Please follow me on The Natural Realm, the blog that I currently write for--and curate--for Preserve Our Parks on our website, awealthofnature.org.
____________________________________________________________
There was a time when I maintained two separate blogs: Arts Without Borders and Urban Wilderness. Although I no longer add to either of those, earlier posts remain available at the link. The work I currently do for The Natural Realm is an extension of the previous work on Urban Wilderness.
_____________________________________________________________
The following was my explanation for creating the two separate blogs:
Why two blogs, you might ask? The short, simple answer is that one deals with topics related to the arts while the other deals with topics related to the environment.
But my life - and Life in general - is not that simple. To be truthful, I don't believe in dividing these two important interests of mine. Like Robert Frost, "My object in living is to unite / My avocation and my vocation / As my two eyes make one in sight...." Put another way, I see my work as bridging a divide between disciplines.
I've called the first "Arts Without Borders" to signify my interest in all artistic disciplines. Within this one topic, I wish to unite; that is, to be inclusive and not exclusive. I see no bright lines between music, theater, visual arts - even literary arts, etc. Nor do I between art and craft, Fine Arts and commercial arts, high brow and low, academic and so-called "primitives." While these are all legitimate categories and topics of discussion, instead of borders I see overlaps and intersections.
"Urban Wilderness," of course, relates to the project of the same name. That oxymoronic concept has been intended to bridge a conceptual gap as well as to symbolize the unity of opposites, the yin of the human with the yang of nature. The meanings I associate with Urban Wilderness are many, varied, and equally impossible to separate into discrete disciplines. This blog will cover just about any environmental topic that catches my attention.
Since I am an artist, not a scientist, I see the environment through an artist's lens. This is why I would prefer to bridge the divide between my two blogs. But, in my experience the people with whom I come into contact when I deal with these two topics tend to be different people. (This is not a new issue. Rereading Thoreau recently, I discovered this characteristically direct and acerbic observation: "It has come to this, --that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature. It is monstrous when one cares but little about trees and much about Corinthian columns, and yet this is exceedingly common.") And so, I have two blogs because I have two audiences. I move freely from one to the other, and I invite you, dear reader, to do the same.
"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." --E.B. White
Click on the links above to get to the archived blogs.
