I’ll be away for a few weeks until the end of August. My trip will take me camping in an old growth forest in Clear Creek State Park in Western Pennsylvania. Then I’ll attend two concerts at the Marlboro Music Festival, an elite chamber music gathering in Vermont. I may head North from there to hike in the Adirondacks, perhaps tackling one of the 46 Peaks called Giant Mountain. After that, 5 days on Cape Cod with will relieve my ocean cravings. Heading down to DC, I’ll stop in Philadelphia for a night to see a friend. After a week at “home” with Mom I’ll be fattened up and ready to come back to good ‘ole Ohio.

I don’t think I’ll return this year to the area in the Adirondacks I found last year called Thirteenth Lake Siamese Ponds Wilderness Conservation Area. I just had a funny feeling about trying to repeat last Summer’s experience. Right behind Thirteenth Lake I did a solo climb past beaver swamps and up a slippery slope to the top of Peaked Mountain, where I was greeted by friendly dragon flies, one of whom landed on my solar plexus just as I was about to leave. Something about the experience made me feel at home, as if I was meant to be in that area. The quiet lake is stocked for fishing; there’s a nearby river for trout fishing and kayaking or rafting, and there’s lots of good hiking within a few hours away. There are several remote primitive camping sites around the lake. A few days ago I was doing some searches for that area and found a nice little 3 acre piece of land for sale right next to the Wildlife Conserve and Thirteenth Lake. I’ll wait a year and see if I still yearn to return there.

See you in September.

I’ll be checking in with the blog regularly.

I enjoy finding blogs (sort of) similar to mine. It’s taken me awhile to find my niche; a peculiar blend of personal experience, spiritual advice, philosophical explorations, poetry, gardening, food and general inspiration. Yesterday someone named Titus-Armand commented on my site, so I checked out his blog, Project Armannd. I was pleasantly surprised to fine a quality blog, one which isn’t prepackaged to a particular audience as so many are these days. He explores a variety of subjects toward living a better life; “about today’s society, issues of today’s world, tips on self-improvement, spiritual advices, inner peace, general psychology, happiness, and some other things…” The topics he chooses are intriguing and unique, like the psychological meaning of certain eye movements. But he doesn’t just report. He interprets. I like that. Welcome Titus-Armand (TA?). I like your style.

What a great blog name: The Green Atheist. I popped over there after a search for posts tagged “humanism” and found a clean, clear and well written blog. The head article today is a bullet list of the Principals of Humanism. Thank goodness humanism is catching on again. The founding fathers of the USA would be proud!

I’ve been puttering along with this blog for months now. I don’t read many other blogs and don’t post very often here. Yesterday I fixed a bug in my comment box code which prevented entering text in IE. Later that day I got over a dozen comments. Elated, I commented back, eager to re-kindle blog relationships. Then I happened to check my traffic, and WOW, found I went from 300 to 3000 hits in one day. Fixing a comment box couldn’t have done that!! I traced the cause to two simultaneous and lucky links by others. One is from a site called BloggerFodder, a simply delicious array of links to hot posts for other bloggers or readers to peruse and use, if desired. The bulk of traffic, however, came from StumbleUpon, where my recent post was added to their spirituality page. I am now fans of both, and I hope you will show MY appreciation for them by visiting them!

Fairy tales – by Anthony Steyning novelist, essayist, playwright, critic.

It’s funny what you find when you let your mind run wild. I just set up an iGoogle home page, which, like IE or Netscape, offers a variety of widgets to enhance the personality and useability of our homepage.

You can set up a theme for the home page, along with a huge variety of little boxes filled with useful or useless toys, links to blogs, news, weather, quotes, art, etc.

You can also set up other pages in tabs. So I set up a news page, a blog page, a literary page and a philosophy page. Each time I set up the page, the ubiquitous “Google” search box inquired if I felt “lucky”, meaning if I would let it set up a series of widgets in that particular category for me. What the heck. I let it. And it came up with some fun sites. One was called “Literary Eruption”, certainly an intriguing title.

Apparently it is linked to the site (at least today) of a Spanish philosopher and novelist named Anthony Steyning.

This fellow seems to have a grip on both the relevance of history and the playful spontenaeity of the Internet. If I were you, I’d check him out. I already did, but since I’m not you, I can’t do it for you, too.

Here’s a quote from his essay, Fairy Tales: A Narrow Escape!.

Antonin Artaud said it allwhen he wrote Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu, asking us to stopthis nonsense with our imaginary friend. For if man needed to createmyth to step out beyond himself so he could look down upon himself andheal himself or give himself that extra bit of courage and strength inthe face of mostly cruel and often endless setbacks, then for a timethis was fine. But by beginning to believe his own inventions, imposingthem as if they were the truth, he created the beginning of his owndegradation. Because myth is a series of pretty fibs and an elaboratelie however well meant, however well told, represents the seed ofdestruction that every grand falsehood carries within itself.”