“My car hates the rain.  It only makes sense.  The vehicle was designed under the roof of an impeccable kept facility in Wolfsburg, Germany, and built in the sweaty factories of Puebla, Mexico.  Its rusting steel was torn from the Alabama ground, and the cracked glass of the windshield is borne of Cholulan silica.  Everything about this car points to a polygamist birth from distant lands, far from the Pacific Northwest.  I think that’s the problem: my car is allergic to the unique landscape I call home.

There’s truth to the old adage “home is where the heart is”.  We are the product of our environments, and while we can adapt to new ones, the places we come from always leave an indelible stamp on our hearts.  And I don’t just mean in an intangible way.  Every particle of the human body is derived from the immediate environment it grows in.  What we drink becomes cell structure.  What we eat becomes flesh.  My car may not play by those rules, but my body does.

I was born in the Pacific Northwest’s soggy rainforest.  I drank the water of swollen Vancouver Island rivers and breathed the respiration of the coniferous giants that dwarfed my childhood home.  Being a farm raised kid, I digested meat and produce that become my body.  I am, quite literally, the Pacific Northwest.  Unlike my shitty, sputtering car, when I venture beyond these Cascadian borders, I am reminded of my connection to it with every turn.

My car hates the rain because it is the spoiled love child of an international pregnancy.  It’s parents are fair weather candy asses.  It skips and chugs when confronted with torrential rain.  It burps exhaust and omits oil as the Sea-to-Sky-and-back elevation tests the resolve of its tired gaskets.  But not me.  I am built for this land.  I revel in the moisture and crisp coastal air.  I believe precipitation has shaped our rugged topography, a landscape broken and jagged from glacial warfare.  I embrace the rain with joyously wet and muddy mountain bike rides.  I put my face into the strong, wet wind and I dive deep into thick coastal snowpack.  I easily defeat seasonal affective disorder with strong caffeine doses and liberal outdoor prescriptions.

On the flip side, I sweat gratuitously in hot weather, even while standing still.  I frighten easily at the sight of an endless, waterless horizon.  I wilt at high altitude, my breath thin and asthmatic in the dry Colorado air, and my skin dry and itchy on the Great Plains.  No, I am certain where I belong, and it is the rainforests and unpredictable surf of this western coast.  It’s in the snow-hammered mountains, where powder is a relative term.  This is where I live.  That is if my car gets us there.”  -mike berard, editor, coast mountain culture.

“Earlier today I told everybody on Twitter and Facebook, that I’m leaving Twitter and Facebook.

Why?

Because Facebook and Twitter are too easy. Keeping up a decent blog that people actually want to take the time to read, that’s much harder. And it’s the hard stuff that pays off in the end.

Besides, even if they’re very good at hiding the fact, over on Twitter and Facebook, it’s not your content, it’s their content.

The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.

And as I’ve said many times over the years, Web 2.0 IS ALL ABOUT personal sovereignty. About using media to do something meaningful, WITHOUT someone else giving you permission first, without having to rely on anyone else’s resources, authority and money. Self-sufficiency. Exactly.

i.e. not waiting for the green light. In the blogosphere, the only light IS the green light.

And I think a lot of people have lost that idea. Instead or writing about something that’s ACTUALLY important to them, they’re telling al their zillions of Foursquare friends what food trucks they just visited.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but…

Recently I had (non-online) conversations with two seminal, veteran bloggers, Doc Searls and Anil Dash.

On both occasions, we were reminiscing about the early days of blogging (I started gapingvoid in 2001, btw. Doc and Anil, a couple of years before that).

A decade ago, blogging seemed more powerful, more revolutionary, more disruptive… more like the way we wanted the web to be, as opposed to how the corporations wanted it to be.

But like I said, it was hard work. You had to write a lot, every day. And you had to be a good writer with something to say. Or else it would wither on the vine.

In other words, the barriers to entry were high, in terms of both talent and energy required.

So clever, talented people everywhere started inventing tools that made Web 2.0 much easier for ordinary people: Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare etc. That was a good thing.

But I think something was lost in the process. Suddenly it got a lot easier for the bloggers to be lazy.

And so people DID become lazy. In HUGE numbers.

Not that there aren’t any good blogs still out there- of course they are- but in the last five years or so, something magical was lost, or at least, diluted.

I think now is a good time to remind people why we all got into blogging in the first place, all those years ago. I think now is a great time to “reclaim” blogging, so that is exactly what I’m doing. Here and now. Rock on.

So from now on, if you want to talk to me, do it in the comments below or send me an email, Thanks.

Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare et al… it’s not my content. It’s not your content, either.

Decide.”

Well enough of that…how about some images from the last little bit.  Heading off to Nelson, Canada for the first time today!

Forrest Coots, Alta, UT

Left: Adam Roberts, Mount Baker, WA  Right:  Jason West, Snowbird, UT

Jason West, The Great Salt Lake, UT

Forrest Coots, Salt Lake City, Utah

Santiago Guzman, Mount Baker, WA

Jeff Campbell, Mount Baker, WA

Jeff Campbell skins towards me on New Years Eve, a near perfect day to end 2010.

I cannot begin to express how good of a year 2010 has been to me.  I feel like I am living in a dream, a dream that has taken time to manifest itself over the years but is finally becoming a reality.  Every once in a while this thought hits me like a brick and I am left utterly speechless.  Who knows how long this wave will last, maybe in 5 years I will be back working sales or retail, but for know I am trying my best to enjoy the ride.

2010 was filled with amazing trips all over the Western United States and Canada with people I have come to really admire and love.  Off the top of my head some adventure highlights include climbing up Half Dome in a day with Nate Farr, running and biking around the Canadian Rockies in utter amazement with Bridget, skiing perfect powder with 7 great friends for a week up at the Fairy Meadows Hut, and climbing routes in Indian Creek, Yosemite and Squamish that only a few years ago I would have only dreamt of accomplishing.

These mantras were posted on the blog a little while ago, but after thinking over the previous 365 days it seems my heightened happiness can be traced back to these five mantras:

1.  Always have a dream.  Believe in it.  Believe in your ability to make it happen.

2.  Keep your passions alive.  For me, my love of adventure and people amongst it reminds me to breath deeply and puts many things into perspective.

3.  Set goals – even little goals are good and then reward yourself.  They will all lead up to you making your dream come true.

4.  Make decisions or they will be made for you.

5.  Do the “right thing”, whatever that may be for you.  You will love yourself more if you do.

A quote from Steve Casimiro as he reflected on 2010, well said and it expresses what it all ultimately comes down to.

“It is our nature to think we’ll live forever — our “endless numbered days” as Iron & Wine puts it. That indomitable hope is one of our great strengths, and I don’t spend my time in maudlin despair that I won’t actually live forever, nor am I trying to be a buzz kill for you. But an eye to the end is a strong motivator for the present, and that’s not such a bad thing. For most of my life, my priorities have revolved around fresh air, motion, and chasing snowflakes, singletrack, waves, and finding lines up rock. It’s no exaggeration to say that adventure saved me, and I have faith that the next year will be filled with unexpected delights in the outdoors. But as I think about how I’ll be spending my time, as I think about the will to survive and the things we give up to move forward, as I think about what they’ll say after I’m gone and what’s on my list, I’m driven by the knowledge that it isn’t what you pass through in life that matters, it’s what you pass on.”

I believe the reason this book spoke to me is due to the fact that my pursuit of photography has been based entirely on my own initiative, no formal schooling, workshops or “creative” surroundings.  A fairly isolated pursuit.  Through this I have had to sort out my own doubts, fears, skills, and direction.  Well this book felt like a conversation with another artist where all I could  say throughout the dialogue is “me too, totally, I understand”.  It helped me realize I am not the only person with these thoughts and roadblocks.  So to say this book was only thought provoking is an understatement.

My general summary of the book is this: We can ALL learn the techniques needed to capture a well lit, framed & balanced photograph but only the hard working perfectionist who uses these techniques to capture his unique voice and passion can turn it into art.

Now for some quotes that stuck out me.

“In art fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work”.

“Many people think that talent is what comes easily.  Wrong.  By definition, whatever you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is no bigger waste of energy than worrying about how much talent you have and probably no worry more common”.

“You know better than anyone else the accidental nature of much that appears in your art, not to mention all those elements you know originated with others.  From there it’s only a short hop to feeling like your are just going through the motions of being an artist.  Its easy to imagine that real artists know what they are doing, and that they – unlike you – are entitled to feel good about themselves and their art.  Fear the you are not a real artist causes you to undervalue your work”.

“Whatever other artists have is something needed to only do their work – it wouldn’t help you in your work even if you had it.  Their magic is theirs.  You don’t lack it.  You don’t need it.  It has nothing to do with you.  Period”.

“Art is often made in abandonment, emerging from those unbidden moments of selfless rapport with the materials and ideas we care about”.

“What is sometimes needed is simply an insulating period, a gap of pure time between the making of your art, and the time when you share it with outsiders”.

“If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with your life, then that is the work you need to be doing in that moment.  If you try to do some other work, you will miss your moment”.

“The hardest part of art making is living you life in such a way that your work gets done over and over – and that means finding a host of practices that are just plain useful”.

“Fear that your are not getting your fair share of recognition leads to anger and bitterness.  Fear that you are not as good as a fellow artist leads to depression”.

“Art that falls short often does so not because the artist failed to meet the challenge, but because there was never a challenge in the first place”.

“Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art the deals with techniques”.

“Making art inevitably engages the large themes and basic techniques that artists have used for centuries.  Finding your own work is a process of distilling from each those traces that ring true to your own spirit”.

“The only work really worth doing – the only work you can do convincingly – is the work that focuses on the things you care about.  To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life”.