THE GREAT OUTDOORS and ADVENTURE (blog-eclectic style)

An adventure has always been attached somehow to those wild and free spaces. When I used to kayak with the sea there was always a "special kind of freedom" as a most wonderful happening. Frank Goodman, from the UK, first used that "special kind of freedom" comment, if I recall well enough from the 1970s, although the first writer to insist upon such a theme was R.L. Stevenson. In one of his early books, from 120 odd years back, Robert Louis Stevenson tried to escape his strict Scottish and church-like life to go canoeing through Europe. The book was called an "Inland Voyage". A voyage of the mind for sure but outdoors and peradventure. Would anybody name their canoe today like a ship would be named? What about the name "Cigarette"? RLS would be seen today as a very bad role model for youth and society.

The "Outdoors" has always been a special kind of place and space. The more the city makes a mind the more the outdoors rebels through many folk. The "outdoors" is a kind of dirty place. Mary Douglas, a wonderful culural anthropologist, used to say that in an age of clean and well ordered systems to be a bit dirty was to be "out of place" and out of order. The special kind of freedom of my kayaking days were out of order, wet and wild and windy and always a bit dirty. Such was the adventure.

I am beginning to look upon the internet voyages in a similar way. The electronic way of virtual waves miss, of course, the real sea mist and wetness and real high waves, but in one limited sense the great outdoors and the adventure finds connection with what can only be called a BLOG-ECLECTIC arena. There is also a special kind of freedom in this blog-eclectic domain and just as the sea and the kayak demands care so to this virtual world. The blog-eclectic wilderness is dirty and out-of-place vis-a-vis the well ordered and clean places. This jetsam-flotsam face of the internet waves is a different kind of inland voyage but still it deserves care and attention.