Calls to Adventure

I’m always encouraging my students to slow down and take some pictures — they don’t have to be brilliant, they just have to capture something they notice between classes or during their day. (Note to students: It’s okay to use your photographs in your final ePortfolios.) Two mornings ago, I was walking past the long rows of glass windows outdoors until I came to mine. There, framed against the glass, was a cousin of the cloud I just blogged about. See the world from the outside in. It lends new perspective.

My office Thursday 7:10 a.m., February Feb 16

I’m rolling out more blog posts in the past week than in the past months. Whycome? A few possible reasons:

• The tug of the need to express myself and be understood.
• The beauty of brevity: sometimes, not much need be said.
• The pull of publishing: seeing my photographs on the web = pretty cool.
• The ‘forgiveness of the form.’ I can be sloppy. I mean, I shouldn’t…but I get excited when I type and there are typos, missing words, incomplete thoughts. I make up for these glaring errors by correcting them every time a reader tells me about another one. Many thanks to you all. But I digress. I can be sloppy because my posts can be edited into perpetuity until, eventually, there’s no more sail to pull in. The sentences are taut.
  

  The composition of this composition, aka post.

I plan to post many more, shooting for one a day give or take. Look for stories about teaching, students (anonymously, when they give their permission), posts about great classic music, comedy, and television shows that folks my age — 50 — will more than likely remember. Generally speaking. To a point, I suppose.

Anyway, tune in to Calls to Adventure once a day or once a week. We’ll be here. How can I make such a bold prediction? I just put down $99 for an advertising-free experience for viewers for a year. Nothing motivates a Scotsman to get his money’s worth than, well, getting his money’s worth.

Good things happen sometimes when I write by hand, late afternoon.

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan Friar and sage, closed this week’s daily meditations with this contemplation:

I interpret this as “return to the source.” The source is ecumenical, open and affirming. It is brilliant light, as the visual cliche goes, and humming warmth. It is immortality. How can we not desire to return to the source? Not now, of course. A full, life well-lived provides unlimited opportunities to see manifestations of the source: a coincidence, a moment of peace, deja vu, awareness of a narrowly averted tragedy. There are so many, little pinpricks in our consciousness of something more.

One way I return to the source is I go to nature. It’s hard not to be humbled by mountains. I most frequently visit the Appalachians, the world’s second oldest mountain range. (The Himalayas are the oldest.)

Here’s a mix of the Wyoming Teton Range and Virginia Appalachians. If you look closely, you may see a few pinpricks.

A glacial lake in the Teton Mountain Range, Wyoming

Grand Teton Mountain Range, Wyoming

Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, VA

Mount Rogers Recreation Area, VA

McLean, William and me – Mount Rogers Recreational Area, Virginia

I’m on a news holiday, which means that I fidget with what to do with all the time I now have, away from the hooting and a’hollering. Here’s one thing. I take my readers on a journey to work. Now, hold down your hooting and a’hollering.

Sun rises.

Cameron in the dark

How I remember where I park

How I remember to stop.

Good Morning Moon

Cameron in the Light

Sunlight

Office Away from Home

The Return