PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

I wrote earlier about my love for a great Scottish golf course, Royal Dornock, in the far north of the Highlands in that great country.

I also wrote about my love for a book, A Season in Dornoch, by golf writer, Lorne Rubenstein, which captured my imagination.

So much so that I wanted to write about Royal Dornoch again hard on the heels of my last blog. Golf in the Scottish Highlands captures golf as it was meant to be – a trip around a great landscape, perhaps with friends, as you enjoy the ground God created.

Too often – and I am party to this– many of us play golf without allowing the pursuit itself to inform our senses. We should take time to play, to enjoy the land, to understand how your foot falls on the ground, and to take hints about about how to play a great game.

Here is part of Chapter 1 in Rubenstein’s great book.

“I have traveled to these Highlands and on to Dornoch from my home in Toronto, a sprawling city where four million people jostle for space. I flew to Glasgow, where I walked the streets and spent a few hours in the city’s main library, then sat in a café until it was time to return to the airport.

“From Glasgow, I took a small plane forty minutes northeast to Inverness, a city of forty thousand people that is the main population center in the Highlands. I rented a car at the airport, and drove an hour north in the long light of the first summer evening in June 2000. I immediately felt far from Tornoto and from the south, the central belt of Scotland.

“There, in the south, are the big cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the medieval town of St. Andrews, where lies the Old Course. Too busy for me.

“I have come to Dornoch for golf, not cart-ball. I have traveled to this seaside village of thirteen hundred residents because Royal Dornoch is one of the most beautiful, and tranquil, courses in the world. I have come to explore empty lands, to fill myself with the virtues of golf as sport rather than commercial enterprise. Perhaps my season in Dornoch will help me understand whether people and land can exist in harmony and if and how the former compromises the latter.

“I am searching for scale, for proportion, for perspective. I wonder what happens when too many people crowd a space and believe that something essential is lost in the game when a course is clogged with golfers. Nobody enjoys it when players knock against one another.

“A golf course is not an elevator in an office building at closing time; it is a landscape meant to allow for breathing room and walking room and space to join with others, but not for golfers to overwhelm one another. Somewhere, somehow, I think, there is a way for people to live with consideration for a landscape, and for golfers to go gently on the course.”

Another passage in the book recalls how Rubenstein took time to feel how his feet fell on the often uneven ground and to use the feeling to influence how he played shot after shot. Feel the game; don’t just play the game.

Maybe I’ll have a chance to return to Dornoch soon, but even if that doesn’t occur, the course – the feeling of the course – is still in my bones.