Mary Panttaja

As we were about to leave, I casted about for something to read—not just anything (I have a large stack of business and technical books on the desktop)—but something comforting and inspiring to read. In the library, I was scanning my nature essay section and pulled out “Desert Solitaire, A Season in the Wilderness” by Edward Abbey. Of course, since we are heading to the red rock country, it was especially pertinent.

I mused a bit on those books that I would always own, those writers that always speak to me very personally. Many of the most important books in my life are of the experience of the person/soul/sensibility coming into contact with the natural world. That experience of nature and the planet is, for me, a key touchstone in my process of keeping in touch with who I really am. It helps me move passed my egoic worries and concerns and feel what really is.

So my mind started to make a list of who these people were. One day I’ll will do it more completely, but here is a start:

• Gary Snyder
• Edward Abbey
• Aldo Leopold
• Wendell Berry
• Gretel Erhlich
• Barry Lopez
• Robert Thurman
• Peter Mathiessen
• Farley Mowat

I know there are more—but today it’s E Abbey and the red rock desert. And that is quite enough.

On the route to Jackson, WY, we took a small detour through Southeastern Idaho to a place called Gray’s Lake. We’ve been here before and never found the lake. And there is a reason we never found the lake—it’s really a very large marshland of reeds with a little bit of surface water. The lake is important as a national wildlife refuge and a major breeding site for Sand Hill Cranes. (Which I learned about reading Aldo Leopold’s famous book “The Sand County Almanac”—one of my favorite thinkers and one of my favorite books.)

So we drove around the lake and saw many pairs of cranes foraging in the cut hay fields, one pair with a baby. Many flocks of cranes soared overhead, each so gigantic that even a small group is very impressive.

As we left the visitor center we found a dirt road that I remembered fondly. It runs from Gray’s Lake through the headwaters and drainage of Tincup Creek. Where the creek hits the main road (Hwy 34) there stands the remnants of an old establishment that is vaguely called Tincup.

This is a very delicate 14 miles through the Rockies: Aspen groves, long creek meaders, open sage brush, and valleys forming from dozens of beaver damns. It is just as beautiful as I remember—and yet such a small thing, just a creek running through its own little neighborhood. And still, it is somewhere I will visit again, just to see it or to sit in its shadows and carefully watch.

Rain yesterday afternoon, but things are dry, and crisp and cold, this morning.

We stayed over in a campground in Wells, Nevada last night (clean, efficient and functional if noisy and inelegant), at the base of the Ruby Mountains, which are one my favorite places that I’ve never really explored yet. Still on the list, but we need a week to stay here and wander.

Passing through Elko yesterday, we looked up and there was His Holiness the Dalai Lama on an enormous billboard, his hands clasped together in namaste. You couldn’t help but grin. It was just two years ago that we drove through Wells and noticed a newspaper headline that promoted that he was speaking that day in Sun Valley. We dashed up to see him. And it’s just one year since I went with Cynthia (Jim was under his travel restriction) to his teaching in NYC. Quite a surprise to keep discovering him out here in the desert.

We found a great bicycle ride last night. A 4% grade on the road up into the Ruby Mountains that went on and on, though we were running out of light. It is quite hazy and overcast here due to the heavy layer of smoke that has settled in from some fire—the moon was a soft orange when it broke through early this morning.

With the wifi at the campground and the new SlingBox at home, we are listening to the dramatic news from the Tour de France while we wake up with our coffee. It’s really early, but all is cozy here.

PS. Jim figured out that maybe I could power my MacBook Pro with a DC to AC converted plugged into the car; and sure enough, it won’t charge, but I got an extra 90 minutes on a essentially dead battery yesterday. That was very cool; at least I can work while we drive and preserve battery.

It is almost 20 years to the month since Jim and I started the original joint business that became Panttaja Consulting Group, Inc. As we start into helping launch another new business it will be interesting to note the similarities and differences. So far:

• You still have to hire people, get medical insurance and workman’s compensation insurance. But it seems to be easier and cheaper to outsource the process than it was. In fact, it seems to be a no-brainer to have a Human Resources outsourcing provider, so setting up the corporate structure for having employees is pretty much a menu driven process. Not so much to figure out.
• You have to find space to house the business. Of course, this depends on whether you are building a “virtual” company or one you want to locate in space and time. (That is, get everyone together much of the time.) We can choose not to “co-locate” people because of all the technology at hand that brings us together virtually: conference calls, virtual meetings, email, instant messaging, video chat, etc. It looks like we will be going “physical” with this new company, so we need the whole facilities and furniture scene. Though I will admit that, having been through it several times before, it is less daunting than that first foray into renting an office.
• The challenge of establishing the technology to support a company has more options these days. You can outsource it all with hosting companies and a wide variety of software tools. If you are not a software development company, you don’t need to install much of any software (you usually need a browser), but you can get away without buying much. Some of the online software choices (like Salesforce) are subscription-based with a fee (it’s called “software as a service”), but others like Google Notebooks are free. You will find free solutions for most of the general tasks you want software for, though they may or may not meet specific requirements.
• Even in the software business, many development environments are free or relatively cheap. They do not require the substantial investments we had to make 20 years ago.

So things stay the same, and things change. And the less you are dependent on physically gathering people, the more you can radically outsource your whole operation.

This follows a theme in the blogosphere (world of blogs) these days, which is outsourcing your life. Some of it is very cool. But yesterday I found myself with one of the ultimate non-outsourced projects—harvesting food for the week from the garden, picking the cherry tomatoes, pear-apples, and strawberries one by one. And it was great. Sometimes you want your life just to be your life.

We are preparing to head out traveling again. This time just the two of us and the pop-up tent camper. The entire rig is small but pretty complicated. We carry the following with our car and a 10 foot trailer:

• Our traveling office includes the following:
  • 2 Macs (now running SlingPlayer to our SlingBox at home to help us follow the Tour de France next week)
  • EVDO cellular network
  • Network hub that can work off the car battery (or the camper battery)
  • Cellular camera and a digitial media transfer device
  • Digital voice recorder
  • HP all-in-one (printer, fax, copier; which we have yet to use)
  • Garmin GPS unit
  • Of course, the two IPhones (a different wireless network)
  • We are also currently maintaining a T-Mobile account for really fast wireless where it’s available (Starbucks for example)

• An old Yakima space case (Gorrila tape patches and stickers abound) carrying our folding flat water kayak
• An extra set of old bike racks on the car for when we want to shuttle without the trailer
• Riding on top of the camper: Two Jackson white water kayaks (for only up to class 3; we’re wooses)
• Two Ibis mountain bikes–much more worn this year than ever before. (Ibis Cycles is back in business in Scotts Valley, which is good news.)

The camper itself is minimially outfitted: no air conditioning, no microwave, no shower. The only indulgence is that these little Fleetwood campers are the only RV’s that come with king-size beds—still using sleeping bags—but they are wide and long. When we are on the road, while we like having access to electricity and tables and chairs for our work, we’d rather feel a little more like we are camping and spend a lot of our days out of doors rather than be coddled inside a house-like environment. So the tent-camper is fitting.

As we prepare our for our sojourn, I realize how fickle I am. Sometimes I really want to be just wandering around the world. (Currently reading “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts.) Live the footloose life, unattached to a place, mirroring an international version of “On the Road”. And other times, I really want to sit and be still and focus. And home is a really productive place to do that. In addition, the two life styles have some difficulty sychronizing. If you want to be engaged in group activities (like play in a band, working in a writing group, or having a personal social life) you need to be around much of the time—making you less free to wander in time and space, even if you can make your work travel with you. So maybe “work” can go where you go, but “community” is a harder thing to take on the road.

Well, if this is the worst problem we have to resolve, then life is good. It does look like we may be settling in for a bit of a work challenge come our return, so this is an important R&R trip. I hope to make significant progress on the the next draft of the novel, and maybe start thinking about finding a professional editor. Fun stuff.

(No, not bets, nor funds.)

We were riding north on highway 128 early one morning last week (a small meandering road that runs north on the west side of the Alexander Valley), when we came around a corner to see a mysterious mechanical monster. It was rounding the end of a long row of vines, heading back into a vineyard. About 12 feet tall, the driver sitting on top, it had long sides and and undercarriage about 5 feet up off the ground. Between the sides hung two panels evenly dividing the deep space under the machine, like a gigantic 4-toothed comb. The result of driving this contraption through the vineyards is that the vines are all precisely 5 feet tall and about 12 inches wide. The grapes nestled close to the main trunk are exposed to the sun and air–supposedly good for the ripening fruit.

I’ve always wondered how they got the vines to look like that—was it some amazingly constraining gene pool that made some vineyards grow so to be so tidy? No, it turns out to be a very large hedging machine that wields its grooming power on early July mornings in the valley.

On another note, we are about to head out on a meander, part work, part vacation, part vocation. I’ll keep you posted but we’ll likely be moving July 24 through August 15.

Continuing the conversation about awareness of the planet, here is an interesting world-based organization that is working to figure out how statistical technologies (data collection, analysis, graphical visualizations) can help us make more effective decisions. The OECD is an organization that concerns itself with the evolution of our societies:

The OECD brings together the governments of
countries committed to democracy and the
market economy from around the world to:

• Support sustainable economic growth
• Boost employment
• Raise living standards
• Maintain financial stability
• Assist other countries’ economic development
• Contribute to growth in world trade

The OECD also shares expertise and exchanges views
with more than 70 other countries, from Brazil, China,
and Russia to the least developed countries in Africa.

And they have a special focus on statistical data and what it can tell us.

For more than 40 years, the OECD has been one of the world’s largest and most reliable sources of comparable statistics, and economic and social data. As well as collecting data, the OECD monitors trends, analyses and forecasts economic developments and researches social changes or evolving patterns in trade, environment, agriculture, technology, taxation and more.

The Organisation provides a setting where governments compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practice and coordinate domestic and international policies.

There is a useful post by Michael Arrington in TechCrunch this morning. He spoke at the conference and discusses some of the technology that is evolving to capture the massive amounts of data and help us visualize what they mean. It’s another case of increasing awareness of the planet, in a more social construct, and using that awareness to make choices.

It makes me think about the simplistic and probably dumb systems we have all built over the years, that, if nothing else, have enabled us to evolve solutions that may really mean something in the biggest of pictures.

In discussing our current (as in time) search for the next thing to do (and its current direction), a close friend commented that she didn’t know if it was the “right” thing to do. And I agree that I’m not quite sure yet that it is the right thing—though getting close.

But that’s the quandry isn’t it? What is the right thing? What does “right thing” mean? The whole point of updrafting is to find the right current (as in a moving force) and catch a ride, so getting a sense of rightness is important. But I don’t think you can use “logic” (or any set of rules) to find it—though you use logic to help you understand it.

An updraft is an established movement of potential. It flows into your life without stress, because its part of your updraft, part of you. And if you recognize it, that is, see it at all, you have to then examine your relationship to it. Why are you interested? Why has it come to you? Are you compelled? Is there any negative relationship to it? (That is, are you shifting into it from fear or dread or because you just want to get things settled. Or are you enjoying an ego trip because it came your way?)

It seems like you have to let the current play out and just bob in it freely seeing how it moves and exploring how it interplays with other currents and drafts in your life. Time will tell. Time always tells because the actual world is always presenting itself to you. And if you can be simple and honest with yourself, you will evolve your choice and find yourself in a current. And whether it is “right” or something else, it will become your life and then every new updraft will meet you there. No worries.

So, today’s post on Catching the Updraft has been a nightmare. It has so few words—but 9 images. So many things didn’t work right:

1. First, 4 of the images were missing—and I had to recapture them from a document (their source seems to be missing, but they aren’t really right and need to be redone anyway. But not today.) This took most of yesterday’s writing time.
2. Last night our sites were down. Our hosting provider is not very dependable and may have to be replaced. When I have time to write and post I am dependent on the site being up at that moment—a serious flaw in the blogging process exacerbated by the fact that I use images. 90% of my time on this post has been uploading the images.
3. WordPress, my blogging platform, doesn’t really allow you to put open space in the post. I need it to format around the images. Therefore the ugly periods that I had to use to create some space.
4. The upload failed 70% of the time this morning, so it took an hour to get them up.
5. My “cloud” images were made for a white background and therefore look terrible on my gray background, but fixing them today can’t fit into the schedule.

So my apologies. I obviously need to upgrade some technology. I was commiserating with a colleague yesterday about the horrible state of blog and wiki editing. A truly grim situation.

All good. Done now. Fewer images coming up.

A very interesting post this morning by Peter Brantly of O’Reilly Radar on the multiplicity of projects aimed at gathering more sensed information on the state of the planet. This is focused on new science to enable us to learn what is really going on and make better choices.

Everywhere I look in the natural sciences, there is a sudden, significant maturing of large-scale distributed science projects that involve active real-time sensing of one of more aspects of the physical planet and its environs. These projects include Neon, the first widely distributed ecologically-based sensing project; the Keck Hydrowatch project based in the American West, and a burgeoning number of geological and space sensing systems. Together, these efforts are often coalesced together under the sobriquet Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), in the ultimate hope that their data and insights may inform each other.

This made me think about our daily practice of developing more awareness for ourselves; to evolve our ability to actually know what is true and make better choices. It’s critical for ourselves and our planet that we not live inside of some story we tell ourselves, but actually see truly what’s happening. You can’t manage something that you do not see and understand. And you can’t move (yourself or your business) unless you have your feet on the ground with a true sense of where you are. That’s where traction comes from—feet (or wheels) on the real ground.