Follow Your Heart
August 4th, 2009 | 9 Comments
I should be going to sleep, but I’m not doing that, I’m writing instead. The reason I’m writing is something I read on another outdoor blog which, for some reason, is just sticking with me. The blog in question is Whitetail Woods, written by a good blogging friend, Rick Kratzke. Rick just celebrated the first anniversary of his current blog, and in his “Tuesday Tips and Techniques” segment this week, he shared some advice about blogging. His main bit of advice? Blog from the heart.
I have to confess that I”ve always relied more on my head than my heart. I’m a cerebral kind of woman, and I tend to follow my brain. Following your heart is more unreliable, and more likely to get you hurt or into trouble. Despite knowing and truly believing that, I’m starting to discover that my entire foray into the outdoors has been one big exercise in following my heart and refusing to listen to what my brain was telling me. Strangely enough that may have been a good thing.
All my life I’ve been the quintessential indoor girl. Outdoors was too hot or too cold and there were bugs or snakes. The humidity made my hair curl. The sun burned my skin or made me freckle. The wind ruffled the pages of my books and made them hard to read. I did spend quite a bit of time outside when I was a kid, but I wasn’t always happy about it. Mostly I preferred climate control, a soft place to sit and room service. I was not anyone’s idea of an outdoor girl.
Then, because I needed a job, I took one with an outdoor company, despite knowing next to nothing about the outdoors. I built a following for that company, and started writing a blog about outdoor activities and issues, without any qualification at all other than I worked for an outdoor company and I could write. I started interacting with other outdoor bloggers most of whom were talking about and doing things that were completely foreign to me. I often felt like they all spoke a secret language that I just couldn’t learn, but something made me want to keep trying to learn, and so I did.
Eventually, my outdoor contacts and some of the things I’d said on the corporate blog led to the formation of the Outdoor Bloggers Summit. As that organization grew, I became very passionate about giving a louder voice to those who talk about the outdoors and about encouraging more outdoor voices to speak. I put my time and effort and my own money into making that happen. To this day, I still wonder what fuels that passion, and why making sure that the outdoor voices are heard has come to matter so much to me, but even if I’m not always sure why, I know it’s something I was meant to do. My brain may wonder, but the rest of me knows that part of my heart lies there.
If someone had told me 3 1/2 years ago that I’d be doing any of the outdoor things I do now, I would have laughed myself sick. This was not where my life was meant to go, and these things are not the things my rational brain had decreed that I would be doing. Still, even though I feel sometimes like I’m living the life of someone other than myself, I wouldn’t trade the experiences I’ve had, or the ones I’m going to have, for anything. I may never be the quintessential outdoor girl, and I’m not sure I even want to be, but I will be something different than I thought I would be 3 1/2 years ago, and it’s all due to one thing.
Instead of listening to my brain, I followed my heart.
I can’t wait to see where it leads me next.
The Blogroll Dilemma
July 31st, 2009 | 5 Comments
When I contemplated starting this blog I was immediately confronted with a king size dilemma. It wasn’t what to write about or how the blog should look or what it should be called. Those were relatively easy decisions. My big dilemma, one that I have not entirely solved, involved this blogroll, or at least the version of it that should end up on this blog.
For those of you who haven’t taken a look at it lately, the OBS blogroll is huge. It now numbers somewhere in the neighborhood of 210 blogs, and I’m proud to have each and every one of them on that blogroll. I’m also aware that a lot of people on that blogroll feel a connection to me because I lead an organization that they support. So, when I started putting together my personal blog, one question that confronted me was this, how does that blogroll there connect to the blogroll here?
For a while I thought about just transferring the whole thing over. That seemed the simplest way, at least from the perspective of sparing hurt feelings and making sure no one felt left out. The only problem with that solution is that I’d then be managing two blogrolls with over 200 blogs on them, and managing one of that size is quite enough.
Also, if I’m being honest, moving the whole blogroll didn’t feel quite right. On the OBS blog I’m a public persona of a sort, and the blogs on that blogroll are connected to the organization, not to me personally. Here, however, I’m just me, and I wanted my blogroll to be full of blogs that had a connection to me, either because they were written by friends, or because they were blogs that had some personal meaning to me.
I’m not sure I’ve entirely decided how I want to solve this issue. I could easily see the blogroll on this blog getting out of control, since there are a lot of outdoor bloggers I consider friends and a lot of outdoor blogs I enjoy reading and admire. It may be that I decide to limit the blogroll to 20 or so blogs and switch it out every month or so. It may be that the blogroll just grows and grows. I don’t know exactly how I’ll solve this dilemma. What I do know is that I believe that having a blogroll is important, and that I want to support the outdoor bloggers whom I admire and who are my friends.
If anyone has any suggestions for how I can accomplish those goals, please share them. If you think I’m making a tempest in a teapot and worrying over nothing, tell me that too. Sometimes that’s helpful to hear.
A Blog Manifesto
July 28th, 2009 | 13 Comments
I have to confess I’ve wanted an outdoor blog of my own for quite some time now. Over the past three years I’ve written a lot of posts on outdoor subjects, written for two outdoor blogs and never had the chance to say what I really thought unfettered by concerns about my opinions reflecting negatively on a company or an organization. Speaking or writing on behalf of someone or something else is harder than it looks and there are occasions when all you can do is bite your tongue and avoid a subject that is just too controversial.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the outdoor writing that I’ve done in the past. Had it not been for my corporate outdoor writing job I probably never would have started writing about the outdoors at all. That job also led to my meeting the people who eventually helped found the Outdoor Bloggers Summit. Writing for, and running, that organization has been a privilege and a pleasure, but it has had its constraints. When I write for that blog, I’m writing as the head of the organization, not as myself. What I say there can have an impact on a lot more than just me.
In the end, I realized I needed a place where the only one I spoke for was myself, and the Tenderfoot Diaries was born.
Those of you who have read my writing in the past probably think you know what you can expect here and, in part, you’re probably right. I will encourage outdoor blogging and seek to educate outdoor bloggers, just as I do on the OBS blog. I may resurrect Safety Friday, which began on the corporate blog I wrote. Hopefully I’ll keep to the standard of writing that you’ve come to expect from me. I certainly intend to try.
The part that will be new, and which you may not have seen before, is my opinions. I have a lot of them, and some of them may surprise some of you. I’ll also be telling you about my outdoor adventures, both the triumphs and the screw-ups. There may even, if I get over my camera phobia, be pictures. The main thing I promise is that I will always tell you the truth, and I’ll always strive to be honest and fair in what I write.
Right now, I’m not exactly sure what this blog will turn out to be, and I’m finding that rather exciting. For the first time I have an outlet for writing about the outdoors that has no other purpose than what I want it to have. That’s quite an exhilarating prospect.
I can’t wait to see what comes next.
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