Here at the research station where I live and work, we’re putting together a forest management demonstration for use in many of our community education and out-reach programs.  We’re going to try to highlight several of the most common methods of managing a stand of mixed pine and upland oak/hickory forest being grown in the Ozark mountains and foothills, including installing a shelterwood, performing a timber stand improvement (select cutting), clear cutting followed immediately by a replanting to pine, and then converting one block of timber away from mixed hardwood/pine to just hardwood, and to another block, the reverse.  These blocks will further be treated with a combination of chemical culling of non-merchantable trees and a controlled burn to remove the forest understory and create a germination bed.

It was while I was out cutting dead snags off the fire line today, with nothing else but the long familiar refrains of a singing Stihl to occupy my mind, that I had the following thoughts and observations.

I was totally mystified by some of the reactions to some of the comments left on the “G-Spot” post I wrote a while back.  I had several people express…  hmmmm…  what’s the word? …  curiosity? …  when I got happy and excited by even the nastier comments.  Ms. Kathy, a friend, looked at me like I was bat-<expletive> crazy when I informed her that I was hoping that even the worst of the commentators kept on reading and commenting!

She laughed and said “But Mike, you want people to like your writing, not hate you because of it!”

Ok.  Valid point.  It would be interesting to be the most loved writer in the world, I guess.  But I’d take the title “Most hated writer in all of human history” with just as much zeal!

Many people hate success.  Just because a person or thing is hated, it doesn’t mean that they’re a failure. 

Time for an object lesson.

Why do any of us write?

For me, I’d say I write to try and get another person to think like I do, if even for a second.  I want him to be able to rationally judge my thoughts, because that implies that he has an understanding of them, and you’re not supposed to judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in his boots.  As a writer, my purpose is to present my ideas, then provide the reader with my boots so he can take my ideas out for a walk down the ol’ gravel road and see what he thinks.

See?  If you understood that, then the paragraph accomplished its purpose.  You really had to get me for a moment to get that paragraph and thus this whole post…

When an individual judges your work, what does it matter if she gives a negative review or judgment?  You certainly retain the freedom to decide whose judgment to value and whose to ignore.  The important thing is that your writing worked, and that the emotion is the proof.

I want my writing to be informative and interesting.  I may never accomplish either goal, but it’s at least where I’m aiming.  If I properly do the job, the reader will have a moment where they think as I do.  This is the “hanging on every word” kind of writing we all so desire every time we pick up a new book, the moment where the reader becomes invested in the task of trying to understand the writer’s thoughts, the writer themselves, and where they’re going with their words.  This investment is both intellectual and emotional, as any one who has ever been moved to tears by a poem or verse can attest, and it’s that emotion that I’m looking for as proof of their attempt to understand me.

Love me or hate me, at least you took a moment to try and know me.

See, love and hate aren’t the opposite of one another, far from it.  Both are feelings of great power.  One could say that they may counter one another, much as a base counters an acid, but both the base and acid operate from the same underlying principle (hydrogen based ions), and so do love and hate.

This wasn’t something I understood until I had my heart broken for the first time and eventually got over it: The opposite of love is NOT hate, it is indifference.  The lack of emotion.  Where something is so meaningless to you that you don’t even care to try to attempt to understand something or someone.  Like garbage lying on the side of the road, tossed out of someone’s car window, tossed out of someone’s mind.  That is the very antithesis of why I do this.

I value all judgments.  I can learn something from all of them, even if I learn more from some than I do others.  This is essential to my growth as a rational, thinking individual.  Indifference does me no good.

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