outdoors

"Wabi and Sabi: the Aesthetics of Solitude"

Article, House of Solitude, Hermitary

Nearly all the arts in historical China and Japan derive their aesthetic principles from Taoism and Zen Buddhism. The two great philosophical traditions proved compatible specifically with the culture and psychology of Japan. The hallmark of a Chinese or Japanese masterpiece free of modern influence continues to be the naturalness and uncontrived, even "accidental" appearance of the work. The artist works with and harmonizes nature and its universal accidents. The guiding principles are wabi and sabi.

From About The No No Project.

The premise of the project is quite simple:

Walking around town, you’ll see sign after sign forbidding you from performing healthy outdoor activities. Skateboarding. Cycling. Walking for the love of Mike. It goes to show what’s really important in this society: keeping things comfy for sedentary property and car owners who would deny you your god-given right to breathe outdoors!

So I take pictures of all the signs telling me not to exercise.

In case it isn’t clear, this is very much tongue-in-cheek. I’m just amazed how much effort is put into making verboten what are otherwise wholesome diversions.

In some indirect way, I’m also trying to connect the dots on what are often disparate cultures — cyclists and skaters, for example — to show we are united against The Man Trying to Keep Us Down more than we are apart.

See Submissions if you’d like to join in the fun. You can send me email at robert at the domain name nonoproject.com. Thanks for checking out The No No Project.

Also available on Twitter, @nonoproject.

Bikehugger has a cool video showing the basics of Google's new bicycling directions for Google Maps. Biggest thing to keep in mind is that, with it being a beta, be sure to sanity-check the directions before sallying forth.

Taking a more local example to me, going from downtown Redlands to downtown Riverside:

View Larger Map

It's cool to start with, heading out Barton Road, and it's making for the Santa Ana River Trail like it should, but it makes a right turn on Waterman and heads north to the cycling path trailhead off Hospitality Lane in San Bernardino. What it should do in this case is just keep going west and get onto the SART in the Cooley Ranch/Colton area.

Still, it's exciting to see Cycling get its (preliminary) due on Google Maps, along with "Walking" and "Public Transit."

Now we just need "Hiking." :D

UPDATE May 24 2010: After submitting a report, I heard from a member of the Google Maps team, who indicated they have updated and fixed the route issue mentioned above. Yay Internet! ;)

Dan Buettner, writer for National Geographic, and a team studied communities around the world where a higher percentage of people lived to older ages, even into their 100s. In this TED video, Dan describes three communities they found where folks both grow older and grow older better. He refers to the talk as "How to Live Past 100+", but really it's about how to better your chances of a longer, healthier life -- more years and better ones.

At the end, he outlines the nine common elements they distilled from studying the Nuoro Province in Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda, right down the road here in Southern California.

The big do's:

1. Move Naturally -- physical activity every day, but not in gyms.
2. Right Outlook -- downshifting intensity during the day, sense of purpose.
3. Eat Wisely -- wine, plants (legumes, nuts, leafy greens), some meat, but don't overeat.
4. Connect -- belong in your family, friends, tribe.

Fascinating talk. I was worried it was going to be a bit snake oily, but it wound up being quite interesting.

Dec 1-8, John Muir will be tweeting via the @calisphere feed. The most recent as of this writing:

Muir: A flower grows in the mountains that is like candy-stalk, and leaves and all look just like red, crispy candy. http://bit.ly/7XQhgi

The tweet text comes from various Muir letters.

In case you aren't familiar with it, Calisphere is an amazing virtual collection of primary sources from the University of California.

I have decided to retire the End Pavement website and subsume its content back into my main Celsius1414 site.

In late 2006, I broke out several different topics that used to appear on Celsius1414 into their own websites. After a year or so, I realized I was spreading myself too thin and got rid of a few. Only one of the satellite sites (Trolley Dodger) really took off, and so I have been debating the fate of the last two for some time -- End Pavement and Grown Diaries. I'm still hoping to expand the latter (though I still might change my mind), but I think two or three blogs+websites will be more than enough for me to deal with.

Especially if I want to be doing any actual bicycling and hiking. :)

On a practical level, and apart from the blog and domain disappearing, not much is changing, the content has been integrated into Celsius1414 and life will continue. I believe all of the comments will come with as well, if my research is correct.

Links will not be redirected automatically as I am letting the endpavement.com domain expire, so please update your outbound links. However, I'm trying to make it as easy a transition as possible with simple substitutions of the celsius1414.com domain for endpavement.com.

Thanks to everyone for reading these past three years, and please do switch on over to the new (old) site if you have a mind to. I look forward to lots of new writing and lots of being outdoors in the year to come.

They're calling it a "Hiking Wiki," but there's a lot more to the Sierra Club's new sierraclubtrails.org website. In addition to the wiki enabling you to find and report on cool local hikes, you'll find:

Tips for hikers, a birding blog, photo contests, and Nature Notes, a series of audio features based on interviews with naturalists and Sierra Club Outings leaders. Sierra Club Trails is also an online community where users can create profiles and meet other hikers and nature-lovers, as well as join discussion forums with topics like the best trail mix recipe or whether guns should be allowed in national parks. Community members can form groups around a particular outdoor interest or place.

Sounds pretty spiffy to me, and the site looks cool as well. The wiki concept seems to be a natural fit for grassroots outdoor reporting, and with the prevalence of iPhones and other handheld computers, that communication can often take place while you're out and about -- I can foresee a quick check while in the car or at the trailhead. Assuming of course you're not looking to get away from technology while you're on the trail. ;)

Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club had this to say:

“Over a hundred years ago, Sierra Club founder John Muir understood that once people experience the beauty of these places, they will be motivated to preserve our natural heritage for future generations. We’re taking that idea into the 21st century with this new technology.”

I should point out it's also meant for cyclists and kayakers, so feel free to visit if you're in one or all of those groups. :) Check it out!