Scattered. But GOOD Scattered

Yikes! My desk suffers from a bad case of the piles. Somewhere underneath Appalachian Voice, NRDC newsletter, Today in PT, Hindman Summer Brochure, assorted bills and solicitations et cetera is the Phoenix Hardwoods oak surface of a clean slate, not seen in some weeks. And this, in spite of my Getting to Done attempts (even incorporating GTD into Gmail. Tried it?)

Front burner: getting ready for Community College book talk Thursday (that’s just tomorrow!). I think I’m okay for baggage–carton of books, change purse, bookmarks, laptop slide show for the pre- and post-meeting perusal. What I don’t have together is my 30-40 minute talk. On the one hand, there is SO MUCH that will spring from the audience–old friends and neighbors we haven’t seen in decades–that I want to stay unscripted so the conversation can go where the energy of the moment dictates. On the other hand, because of the level of potential distraction, I need some notes to guide me and not let me wander down any rabbit hole that comes along. There is a certain fear in operating according to a very loose script, but that seems to have worked out okay in the past. Still, I’m a little bit anxious. But good ANXIOUS.

Some of you read this in rough form a few weeks back. I massaged it some, and turned it into an essay: Nose for Winter. It will air live on WVTF this Friday. You can listen online now. The intro goes like this:

Anyone who walks Virginia’s fields and forests in winter might easily forget they even have a sense of smell. The olfactory world of the cold months can seem a trackless desert for the nose. But WVTF essayist Fred First says if you know where to look, you can find ways to use your sense of smell even on the coldest winter day.

If I’d finished the article, I’d most definitely have something to say about Richard Louv’s Orion essay, Leave No Child Inside. I highly recommend this topic for your consideration and for discussion here next week. I think this is a crucial issue, and one to which I can, perhaps, contribute–with my writing, photography and general concerns for esthetic and biological awareness, especially among the nation’s cloistered and apathetic young people. An excerpt to lure you over to the article:

We do know that when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature–if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm–they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch or creek or meadow. They recall those “places of initiation,” in the words of naturalist Bob Pyle, where they may have first sensed with awe and wonder the largeness of the world seen and unseen. When people share these stories, their cultural, political, and religious walls come tumbling down.

Over on Nameless Creek today: Abby asks Dumpa a nature question.

I could go on, but I know very few are left reading this far down a blog screen. Lost most shortly after YIKES! Does anybody know if there is an “extended reading” function (to hide most of longish posts) that can be added to blogger like used to exist for Moveable Type? Would be nice. More as it happens…