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See all those blogs to your left? I cruise those on a daily basis. The reason I do is because they lead me in directions I never intended to take. When I sit down to a blogroll full of asterisks, I’m like a seed: all potential, ready to grow. For the most part the folks on the left (no pun intended, and anyway maybe Reflections in D Minor should be on the right!) speak my language but they speak it about things I’m not currently talking about. So they are my teachers.

For me weblogs are all about learning. You see that other section there above the blogroll, the one with a list of all of my blogs? That’s all about my learning. It’s all about keeping up with something, whether it be Open Space Technology, the emergence of Wirearchy, the fate of the Toronto Maple Leafs or recent advances in Irish woodenflute technique, those blogs are places that allow me to discipline my thinking about things I care about. I’ve had other blogs come and go over the last couple of years, and I have others you don’t know about (yet). But they are all about learning.

And this one, Parking Lot, this is the really open ended one. This is where the acknowledgement of Denise Levertov’s birthday in wood s lot results in me combing Google for more of her poetry online and then assembling a little collection. And Mark Woods picks up on that and we come full circle. And I end up knowing a lot more about Denise Levertov than I ever thought I would.

I add people to the blogroll once in a while, usually because they have said or linked to something that really resonated with me. So I thought I would pay my teachers a little due and start giving them props when they made it to the roll.

This evening I added Time’s Shadow. I did so because Dave has said a few things lately that have really resonated with me. Among them is this:

You will also note the phrase, “manipulate their attention,” which is, I believe, a component of Zen Buddhism. It’s more highly developed there than in stoicism, which shares a lot with Zen. We’re terrible masters of our attention. Usually our attention is mastered by others, as part of our evolutionary past. We’re wired to be members of groups, of social organisms which exist by marshaling the attention of constituent members to attend to the priorities of the group, often to at least the neglect, and sometimes the harm, of the individual.

It doesn’t have to be something I agree with, but it’s something to chew on. Right now I’m wondering if it really is true that we are wired to be a part of groups. I don’t know. I think there is some hardwiring there that tends us to solitude too, but then the fact that I’m writing this thought in a blog probably doesn’t do much to bolster my case. I do wonder though if society doesn’t demand a little TOO much connectivity, and that we are losing parts of ourselves in the process.

One more thing. I don’t usually tell people that I’ve added them to the blogroll. If Dave Rogers checks his referrer logs he’ll notice it soon enough. The reason I don’t tell folks is because I don’t want to come across as wanting a reciprocal link. If people like what I’m doing here, they’ll link to me. If not, I don’t lose sleep over it. I have so few readers, that most of the stuff collected here is for me anyway, and the site meter tells me where the eight people have come from. Turns out half of them are Googlebots checking out whether or not I have Joni Mitchell lyrics collected here. The other three are me logging on to my own page. The last one is Lynn. Hi Lynn! *waving*

Anyway, welcome to my blogroll Dave.