What’s funny is how many writers don’t like blogs; or at least they don’t like the idea of “wasting” time writing a blog when we could be focusing on best-selling books, Pulitzer Prize winning novels, Nobel fodder. Because that’s what I’d be doing, obviously, if I weren’t doing this, this A View from this Wilderness, for the past eight years, the past four hundred and ninety-nine posts.

I suppose some of the disdain is justified when some writers put everything out there; the result of impatience or insecurity, of misjudging the quality of their own work or overestimating the literary instincts of journal editors.

But that’s the trick. No writer who is thinking clearly is going to put publishable (“otherwise” publishable) material in a blog. That’s dumb. The trick, of course, is knowing what someone else will publish and what we are better off just slapping down on our own page and letting it drift. We guess wrong in both directions, to be sure.

One writer I admire both professionally and personally told me I’m throwing all of my energy (for her it is about energy: “How do you find the energy to write the ‘real’ essays and books if you’re spending it on blogging?!” That last word said with attitude) into some online trash bin. She has a point; but it’s all about balance. It is very easy to get carried away with a blog post, treating it more as a serious essay for Atlantic or New Yorker, when it is going into the same format used by brain dumps about dating from fifteen-year-olds.

I actually know someone who just had a piece published in Atlantic Monthly. He also writes a regular blog, and he also just launched (not dropped, come-on, save “dropped” for music where it belongs—besides no one wants to “drop” a book, they want it to take off) a new book which is getting some national press. I’m more than a little confident the material he is putting out there in his blog is not the same quality he published in either other format. Maybe—maybe—some of it was intended for another outlet, but for whatever reason, it didn’t make it. He didn’t think, “Well, Atlantic Monthly with hundreds of thousands of readers wants this, and it is good enough, but hey, I’m blogging this baby.”

For me, I have several levels of writing. The work that is most involved, which comes closest to what I wanted it to be when I conceived it, whose style and artform are working for me, head toward editors of various flavors. The work that is raunchy, work not only I would never publish in a magazine, but I’d also never publish on my blog, I save to read at pubs with Tim Seibles. The rest—the good thoughts I rarely rewrite more than once, if that, the more personal stuff that most readers wouldn’t necessarily care about, are blogs.

As for energy, well, this is the point. Come on; we push new writers to write everyday—write—keep writing. “Sir? How do I become a better writer?” “Write! Everyday!” So I do. I put my blog where my mouth is. Blogging every week, sometimes more, has kept my brain functioning, kept me on the writer’s driving range where I can keep my swing loose, adjust my grip on verbs, and make writing my daily routine instead of only when “projects’ haunt my screen.

And more than a few published pieces were the result of blogging; some quite successful ones.

But that’s not how this was born. I did not have literary ambitions in my mind, creative prompts, or really even a need to be heard and read.

It was January of 2016 and my dad had just died three months earlier. I was here at Aerie thinking about how much peace I find in nature, escape, like I did as a kid on Long Island where I escaped with my friend Eddie into the wilds of Heckscher State Park. Or I did with my son on the Camino in Spain. I have always found it easier to assess what’s bothering me, what is getting me down, if my view is from the wilderness.

It was going to be about nature and philosophy. All of it, about being out here on the bay and how the old axiom is correct: We cannot step into the same river twice. The blog was going to be about trying to do just that. But it was 2016 and the world was hijacked by the presidential election. My editorial muscle memory from my collegiate editorial-writing days under the guidance of Russell Jandoli and Pete Barrecchia suddenly flexed, was reignited, and what emerged in my posts was pissed-off Bob. But then stress took over, and bad things happened, and breakdowns ensued, and I needed an escape—this damn blog, conceived to help me and perhaps others escape, had funneled me into the murky waters of “who really gives a shit anyway.”

So I reread them to find the good ones, the ones with peace and some soul-settling thoughts and observations, and the book A Third Place: Notes in Nature was born. More recently, another, Wait/Loss, has coming to fruition, both from blogging. Certainly none of the Siberian essays which I knew would end up in a book started here, but other material—about my son, about traveling, and of course about my father whose passing pushed me onto these pages to begin with to better “deal” with it all.

But none of that is what I wanted to write about. Hang in there:

It’s about that picture up top. The “label” of A View. That’s me in the photo taken by my son, and we are just southwest of Pamplona, Spain, on the Camino de Santiago. Behind me, just next to Michael, are the famous bronze statues at the Alto del Perdon, the Mount of Forgiveness. At that point we had walked roughly two-hundred miles. We had adjusted to climbs, our muscles and lungs had been tested while climbing the Pyrenees, we had weathered some rain as well as blistering heat, and we kept going. At some point we arrived at these statues, but for most of that day I had been thinking about the paths I had taken in my life and how almost always they were accidental; I had been a veritable pinball. Very little if anything had been conceived and planned in advance, thought out, problems anticipated, goals in mind. No, not at all. Not me. If there was a path with less friction than the path of least resistance, I would have found it. As I climbed the long steady trails to this point, my anger at myself for how I had lived was climbing as well, and my disappointment in myself, and my frustration and depression and self-doubt, to the point that I knew I had to completely abandon those old ways and reinvent myself somehow, remember somehow the drive I had had in earlier years. And I knew instinctively that I could only do that if I first forgave myself all of those shortcomings, those lazy-ass, howl-at-the-moon stupid decisions I didn’t so much make as I simply rolled through. Then we reached this cool hilltop, these metal pilgrims, at Alto del Perdon, and the name of the plateau on the sign took me up short. I mean, I had just been thinking about forgiveness.

And Michael snapped this shot, and to me it symbolized the world, the life in front of me, wide open, a million choices, endless possibilities.

And one thing more. Life sometimes feels like a pathless wood, as Frost once wrote, and much too often we have simply too much to deal with. And I can think of a thousand problems, the weight of which just gets too damn much to handle on my best of days. Then I think of this picture, and I notice that in it I am carrying a small backpack; that’s it, with Planet Earth just down the path, and I had everything I could possibly need with me. Everything.

The picture is static of course, but not really. Clearly, I am about to step off into what’s next.

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Thank you so very much for reading A View over the course of these past eight years and five hundred ramblings. If you want to follow, in the bottom right corner there is a small box that says “follow.” Click it, enter your email, you’ll get an email asking to confirm, and that’s it. You’ll get A View each time a new one is published.

Peace, my friends. Much peace.