeared to me well mannered girl was somewhat proud talking about it, that it took three cops and a taser to take her down.

I am definitively not planning to make this a travelogue, but want to highlight some commonalities I experienced during all three visits.  I felt at home and accepted.  Naturally, Abingdon is not off the beaten track, and Damascus is on the Appalachian and the Virginia Creeper Trails.  So they get a lot of influx from people who are from the outside, but still there is a difference between being tolerated or almost accepted.  I can feel that.  I travel so much that even in local restaurants or so the ambiance or the friendliness of the local waitstaff give you that feeling.  Some people just give you the feeling they really care, others just fake it or don't even do that.  Only once did I feel alienated when traveling out in the mountains of Virginia, but that was only the result of listening to conservative talk radio, which is difficult to escape on the AM when you drive through the area, and so are the religious stations.  I wrote about it on March 4, 2015 in my blog.  Yes people are more conservative and you notice that on the radio.  I sometimes use that as a learning moment, as long as it does not become hate speech and intolerant; anyway NPR almost reaches everywhere.  Otherwise, best to download a book or a podcast.

Walking back along Main street from the restaurant to my motel in Abingdon.  It would great to have sidewalks, but we don't even have those in York County.

The Appalachian region has been in an economic downturn for a long time.  Driving through towns like Pulaski you can see the empty furniture factories and other industrial area.  On top of that you hear about coal mines shutting down and that the area has not really returned from the depression that started at the end of the Bush presidency.  National Public Radio Morning Edition had a whole special on it; click <here> for the link to that program, you can actually listen to it.  It played one Thursday morning when I was sitting in the car and just leaving town on my way back home.  I swore that the next week I would bike part of the Virginia Creeper Trail and somehow end up at the Damascus Brewery that is mentioned in the piece to have a beer.

The Damascus Brewery serves the best Dam(ascus) beer!

Well I did it the next week.  The bike ride was wonderful, I left town and went left as recommended by the bike shop owner, away from town.  Biking through the national forest along a creek was a great experience, but you know my need for nature and my battles with nature deficit disorder.  While I only biked 3 miles out (total ride was 6 miles) it was an easy ride and the beer tasted extra good afterwards.  There I got in a long and very pleasant discussion with a through hiker on the Appalachian trail who stopped over for a few days to recharge his system.  Again, what great experiences to be had, to get off the main road and just take your time to explore and interact with people.  Books can be written about these experiences.

Along the Virginia Creeper Trail, this photo and the first photo are the two bookends of my experiences along the trail.

What did I learn or what stood out?  I did not encounter many African Americans or Hispanic during my stay in the area.  I am sure they are there, but I had none in my classes; I saw none in restaurants not even as waitstaff or cleanup staff, not even at Wendy's, but I did not eat in any Mexican restaurants this time; none of the household staff at the motel was black or Hispanic.  I think I saw one, who appeared local, African American gentleman putting gas in his vehicle when I was doing the same one morning, but that was all.  I don't want to conclude that the area does not have any minorities, but it seems much more segregated.  I also learned that it still is economically depressed, but people in generally seem to have a positive outlook on life.  The people out there are like everywhere else, they genuinely care about their fellow human beings.  But they have an edge, like my school teacher who did not think twice about taking on three cops and getting tased as a result of it (and she was not ashamed of it, to say the least).  They live in a beautiful part of the state, that they should be proud of.

Travels, nature and breweries (4/9 through 4/16/2016)

My wife and I have been away on vacation for a week.  It was wonderful, away from work, away from the regular travel I do for work, just away from all the regular crap I do all the time.  We spent time in New England; we visited our daughter who goes to graduate school in Boston (Harvard) and (as we describe it to friends) we stole her car for a few days and drove to Maine.  This entry: however, is more about a few experiences I had and how they relate to some of the subjects that are a common thread in this blog.

As any good naturalist or any good Unitarian Universalist that visit New England should do (it helps I am both), I visited WaldenPond.  It is somewhat of a pilgrimage site for many of us.  I often mention Aldo Leopold, who introduced the idea of environmental ethics, but in truth, it was Henry David Thoreau who was one of the first persons who introduced naturalism to the American public and the need to get away in nature.  He had a strong need to go back to the land, to get his sanity back, learn what life was all about and what it could teach him:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

The location of Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond.

The plaque showing the location of the chimney of the cabin.

This is one of the most common used quote from Thoreau when it comes to Walden.  Walden was published in 1854 and was based on a more than 2 year stay in a cabin in the woods near Walden Pond.  It is just interesting to see how already in the mid-1800s there was an obvious need by some to get away from it all and go back to nature, to connect to nature, to experience nature and describe it.  Did Thoreau experience nature deficit disorder in 1850?  But it definitively shows the need to connect to nature.

Walden Pond

Thoreau was a fascinating character he did a lot more than just live for two years near a pond, he is worth a read and a study.  I have read a few books by him or books that tried to retrace his steps and it was impressive what he did.  But he was more that a naturalist he also was a philosopher, a humanist and humanitarian.  There is a whole society set up around this scholar and thinker.

While sitting in coffee shops, microbreweries and funky restaurants is wonderful, albeit maybe not so wonderful on the budget, they can only satisfy me so much.  It is really the nature that nurtures me and satisfies me in the long run.  Our most favorite times and memories of our trip to New England will definitively be our hikes around Walden Pond and on Mount Dessert Island (Acadia National Park); our trip to the top of Mount Battie to look over the Penobscot Bay; and our walks around all those wonderful lighthouses looking over the water (that’s nature too).  They will be staying with us much longer than that food we ate at that restaurant.

Visit to the Allagash Brewery (my favorite) in Portland Maine)

We encountered a beaver dam in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island (near Bar Harbor, Maine)

Looking down on Camden and the Penobscot Bay from Mount Battie

One of the many lighthouses we visited and had an opportunity to enjoy ocean views.  We saw a lot of common eiders swimming in the waters below these lighthouses. 

The need for nature really struck me during our walks through downtown Boston.  It is great to see how the famous "Big Dig" stuck a major highway under ground and turned the above ground part into a park.  Moreover, it was great to walk on the Boston Commons, in the Boston Gardens and even along the Charles River.  All little pieces of green, where people could enjoy a little nature.  One bizarre thing struck me and I had to take a photograph of it (below).  Not far from the Paul Revere house was a church that where the outbuildings were completely covered with a canvas depicting plants, branches and leaves.  It reminded me of Richard Louv's in his book "The Nature Principle" in which he describes that research has shown that even pictures of nature in buildings and offices help in reducing stress.  Personally, I know that being in nature is so important in bringing down my stress level and (I assume) bringing down my blood pressure.  Nature can be the woods (green) or the water (blue).  That's why I was so fascinated by what I saw on the church; hopefully it does the same in the area near the church.  I found it such an interesting idea of using a bare wall.  What a sight!

The canvas nature mural on a church in downtown Boston

Digging deeper (3/30/2016)

Boy, I only had one post in March.  Guess I had nothing to say.  Well, not really, but life is getting away from me (taxes and other writings).  Maybe I had nothing inspirational to say or nothing I have wanted to share; at least until today, when during lunch time I started looking through the on-line version of Wired and ran into the "Instagram Rabbit Hole" section of the magazine.  That was fun.  What Wired does is, one of their photographers takes one of their favorite photographers on Instagram and looks who they follow or who follows them and they go down five levels and see where they end up.  I tried it with people who follow me on Instagram and it was fun.

It is kind of as the 7 degrees of separation, the theory that everyone on this earth is no more that 7 persons away from each other.  Fore example my wife and I have actually spent a very pleasant evening talking with the father of the king of the Netherlands (or Holland as some call it) when we lived in Yemen of all places.  Now that all the sudden brings you close to many world leaders.  I wonder how many degrees I am away from Kim Jong-un; although that would not be really be not something I to be very proud of.  But then, I have been close to other weirdos as well (see my posts on Idi Amin).

It is just very fascinating to me these kinds of rabbit holes.  When I did it to my Instagram contacts I ran into locked pages, or pages that you had to ask permission to the owners from to connect to.  Makes you wonder what they have to hide, or if they are just private.

Going to one of my favorite photographers following me: Derya or @Daltuny on Instagram from Turkey, this is one of the latest photographs by her:

Photo taken by Derya and published on Instagram

Going "5 generations" in random down the rabbit hole (avoiding locked pages and just selfies) I got here to the page of Kenny Byron or @kidd_ok on Instagram.  Kenny seems to be a snow boarder and this was a recent photograph I loved:

Photograph by Kenny Byron published on Instagram

Fun to games like this.  Next time I would end up somewhere completely different, but I am so happy I ended up here Kenny Byron takes some awesome pictures, but so did the intermediaries between Derya and him, it was a feast for the eyes.  You should try it, whether you do it in Instagram, Google+ or maybe even in Facebook.  Who knows where you end up and what you learn about the world around you and your fellow humans.

So sorry guys, no photographs or deep thoughts by me, just some observations on the inter-connectedness  of us all, something I did discuss in this post before as well.  I am still amazed how small our world is becoming and how much we depend on each other.

Que sera sera, what ever will be will be, really? (3/8/2016)

Of late I've been interacting with people or hearing about people who seem to be so fatalistic, and just take life laying down.  I went out to the field with an absolutely great guy, who in is mid forties and already has developed type two diabetes.  He warned me about it, since he had to take an insulin shot at the lunch table, to make sure I did not have to deal with someone in a sugar coma later on during our work in the field.

Not that it grossed me out or so watching someone shoot up, it just upset me to see someone so young and nice to be so matter of fact about it.  He was like: "My grandmother has it, my mother has it, so I knew it was just a matter of time before I developed it."  He went on telling me how skinny his grandmother was (he is not that skinny; he is actually a big bear).  But, he told me it was to be expected since it was familial.  He continued to tell me that the insulin shots actually caused him to gain some weight, which if you believe the books would make a person even more insulin dependent.  More than half of the people in my wife's office have the same affliction of being either pre-diabetic or having full-flung type 2, and yes there are a few who also blame their genes or as I sometimes say, "their uncle Bob."  But then, I seem to blame anything on Bob!

So I come home with this story nagging my brain, and my wife comes home from the field after talking with a guy who is convinced that he will be dead in a year.  All his relatives died by the age of 60 except his father who died at ripe old age of 63, so at the age of 59 he figured his years were limited.  In other words, who cares, he might as well throw in the towel, give up and let his life and health go to hell, since he is going to die after all: a self fulfilling prophecy?  He basically summoned my wife to get his business in order before he died.

Waiting for a food cart in Richmond this afternoon, few people know what their health future will be, or maybe few know what it actually is or they are cavalier about it.  I know that when I travel I don't often eat the most healthy, but at least I try to get some exercise in to offset my diet.

I have just been so bothered by people taking things lying down and taking things spoon fed.  When I teach my students I try to help them think, understand and appreciate what lies beneath it all.  I want to instill a wonder lust; a curiosity.  I know it is often appreciated.  Sadly, all that I see lately is people just blindly following demagogues (politicians); they seem to follow the same paths where the rest of the herd is going without asking questions; or even personally concerning themselves, they let their relatives (uncle Bob) and parents rules their health, life and longevity.

What lies beneath it all.  A dear friend and fellow teacher uses this picture in one of his presentations and it is emblematic of it all.  We need to look beneath it all Look at the root instead of being spoon fed.  The hammer sharks here also symbolize my I need to work (hammer) on myself physically and mentally.

Darn it, if I believe this, I should be having treatment for prostrate cancer by now, because that is what my father had at my age.  I was tested and I'm doing fine.  I also made sure I did not suffer from any brain aneurysms as my mother had and I suspect her mother had.  I will "Go my own way" damn it, just like that popular Fleetwood Mac song.  I know I need to clean up my life, but then again, I am not as bad as some others that I know.  It is such a damn cliche, but such a good one: "getting old is not for sissies," I am stiff, I hurt, but I'm going to fight getting old all the damn way!  That is why I sail, why I bike, why I hike, why I blog, practice yoga, try to meditate, live in the moment, and why I still threaten my wife that I will retire when I am 70.  It is just that I want to live my life my own way, with my wife and my friends, without people telling me how to live it or what to expect based on some preconceived idea or model.

Knowing how essential exercise and moving is I made sure that during my tripto Front Royal Virginia today I stopped over at a point where the Appalachian Train crossed the highway and I went for a walk.  My fitbit reported I walked for an hour and a half for 5640 steps, average heartbeat was 106 with top rate at 159.  I climbed over 500 feet at times.  Great exercise!