Don't worry, no cheezy greenwashing effort to link my use of QR to any kind of environmental message. Two separate messages. The first: those of you who have contacted me to express bafflement about the quiz, might have missed this. It's a new page at my site, complete with an awful YouTube video of a haggard author in a rather rain-leaky office (when you hear that universities need some of this infrastructure money, believe it). Anyway, the instructions there will help you get started, but you'll still need to do a little more digging to get to the answer and to win a free book.
Second, as much fun as it is to try to think of puzzles and contests, I've missed the chance to just talk about stuff that interests me, and there's still quite a lot bubbling away in the background. I've spent all weekend looking for a chance to say a little more about my visit to the Extended Learning Opportunities group in the village of Erin last week. I did my own feeble version of a live Tweet (which is difficult to do during a talk - people don't want to see you thumbing on a phone while actually speaking) which mostly consisted of saying something deep such as "Holy frig there's a lot more people here than I had expected and they look hungry for some content." Was that 140 characters? I'm tired of counting.
But the most unexpected part of the talk was not so much the size of the crowd nor the quality of the questions (60 minute talk, and a planned 45 minute question period that not only went through the break but went overtime as well -- about 75 minutes altogether) but the nature of the questions. I've given my "Where Am I?" talk a few times now to a number of different types of crowds, but this was my first appearance before an older group of people who are very active and thoughtful about the world. I think that what surprised me the most (other than the questions about dowsing -- ok, I've been accused of covering a lot of territory in my book but even I didn't think about dowsing) was the attunement of this audience to the environmental issues. In my book I make the argument that being lost disconnects us from nature, and is one of the root causes or our neglect of our duty to act as stewards of the planet. These people did not need to hear this from me (though I believe they very much enjoyed hearing me say the words). It occurred to me that one difference between this audience and my more typical one would have been that many of these people would have grown up in rural settings. In fact, one delightful fellow, in an eloquent paean to fields, forests and critters, likened his early experiences of the simple joys of connection with nature on the farm where he grew up to my descriptions of Aboriginal Songlines and pleasure-seeking raft voyages in the Pacific ocean by the Puluwatese. I most commonly think of our modern urban disconnect as a gradual shift in outlook that began a very long time ago, and when I think of people who are truly connected to the planet, my examples tend towards the exotic. It was a nice wake-up call for me to remember that we in our superdeveloped, overheated high-density lifestyles actually live among people who get this because they've lived it. When I think about possible futures and try to imagine optimistic ones, I most often imagine that the up and coming generation, now beginning to show a profound aptitude for organizing the changes that we need, are the only ones who are up to the job. It was an unexpectedly buoyant experience to remember that there are other generations among us who could contribute much wisdom and understanding to the processes of change if we listen to them.
More about this later. And also Le Corbusier, who is still churning away back there, mixing it up right now with Plato, Vitruvius, and the freemasons. It's getting a little messy in the back of my cranium.
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