Learning to ramble

I know that I should be writing more, and although I feel that I have a lot to say, my thoughts are unorganized and incomplete. I am not one who likes to ramble, despite the name of my blog. For me the need to know what I am doing before I do it supersedes just about everything else—I am a planner. I plan out what I’m going to do, say, wear, eat, etc. My mother likes to tell the story of how when I was a baby I started talking but then stopped for about 6 months. My parents were quite worried and took me to the doctor but he didn’t find anything wrong. Then, when I did start to talk, I was speaking in sentences. Guess I just had to put it all together first, plan it out.


I have a lot of things I want to explore, a lot of topics that I want to read and write about, but I feel that I need to put it all together before I put it before the public eye—small as that eye may be. I am learning about all sorts of different but related issues and philosophies that surround the idea of environmentalism--deep ecology, transcendentalism, conservation and stewardship, the place of God in nature or of nature in God, man’s own place in nature—and I want to put down here what I’ve learned and what I think about it all.


Right now I am reading two books, both very well written and informative: Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken and The Life of the Skies by Jonathan Rosen. Both these books have a nature/environmental theme. Blessed Unrest discusses how issues of social concern are often tied into environmental issues, while The Life in the Skies talks about bird watching, its history (or at least the history of the naturalist as scientist) and takes a much more spiritual angle. I mention this because I think what I’d like to do is use the books I’m reading as a jumping off point, to write about some of the points made and what I think about them, and try not to worry if I’m right or wrong or even if I know what I’m talking about. The point is to use my voice and to start a discussion about topics that concern me, and hopefully we will all learn something—about ourselves as well as the world around us.