Why CircumBoreality?

Why another new blog? Is this just another sign of inner psychic fragmentation? I can hardly tell you how much I admire those who have gone about blogging in holistic fashion, one central blog serving most needs or desires for expression. I have, thanks to Blogger's generosity, chosen another path, and blogs seem to proliferate at will every time a new enthusiasm arises. Here is one more.

As I see it, my "home blog" at Foothills Fancies is the nuts and bolts of exploration and interpretation of what I see and experience here in the nature of the Colorado Front Range. Romantic Naturalist, recently revived, tackles whys and hows of being/becoming this odd creature, the "naturalist." The natural world is central to me, and these three blogs revolve around that core.

Thanks to today's insight, CircumBoreality will take a different tack, still another angle on life and experience. Here we can expect more historical and personal conversation about the central issues of home and place, and how we are shaped by them. It stems, especially, from the sudden realization that circumboreal forests are my home territory, a realization that came from the struggle to write about a special place here in the Colorado foothills.

Someone, a writer, said "I write to find out what I'm thinking." For some of us, writing is a way to process and shape ideas, and that's basically what I need to do here.

Our "Fern Gulch" was different and unusual, but many places and ecological situations have pushed that button before. My years in Arizona left me loving the desert, but do I have a lasting attachment to the living beings of the Sonoran ecosystem? I've worked in the sagebrush steppes of Wyoming, the uplands and canyons of the Colorado plateau, the high alpine tundra and the tallgrass prairies and mesas of the lower Front Range. Many of the sights and sounds and smells of Colorado still resonate with me, but I was captivated by that one little gulch.

So what explains my excitement and enthusiasm for that particular spot? It triggered a sensation of home. Places where I grew up, and my ancestors grew up. A certain type of landscape is, apparently, built into me, and that's what I hope to explore here at Circumboreality.