All images and writings are copyrighted by Brett Nelson (BN), with the exception of quotations from others as noted. Content by Brett Nelson on this website may not be printed, copied, or used in any way without written permission from the author, except for brief quotes of the author's words used in reviews or other writings
with clear attribution to the author.
Welcome to Blue Dot Outpost
Blue Dot Outpost is my window on the world to share photographs, poems, articles, and essays from thirty-odd years of writing
on a small blue dot somewhere in a remote corner of a wondrous universe. I wanted an outlet to share my creative efforts in a
way that doesn't require someone to buy a book, although you're welcome to contact me for that as well. Take what you need
and leave the rest. I will make additions and changes around the first of each month. Visit as often as you like.
Thank you for looking in.
Blue Dot Outpost Brett Nelson Author and Photographer
Blue Dot Media Arts bluedotoutpost.com [email protected]
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
Man is the mean of nothing and infinity.
Blaise Pascal
Background
Brett Nelson has been writing since 1990 and has published his
poetry and several essays in Man Alive! A Journal of Men’s Wellness,
Fixed and Free Poetry Quarterly, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the
anthologies from the 25th and 26th Annual Winter Solstice Poetry
Reading in Placitas, NM. He has published three books of poetry titled
In Another Skin (2017), Just to See What’s There (2020), and Poems
from a Blue Dot (2023). He also published a photography book titled
Wild in the Southwest – A Photographic Odyssey in Canyon Country
in 2022, which was reissed by Dorrance Publishing Company in 2023.
A New Mexico photography book titled Where the Light Is -- A Photo-
graphic Memoir of New Mexico will be coming out in 2024
He is a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society and is active
in open mic poetry readings in and around Albuquerque.
Brett grew up in the Midwest, where his interest in photography was
first kindled. He has made his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico
since 1978. He was a counselor and psychotherapist in Albuquerque
for 31 years before he retired in 2019.
He has hiked and backpacked in New Mexico and the Four Corners
area of the Southwest for nearly thirty years and has photographed
these areas for over twenty years. He has exhibited his photographs
at the Johnson Gallery in Madrid, New Mexico and other venues in
Albuquerque.
The Mountain Will Swallow You
-- in Poems
New entries on all pages
Blue Dot Outpost
Outpost: a settlement on a frontier or border. Webster’s Dictionary
This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
Novelist Marilynne Robinson
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker
The contents of Blue Dot Outpost are reports from the frontiers that are
the white spaces on the maps I’ve explored in my head and heart as well as the wild country I’ve traveled in the Southwest. White spaces on old maps from hundreds of years ago indicated unknown territory for European mapmakers, blank spaces that aroused the curiosity of men who explored them and reported what they found. That’s the image that comes to mind as I think about what I do and what motivates me.
The need to know and understand has been posited as a basic need in
the human species that's an especially important value for some people. It certainly is for me. Another way of saying that is that curiosity is one of the primary motivators in my psyche. Writing is not only a way of expressing what I think and feel but also a way I learn what I think and feel on a deeper level. What I post on this website is my offering of what I’ve found that has meaning for me, and I hope some of it has meaning for you.
I’m a very visual person who has been photographing, hiking, backpacking and exploring what are white spaces to me in New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona wild country for almost 30 years, bringing back the visual evidence of what I’ve been fortunate enough to see in my wilderness wanderings. In fact, my original website foray was a photography website, contents of which I’ll be posting here from time to time with new additions and periodic changes of scenery like I do on my walls at home. I hope that some of what I post may stimulate visitors to explore their own white spaces, outside or inside or both.
The ”Blue Dot” in the website name comes from Carl Sagan’s comment
to a roomful of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1990 as he pointed out Earth in the picture taken by Voyager ! from 3.7 billion miles away as a tiny “blue dot . . . the only home we’ve ever known”. Earth itself is a remote “outpost” in an unimaginably vast universe from any other part of it. On the other hand our planet is a vast world to any one of us, who can explore only a tiny bit in a lifetime, though places like the Grand Canyon are pretty large “bits”. The places I’ve explored in the Southwest are like outposts to me that I’ve been lucky enough to visit and spend time in. But there are interior “outposts” I visit as well, and I include posts from both.
Brett Nelson
Featured in November
PUBLISHED IN APRIL:
Where the Light Is -
A Photographic Memoir of New Mexico
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