After the 4th and Life Resumes

Maybe it is the unexpected gift of COOL early July mornings that has recharged my batteries. I don’t often feel this energized in this particular month of relative heat in our mountain valley.

I imagine, like me, your life has been on hold as folks left town, left the office, took their phones off the hook (there’s a phrase that is vanishing into dusty memory). Twice, we moved during July 4th week, and just try getting a banker, realtor, or lawyer to return your call.

At any rate, after a week on hold for this national holiday, it seems like time to jump back on the moving walkway and enjoy where ever it is that it will take me.  It’s an uncommon ambition for summer.

And with that new surge of energy in mind, I point your attention to ten ways to “become an explorer” that the posts’ author, Maria Popova highlights from Keri Smith’s  How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum. 

Screenshot 2014-07-07 05.43.17She describes this new book as “a wonderful compendium of 59 ideas for how to get creatively unstuck by engaging with everyday objects and your surroundings in novel ways. From mapping found sounds to learning the language of trees to turning time observation into art, these playful and poetic micro-projects aren’t just a simple creativity booster – they’re potent training for what Buddhism would call“living from presence” and inhabiting your life more fully.”

You know this resonates with me if you’ve hung around Fragments or read my books. I think I just might come back to these “Ten ways to Be an Explorer” and remind myself and you few readers about how important these small insight-shifts can be, especially to forming the life patterns of a young person.

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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