This morning I was watching Gordon White’s tribute to the recently-departed Peter Carroll. I’ve never read any of Carroll’s books and I doubt I ever will. I was watching for the same reason I read or watched nearly everything Gordon produced: you never knew when he would drop some jewel of knowledge or practice. He ended the video with a prayer that Carroll would be seated as an ancestor of practice.

I switched over to my email app and saw an “Announcement” email from Gordon’s Rune Soup community timestamped just moments before. Gordon had died while travelling in Peru. Shock doesn’t begin to describe it. I would guess he’s about my age (though he will always be remembered as forever 27 😉) and he was so full of plans for new work and ideas for the community.

Everyone here knows about the influence Wendell Berry has had on my life. I haven’t talked as much about Gordon–mostly because I never imagined I’d be talking about his work in the past tense for many years to come. Also because the material he covered isn’t something many people here would seem to have much interest in; in fact, some folks might have little patience for it. (If you’re one of the latter, please don’t tell me. I am emphatically not in the mood.)

Rune Soup started as a blog, then a podcast, then a membership community centered on the Western esoteric and magical tradition, including eventually animism and indigenous shamanism. I’m not sure when I discovered it–probably a decade or more ago? I think my first encounter was when I first came across the term “animism” as a contemporary worldview and not just an insult hurled at indigenous communities by racist anthropologists. I was fascinated by the idea and searched Twitter for it. Many of the folks discussing it had #RSPM in their bios. More digging, and I discovered that hashtag referred to Rune Soup Premium Membership. Down the rabbit hole I went. I started listening to the podcast, reading the blog, and following all of the #RSPM accounts. I joined the membership some time later. I quit for a time but then re-joined in late 2020.

I didn’t always agree with Gordon–and the great thing about him was he never presented himself as a spiritual teacher demanding to be followed. He was irascible and extreme sometimes. He was also astonishingly smart and had an ability to draw together ideas and practice in ways that will not soon be matched.

I’ve never really been what would be called a magical practitioner, especially in the ways that were most prominently discussed in Rune Soup (grimoires, etc.). What Gordon did for me was re-enchant the world. He exposed me to ideas that have become fundamental to who I am, animism being only one of them. And, as one person said in a remembrance this morning, he got me to pray again–and that’s no small thing. He helped me find a way to re-engage Christianity. That engagement would not satisfy traditional Christians, of course, but it has been vital to me.

Gordon has been one of the most important, ongoing teachers of my adult life. I’ve cried more over his death today than I would have expected. The work will go on, of course, but he himself is irreplaceable. His combination of gifts will be deeply missed by me. It’s absurd that he’s gone. It’s way too early, and there’s too much going on.

But, in a very Gordon move, I will quote Lord of the Rings: “A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.”

A friend recently said that he identifies more with his grandparents than his parents. I agreed, and with some more thought I think I know why.

A brief overview of the four turnings model of Anglo-American history, if you’re not already familiar. Quotes are taken from the book, focusing on the last two cycles. I suspect historians would hate the four turnings idea, but it’s been a very useful mental model for me.

First Turning: High

an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and an old values regime decays

• Reconstruction and Gilded Age (1865-1886)
• American High (1946-1964)

Second Turning: Awakening

a passionate era of spiritual upheaval when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime

• Third Great Awakening (1886-1908)
• Consciousness Revolution (1964-1984)

Third Turning: Unraveling

a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants

• World War I and Prohibition (1908-1929)
• Culture Wars (1984-2008)

Fourth Turning: Crisis

a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

• Great Depression and World War II (1929-1946)
• Millennial Crisis (2008-2033?)

In this model, my friend and I came of age in an unraveling era–and so did our grandparents. Our parents, on the other hand, came of age during a high age, which is very different from a time of crisis. Now that we are facing in the midst of the crisis, we are naturally drawn to those who faced such times before.

Still trawling the archives. I used to have a Buttondown newsletter. The following—a themed issue rather than the usual “what I read this week” format—is the only thing I’ve found worth saving from that era. Reading The Magic Mountain every morning over that winter of 2018-2019 remains as a happy memory.

Welcome, friends. You can only come across so many references to a novel before you decide you need to read it for yourself. That’s why I started reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

It’s the story of Hans Castorp, “an ordinary young man” who visits his cousin Joachim at the Berghof sanatorium in the Swiss Alps where residents are treated for tuberculosis. Although he plans to visit for only three weeks, Hans is eventually diagnosed with a “moist spot” - a sign of tuberculosis - and stays for seven years. The novel follows Hans' development as he falls in love with a mysterious Russian and befriends, in turn, a humanistic disciple of the Enlightenment, a reactionary Jesuit, and a Dionysian Dutchman. It ends with the outbreak of the First World War, when our hero leaves the Berghof for an uncertain fate.

Image: The Wald Sanatorium in Davos (ca. 1920), where Mann took his wife to be treated and which inspired his novel.

Tuberculosis ravaged Europe in the age of Romanticism (a movement in reaction against the Enlightenment). That historical coincidence led to a blending of poetry with an idealization of disease, as in the poetry of John Keats. Hans Castorp brings to the sanitarium a “sympathy with death” which he absorbed from this milieu.

Image: Sketch of John Keats on his deathbed by Joseph Severn

Early in the novel, Hans Castorp is warned by Settembrini that while it is pleasant to experiment with ideas, it would be safer for Hans to patiently learn what Settembrini has to teach him. And he does learn from Settembrini, but while also learning from others and maintaining a critical distance from them all.

The Berghof sanitarium - the magic mountain - is a hermetic place, sealed off from the influence of the “flatlands” and yet a place of transformation. When we meet Hans, he is a chatty, bourgeois engineer. By the time we leave him, he has passed through seven years of individuation. He has watched his would-be teachers run up against the limits of their ideologies. He has experienced serious losses and entered into a “great stupor”. It is only war that draws him out of his lethargy and forces him out of the sanitarium.

C.S. Lewis said he would be happy “to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these [Italian Renaissance] poems eight hours of each happy day”. But the world makes too many demands for that. Individuation is not neoliberal self-help aimed at creating better workers. It is a process of becoming who you are, experimenting with ideas, and experiencing losses. It is an alchemy, moreover, intended to situate you in the world of demands, to carry you down from the magic mountain and into the world of conflict.

Image: Residents taking their “rest cure” at a sanatorium. It was believed that the high altitude and crisp air of the Alps contributed to the cure of tubercular residents.

Why The Magic Mountain has particular relevance for our time. Ignore the writer’s nonsense about the book being tedious. It is long though…

Everyone knows about child development; adult development is less appreciated. One aspect of adult development is the maturation of long-term love.

Young Love
This is the period characterized by looking long and deeply into the lover’s eyes. The world disappears and the only thing that matters is what is seen in those scrying orbs. This period is well documented (see the pop music charts of the last seventy years) and, unfortunately, grasped too tightly by people who do not realize it is meant to be a phase, not a permanent condition. That mistake is the source of a great deal of misery.

Striving Love
This is the period in which the lovers break the mutual gaze long enough to begin building the world seen in each other’s eyes. The mutual gaze is re-engaged less and less often because they’re busy! This is also the most perilous time of the relationship (see the country music charts of the last seventy years). The danger lies in two directions: 1. The work is hard and one or both lovers begin to question if it is worth it. 2. One or both lovers fail to mature through this transitory phase, wishing for the young love phase, and begin to look elsewhere for a new start.

Adept Love
This is the period characterized by the lovers side by side, looking out at the world they have built together. Not so much of the mutual gaze these days; it has been replaced by a rooted knowing, a deeply felt steadfastness. The lovers are no longer those young people with hearts aflutter or the hardworking-yet-anxious lovers of the middle period. They have become the fertile ground out of which grows the future.

Future Phases?
Meet me back here in twenty years, as we approach fifty years of marriage and seventy years of age, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.

Finished reading Sacasus’ “AI as Christian Heresy.” His final paragraph clarified something that’s been banging around in my head:

What would it mean to render to the machine what is the machine’s? To regain a sense of what it is to be a person, coupled with a subversive practice of the same, within a techno-economic system whose default settings incline us to forget this vital fact about ourselves and our neighbours? To reclaim a confidence in what we can do ourselves and for one another in the face of an array of technologies, services, and institutions that market themselves under the implicit sign of our ostensible helplessness and the banner of a debilitating liberation? Let the machine have everything that is stamped with its spirit. Let us keep everything else.

In my day job, AI will not be an optional tool for long. In fact, I suspect I’ll end up being the person my department semi-officially appoints to find ways to use AI in our work. I’m not anti-AI; in fact, I’ve found good uses for it. I am, however, deeply cautious and skeptical. With all of this in mind, I’ve been thinking about guardrails around AI both in my own life and at work.

One good use I’ve found is what I’ve characterized as “letting the machines talk to the machines.” Or, in Sacasas’ phrase, “render to the machine what is the machine’s.” Microsoft Copilot is really good at finding ways of accomplishing tasks using previously unknown to me features of Excel. It’s also good at taking a stream of consciousness knowledge dump and turning it into coherent process documentation.

This is Machine work. My foreseeable future is, to use Kingsnorth’s phrasing, as a cooked barbarian. Using machines to do Machine work is, to my mind, letting the machine “have everything that is stamped with its spirit.” In the spirit of taking the devil’s money to do God’s work, I am rendering to the Machine so that I may have more mental space to do what is truly mine to do, which is work opposed to the Machine.

This morning, Rachel and I were talking about home. We often talk about plans and projects, and what we’ve built here over the years; sometimes, though, we talk about home in its hidden sense, the feeling that lies behind our patch of ground in the plain light of day.

What is home in the hidden sense for you? Does it align with your patch of ground?

When the two senses of home align, that is a sign of an integrated life. In such a life, there is no need for somewhere else. Other places may be fun and interesting, but they are not required.

There are many reasons why a person’s sense of home may be misaligned. War, addiction, poverty, violence, and other abuses can rightly, or at least understandably, drive people from home. People in these situations need help to find a new, integrated life.

At the same time, so many of us have been taught to be unhappy at home. Ambition, greed, entertainment, and lust wrongly drive people from home. The patch of ground for these folks is utilitarian. Life, as they see it, is elsewhere—at work, on vacation, in imagined worlds.

Maybe the desire for an integrated life is not present in everyone. Maybe some folks have other worthy aspirations. For me, however, the only place I need to be is home, in the warm heart of my world.

When you situate yourself in a nexus of relationships–ancestors, community, spirits, nonhumans, and more–your role in the intergenerational gift economy becomes clearer. When this role becomes clearer, your responsibility as both inheritor and steward becomes clearer. Your responsibilities become your sacred task. They are no less tasks for being sacred, but the context matters. There are some responsibilities I have that are not easy. When I settle into the nexus, though, the clarity keeps me going.

To deny or ignore this nexus of relationships is what cultural critics have called the atomization of the individual. It has many effects, one of which is perpetual adolescence. Taking up your role in the intergenerational gift economy is what constitutes adulthood. The person who refuses their role in the nexus of relationships also refuses the task of adulthood, and so spends their life in pursuits of childish things.

If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

Many times over the years I have heard that there must be a necessary delineation between spouses. They each must have their own identity, interests, and ways of seeing the world. We are warned that a complete identification would annihilate one’s own self-identity, which is essential for well-being.

This is the language of psychological safety. There is no safety in love.

If Rachel dies before me, the loss will be total and irrecoverable. I have seen in the experience of others that it is survivable, but it is no less total. Does this mean I have no interests or life apart from her? Of course I do. I have interests she does not share. I like things she does not like.

But I do not hold these things back from her. I do not reserve some portion for myself. All that is mine is hers; all that is hers is mine. There may be areas of my life that she doesn’t have a lot of interest in visiting, but she is no less queen over that territory.

A great deal of trust and no small amount of time is needed to establish such a love. It may or may not happen; if there is a formula, I do not know it. If you find the possibility of such love before you, however, it will not tolerate reservations. There is no safety in love.

David Orr, as quoted in “Prophetic Possibilities":

The increasing velocity of knowledge is widely accepted as sure evidence of human mastery and progress. But many, if not most, of the ecological, economic, social, and psychological ailments that beset contemporary society can be attributed directly or indirectly to knowledge acquired and applied before we had time to think it through carefully. We rushed into the fossil fuel age only to discover the giant problem of climate destabilization. We rushed to develop nuclear energy without the faintest idea of what to do with the radioactive wastes. Nuclear weapons were created before we had time to ponder their full implications. Knowledge of how to kill more efficiently is rushed from research to application without much question about its effects on the perceptions and behavior of others, about its effects on our own behavior, or about better and cheaper ways to achieve real security. CFCs and a host of carcinogenic, mutagenic, and hormone-disrupting chemicals, too, are products of fast knowledge. High-input, energy-intensive agriculture is also a product of knowledge applied before much consideration has been given to its full ecological and social costs. Economic growth, in large measure, is driven by fast knowledge, with results everywhere evident in mounting environmental problems, social disintegration, unnecessary costs, and injustice.

Is there any better example of this than AI? Sure they talk a lot about “safety,” but how long until it’s no longer in their best interest to fund research which might come back to bite them?

“Move fast and break things” does not allow for a patient evaluation of the risks of new technology. It seems to be absolutely impossible for the whizbang scientific and technological geniuses not to do something just because they can.

When changes like these are imposed on people by corporations and governments bought by corporations, why are we surprised when bullets start flying and molotov cocktails are thrown?

The final word is the opening word of the Tao Te Ching:

A Way called Way isn’t the perennial Way.
A name that names isn’t the perennial name.

Our training has given us chatty minds—but mystery is not chatty. Reassure that anxious part of yourself: Mystery is and ought to be underdefined. It is not trying to slip away; you do not need to tether it with words.

Gregg Braden tells the story of his visit to a Tibetan monastery. He asked the abbot about their internal state amid the bells and mantras and incense. The abbot replied:

You’ve never seen our prayers. You’ve seen the things we do to create the feeling. The feeling is the prayer.

The feeling is the prayer.

Tara Couture, writing about a place near her farm:

There’s something mysterious there, attractive to animals of every ilk, but unknowable, too. The feeling of the ridge transcends the logical ‘glacier dropped it off’ explanation. If someone told me it was a stone dropped from a dragon’s mouth many eons ago, I would be more likely to believe them.

When I was young, a Holiness preacher said, “A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.” I loved that line. Then I left the Holiness churches and hated it. Now, all these years later, I write in the margins next to that passage.

And it’s not the first time it’s come to mind this week. I was sent a video of a person explaining a Pentecostal church service in terms of mass delusion and mirror neurons and several other phrases she had dutifully learned from her textbook, bless her. It all made a great deal of sense and it was so pitifully boring.

Do you want a more enchanted world? Step one: lose your taste for tidy, respectable explanations.

After coming across that “writers against AI” image, I decided to put it into my micro.blog newsletter’s footer. Then, inevitably, I wondered “is that presumptuous to consider myself a writer?”

I quickly concluded, “Who cares? You’re being tiresome.” That’s the proper response and I am satisfied with it.

Later, though, I came across this line from Caspar David Friedrich quoted in The Romantic Revolution:

bring to the light of day what you have seen in the darkness, so that it can work on others, from the outside inwards

A writer, then, could be considered a person who practices bringing the inward outward through the medium of language. Nothing in that definition requires publishing or audience or even much talent–though it is a level of effort beyond simple communication. At its highest levels, of course, it is art. It can also be one way of meeting the work of life: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.”

This post is a little long and rambly, but I think I’ll leave it.

A few days ago I posed a question for Christians: “How would you square a belief in the inherent dignity of honest work with the idea that hard work was the curse of God on Adam?”

I got some good responses, which you can see in the comments to that post. Caleb’s response, in particular, sent me back to the recent Plough issue on “Why We Work,” where I found a helpful piece by Alastair Roberts. More on that momentarily.

The background to my question is my recent reading about the Amish and other Anabaptists–a tradition with a long history of weaving together their daily work with their faith. This is attractive to me. It’s essentially been a lifelong goal of mine, stretching from the time I left the Holiness churches through my time as a Lutheran, Episcopalian, and, now, a pagan. I have no interest in an otherworldly faith that cheapens this world. I am interested in how I can live a fully integrated life here and now.

Many years ago I read that deeply problematic C.S. Lewis passage (from God in the Dock_) where he divides religions, like soups, into “thick” and “clear”:

By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly.

Surprising no one, Lewis says Christianity is the best balance of Thick and Clear. When I first read it, however, I was instantly attracted far more to the Thick than either the Clear or some balance of the two. That has remained the case in the decades since. There have been times when I perhaps drifted more toward the Clear, but I always come back to the Thick.

“Good work is our salvation and joy,” says Wendell Berry, and I agree. This is a Thick principle. Earthy and solid, like the Amish. As I was thinking through this, my mind went back to the Garden of Eden, as it does surprisingly often. I find it to be a fruitful(!) myth; I posted one of my theories about it here. How can good work be essential to our well-being if work is the curse of God on Adam?

As a few people pointed out, that is a mistaken way of framing it. There was indeed work before the Fall. Here’s where Alastair comes in. He says humanity’s work was meant to be “continuous with and established by God’s labor” in creation. Eden, in fact, was a training ground. God would teach Adam and Eve how to “extend and elaborate good order within the creation” and from there they would go out to exercise this responsibility throughout the world. Eden would remain as the primal garden sanctuary, where God and humanity could commune. Humanity’s work would be a pattern of there and back again: going out to perform their work, and returning to the garden sanctuary to be with God.

The Fall, however, changed the character of work:

Man’s work was supposed to flow out of and back into fellowship with God: it was ordered out from and into the sanctuary. However, after humanity’s rebellion in the Fall, human labor went awry, adopting a different character. Alienated from God, human labor lost its primary orientation to communion, becoming acquisitive, driven by a desire for material possessions, power, and status. Capacities that were created for beneficent rule were twisted to the ends of domination over others, and labor became entangled with systems of bondage. Mutual recognition, companionship, and belonging through fellow labor curdled into rivalry and division. Work once blessed with fruitfulness was reduced to frustration and futility. Labor degraded into unrelenting toil. The earth no longer readily answered to the efforts of the man, and now, alienated from the Giver of Life, man’s labors were constantly slipping down into the pitiless maw of death. The labor of women in childbirth became hedged about with the risk of death, for mother and baby alike. The book of Ecclesiastes, which meditates upon the condition of man in a world under the power of death, describes how man’s greatest works are washed away and forgotten beneath the advancing tides of time.

Having lost its grounding in relationship, suffering became the new character of work. I appreciate this elucidation of the story–so I’ll adapt it for my own uses.

My personal theory (more in that link above) is that the Eden story is an ancestral memory of our break with the more-than-human world. Viewing this through the lens of work, Eden tells us that once we labored in harmony with the universe. Our work was reciprocal: taking and killing, yes, but also giving, caring, and protecting.

Perhaps the break with the more-than-human world happened because evolution damaged humanity in some way. However it happened, the separation set us at odds. Work is now rarely a partnership between people, much less between humans and non-humans. At this late date, money is all that matters.

I don’t know whether or how this breach will be healed on the grand scale. I will leave that question to the religions that operate at that scale.

In my own life, I intend for my labor to be grounded in the recognition of interrelatedness. Living in the world as it is, my work will often breach those relationships. Wendell Berry once had a pond excavated on a narrow shelf on a wooded hillside. He thought he had done it carefully, in consultation with experts. Nevertheless, after a wet fall and winter, a chunk of the woods above slid into the pond.

In general, I have used my farm carefully. It could be said, I think, that I have improved it more than have damaged it.

My aim has been to go against its history and to repair the damage of other people. But now a part of its damage is my own.

The pond was a modest piece of work, and so the damage is not extensive. In the course of time and nature it will heal.

And yet there is damage—to my place, and to me. I have carried out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy: I have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, for no lasting good.

Until that wound in the hillside, my place, is healed, there will be something impaired in my mind. My peace is damaged. I will not be able to forget it.

When our work has breached relationships, it is our responsibility to repair and heal what we can, in memory of Eden.

It is better, of course, to avoid these breaches altogether. This is where our work becomes truly difficult, because it cuts against the grain of everything around us. I don’t know what you will be called to do; I know what Rachel and I have been called to do. Like Adam and Eve, our work is joint, one long venture lasting thirty years so far. We have been called to work together in patience and love: parenting, gardening, making a home, supporting each other. We gave up a job with money and status (that was killing me) so that we could remain near each other, within our community, and fully shift our focus there. I say this only to insist that work grounded in interrelatedness will cost you—but only in ways that do not ultimately matter. Ultimately, you’ll only lose your suffering. For the last word, we turn again to Mr. Berry:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other’s arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and that vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

Nothing original below. To the contrary, I’m trying to remember that less alienated era I grew up in. Some of these I’m doing and some I’m working on. Please suggest additions.

1. Don’t talk about politics or religion. Never bring it up yourself and if the other person brings it up, redirect the conversation.
2. The only exception to the above is local news. This encourages engagement with the concerns of the community, which actually affects your life.
3. Don’t gossip, even if it is local.
4. Get to know your neighborhood by walking it. This gives it texture and shape in your mind.
5. Embrace small talk; it signals openness between people who may not have much in common.
6. Take note of the elders around you and watch out for them.
7. Avoid cash exchange. Practice the gift economy.
8. Be outside more. That’s where most neighborly interactions happen.
9. Try to remember names. Failing that, “neighbor” signals a warm heart despite a blank mind.
10. Consider the health of your neighborhood as a whole.
11. Wave.
12. Welcome new neighbors with baked goods.
13. Feed the birds and stray cats.

One of the good things I learned from my upbringing in the Holiness church: going it alone.

I keep running across people looking for validation in their spiritual path. I get it. We all love validation. We want someone to help us along, encourage us, tell us we’re not crazy.

At the same time, there’s a valuable lesson in “I’m gonna pray if I pray by myself; I’m gonna stand if I have to stand alone.”

(Aside: That’s a pretty bland recording of the song. I’ve never found a good recording of Holiness singers. You’d only ever understand what Holiness music can be at its best by hearing it live. It’s as if the Holy Ghost refuses to enter recording studios.)

I remember women who had faithfully prayed for years for their lost husbands and lost children dancing in the aisles during that song, a Spirit of defiance having overtaken them. They would return to their tearful prayers soon enough but in that moment they were prepared to leave even their dearest ones behind in pursuit of their goal.

I’m quite aware of the dangers of spiritual lone wolfism. At the moment, however, we seem to be in a time of increasing conformity; the Romantic Spirit is waning. I don’t blame anyone for turning to the more established sources. Lord knows I’ve felt the draw too. Nevertheless, some of us still feel the call of individualism. For those with ears to hear, let them hear.

There is wisdom, even kindness, in concepts like “householder” and “laity.” Broadly speaking, these ideas represent an understanding that the capacities of someone devoted full-time to spiritual practice are very different from the capacities of someone with family and “worldly” responsibilities. I say there is kindness in these concepts; someone could just as easily see it as a spiritual caste system. That absolutely can be the case! Here, though, I want to emphasize the wisdom of these concepts in a time when they seem to have been forgotten.

I could tell you stories of other folks but, listen, I’m a lifelong tryhard. Serious. Sincere. Precisely zero chill. I have a good sense of humor but my friends wouldn’t exactly call me fun. The moment I left fundamentalism I set out cranking spiritual practice to eleven. I was Lutheran for about five minutes before I started looking into Radical Lutheranism and then Orthodoxy. (“Luthodoxy” was a blogging phenomenon I was a part of, though it seems to have disappeared from the internet.) Eventually we became Episcopalians and I got into Anglo-Catholicism. Then I ended up in Zen sesshin after taking an interest in Buddhism. The pattern in clear, right?

I did the same thing with reading. The fundamentalism I grew up in was fiercely anti-intellectual. So of course I started reading academic theology. And while I was way out of my depth sometimes, I did learn a lot. The problem is, all of this landed me with a case of anxiety that took years to work through. It still pops up now and then but, thankfully, I’ve learned how to better handle such unpleasant emotions.

Now I’ve settled into a more balanced life. I’ve made peace with who I am. I am a husband and a father and time spent with my family is never wasted time. (Pity A.W. Tozer’s wife. He was so “zealous” that he would only help her if she agreed to read to him while he ironed.) I am an accountant, not an academic. I’m self-taught in religion and philosophy, which means there are gaping holes in my knowledge that will never be corrected. I will never make a living as a writer; now and then I can write a good sentence but I will never have the time or discipline to write very many in a row.

I am, in short, a householder. I have worldly obligations. I will never be a hermit or a monk or a professor in a small nineteenth-century liberal arts college. I do, however, have a wonderful wife and daughter, and we all love each other very much. I have a job that pays the bills and doesn’t make me miserable. I have enough free time to piddle in the garage, read some books, and type out some thoughts now and then. My wife is a talented gardener, baker, and cook and I regularly get to enjoy the fruits of her labor. I still explore spiritual practices but my day to day life has settled into a practice of honoring the powers that shape my life and expressing gratitude for their gifts.

The settled life of a householder is full of both compromises and blessings. And while householders are typically not remembered as saints or sages, there is a hand-worn holiness in such a life.

From the latest essay by Rhyd Wildermuth:

Again, worlding is what we do and is not dependent on what we believe. This make the question not “what is true?” but rather “what do we include?” We already live in a world full of gods and spirits, but for the disenchanted mind, these are so distant in the background and so excluded from our consciousness that we can say “they don’t exist” without any feeling of falsehood.

But what we’re really saying is “I don’t include them in my worlding.”

This brings to my mind the thoroughly argued (perhaps argued to death) question of faith–a word which I don’t even like, to be honest. It’s been so thoroughly bashed and abused that it feels most compassionate to lay the poor word to rest for a few centuries until some fresh wind stirs it to life again.

The damage done to the idea of faith is one reason why I believe the Protestant Reformation was an unfortunate mistake. The dispute over faith and works has resulted, on the whole, in an idea of faith that cashes out to “belief without proof.” Enter the apologists and the atheists, arguing ad nauseum.

At this point, I prefer Conan the Barbarian’s approach: “What god do you pray to?” As the Weird Studies guys point out about that clip, the phrasing is important. “What god do you pray to?” Not “what god do you believe in?”

Years ago I was talking to an academic historian friend (a Christian) who said comparative religion scholars had often misunderstood world “religions” by looking at them through a Christian lens that centers beliefs. It is important to understand, he said, that the day to day life of most practitioners is more about diet and calendar than any set of doctrines.

Getting back to Rhyd’s essay: The relevant point is not whether I (squeezing my eyes tight like a child wishing for a Red Ryder BB gun) believe in spirits. Rather, I ask myself, “do I include them in my worlding?” Do I worry over intellectual questions about spirits of the land or do I build them a shrine in the backyard and make offerings? “I will shew thee my faith by my works.”

There is a place for those intellectual questions, to be sure. But before all else, it is the orientation of the heart in day-to-day practice that matters most. In place of the word “faith” I would substitute “acting in trust.” That phrase holds together what the last few hundred years of disputes in the Christian west has pulled apart. When I build that shrine, I am acting in trust; I am building my life and structuring my dwelling in relationship with a living cosmos. Living in that way, the intellectual questions take their proper place.

If your baseline assumption is that the universe if meaningless, you will of course find no meaning there.

If, on the other hand, you look for, inquire after, draw up the meaning in your circumstances, you will find meaning.

Does that mean it’s all “just” in your head and therefore false? Of course not. By embracing the meaningfulness of the cosmos, you are co-creating that meaning alongside it. You are performing the human role of making conscious the interrelatedness of all things.

The men who live in my memory had work to do. That work had a purpose: to feed their families. They were not career men with five year plans and KPIs.

The men who live in my memory did not worry about what it meant to be a man or whether they were good at “adulting.” They knew that whatsoever their hands found to do, must be done with all their might.

The men who live in my memory call me to that same simplicity. They tell me to lay aside these trendy worries. They tell me I’ll find all I need deep inside my bones, which they gave me as an inheritance.

Some of us children of empire are rightly worried about further damage to colonized cultures. We try, therefore, to build walls around these cultures and call any breach of those walls “cultural appropriation.”

The fear of cultural appropriation, though, is itself a product of empire. Such a fear attempts to freeze those cultures at a moment in time, specifically the moment when the colonizers “discovered” those cultures. Only an imperial mind would make the mistake of ignoring a culture’s entire history, pretending that it had sprung into existence only when noticed by imperial eyes.

Cultures and religions are always in flux. Gods travel with their worshippers and take on new forms in new lands. Religions are always in relation with the cultures in which they are situated—even if only a relation of denunciation. Religion is syncretism.

While the fear of cultural appropriation arises from a good heart, there is a difference between syncretism and pilfering. There are better and worse ways of encountering other cultures and religions. (“Religion” is such a clunky word here. One source of the problem is the separation of “religion” from “culture”—this is disenchantment. But that’s a post still in my drafts folder.)

The self-determining individual of consumer capitalism finds themselves in the marketplace of religion. Pick and choose. No context. No demands. Only costumes.

At the same time, have some pity on the poor modern seeker. We’re all heretics—“choosers”—now. Perhaps in this welter of choice, we are undergoing the same syncretic process that birthed all religions, including those with ancient pedigree. Perhaps some forgotten thing is being rediscovered; perhaps some new spirit is being awakened. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh.”

Following up on my post about rational abstraction.

That mode of thinking is an acquired skill, taught mainly at universities. It is a technical ability needed for certain types of work; its the equivalent of the knowledge of accounting rules for accountants. Because of the self-involvement of the elites educated in such environments and employed in such jobs, it has been generalized into a skill thought to be a base requirement for functioning humanity. To lack it—or to be less skilled in it—is to be regarded as ignorant or even inferior.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” could only be said by a self-involved elite.

There are other ways of knowing. In fact, for much of life, other ways of knowing are far more important than the academic mode. How happy do you expect a person competent in rational abstraction but unskilled in emotional intelligence to be? How important is intuition in navigating life safely?

Rational abstraction is an excellent servant but a terrible master. It’s a skill most suitable to computers and AI. For all of the folks bemoaning the irrationality of humanity, you may be about to experience a world run entirely according to your rules and you may not like the result.

I came across this in my notes from two years ago. I don’t recall if I planned to do more with this or not, but it seems okay to me in its current form.

My political action plan:

• Our political and economic system is a world eating monster with an unalterable hostility to life. Until the powers that be get serious about killing that monster, I’ll continue assuming they are emissaries of the monster and accord them all the respect that position is due.
• Although I am a sworn enemy of the world-eating monster, the reality is that I am living in enemy-occupied territory. Daily life requires some transactional relation with the enemy. So I will seek to minimize the necessary evil with simplicity.
• I will regard the enemies of the world eating monster as allies, if only even temporarily. I will listen to them, engage them in conversation, and encourage them in their enmity with the world eating monster.

One alternative to streaming music I don’t think I’ve ever seen discussed: radio! You probably have an oldies (or similar) station in your area with a local connection.

• Music: So, yeah, maybe it isn’t your favorite and maybe you have stronger feelings about music discovery than I do. But oldies are basically another canon of standards at this point. It ain’t bad!

• Local ads: This is America; you don’t get to escape advertising. At least this way you may hear about local businesses and events.

• Local news: Local papers are dead but local radio news does still survive around here, in a much diminished way.

• Live broadcasts of local events: Goofy, for sure. But surely that’s not so bad, here at the end of all things?

The voluntary self-limitation of local radio—tune in and drop out, in a different sense—seems like a good option. This is one of the main ways our parents and grandparents connected to their community when I was young. I remember my blind grandpa sitting by the radio listening to Hoosier basketball. I remember waiting so impatiently to hear whether a snow day would be called—and the thrill when the broadcaster said he had a list of delays and closings to read.

This is a lot of nostalgia, to be sure, and I’m getting a bit off track. Anyway, count me in, WQRK.

Let me say from the outset that I do not believe the Trump administration’s destruction of USAID flows from anything like deeply considered principles. That’s obvious, right?

However: In the context of liberals defending the goodness of international aid, it might be instructive to remember that Ivan Illich–hero to many of us on the left–famously opposed international aid. “To Hell with Good Intentions” (pdf) was an invited keynote address delivered in 1968 to a group of people promoting international aid.

By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class “American Way of Life,” since that is really the only life you know. A group like this could not have developed unless a mood in the United States had supported it - the belief that any true American must share God’s blessings with his poorer fellow men. The idea that every American has something to give, and at all times may, can and should give it, explains why it occurred to students that they could help Mexican peasants “develop” by spending a few months in their villages.

Again, I’m not defending anything about the Trump administration here. But it’s as good a time as any to remember the anti-colonial critique of international, capitalist development.

Content warning: paganism

This year, a few holidays fall into this weekend: Candlemas, St. Brigid’s day, Imbolc. Maybe they’re historically related, maybe they’re not—you’ll have to look into that for yourself. Today I’ll just be writing about our plans.

At some point in the past twenty years, I found out about Candlemas and the associated practice of eating crêpes (possibly because of their sun-like appearance?). That sounded good to us so we’ve been eating crêpes by candlelight every Candlemas for a few years now.

Over the past year though, Rachel and I have started making a more concerted effort to celebrate the quarter and cross-quarter days. The Wheel of the Year has historically been attuned to the seasons of the British Isles, so (like many others) we’ve been trying to focus our celebration on more local seasonal changes. Imbolc is generally regarded as a celebration of the first hints of Spring, and I believe we’ve found a couple of good ones.

First, the beginning of February is roughly the beginning of sugaring season around here, when the sap begins to run and maple syrup production begins. So I’m going to attempt maple candy today using some local maple syrup. (Maple candy AND crêpes in one day? That’s a lot of sugar.)

Secondly, Rachel is going to start a batch of seeds today, mostly for cool tolerant plants like leafy greens. She did this in February last year, so timing it with the holiday celebration seemed appropriate. She’s very excited about this. :)

We’ll still be eating crêpes by candlelight. This year we’ve added a nice candelabra we found at a flea market. Candles are from a local maker using semi-local beeswax. The candles will be burned all day today and possibly tomorrow.

Brigid/St. Brigid is not a large part of our celebration but Rachel did make a nice Brigid’s cross from horsetail growing in our little pond:

I’ve enjoyed revisiting this essay from Rhyd Wildermuth from last year at this time.

We’ll also have a fire out back at some point. (Any excuse will do.) Tomorrow’s weather is going to be especially nice, so we’ll also do a bit of outdoor spring cleaning, e.g., raking up sweetgum pods, straightening up the garage, cleaning up the area where we feed the birds.

It’s going to be a good weekend. Bring on Spring.

Denny:

If history demonstrates that Israel committed genocide in 2024 how will you feel about your silence, your role as an enabler?

That’s my question to you if you’re silent on the subject of the current events in Gaza. And if your silence does not enable wrong policy and action, explain to me why it does not.

… I would suggest that tax-paying citizens of the United States do need to take a public position as a matter of basic human accountability and decency in regards to basic human rights.

If the public remains silent or is seen to remain silent on an issue the government can and does point to such lack of dissent as approval.

Denny and I have talked enough that I think we both know we have certain values in common and he won’t take what I have to say here as anything other than a good-faith attempt to answer his challenge. The tone of this is a bit testier than usual and that should not be construed as me being angry at Denny (an honorable, principled person) or anyone else. It is the result of my strong feelings about retaining my independence. Those feelings, in turn, probably go back to the churches of my childhood, which sought uniformity of lifestyle and opinion above all else. Independent thinking was not allowed. I have a strong reaction whenever I feel like someone is trying to compel me to act in a way they judge to be right.

What follows are a list of possible reasons why I may not speak publicly about a given issue. It is not addressed to the situation in Gaza particularly, because I intend this to be a general statement. One or more may apply to my thinking on any given issue.

1. I have no ability to change the situation and no amount of talking on my part will ever reach the ears of those who do. There is currently an ongoing effort to remove protections from wetlands in Indiana to make way for real estate developers. I called last week to inform my state senator that I wished for him to vote against further deregulation. When I called the number, I was sent to a statehouse call center—not even my senator’s office. My name and number and address and preference were noted in a database. How influential do you think that statistic in the database will be on my conservative state senator, who has sold his soul to the energy companies? Do you think if I talked to him face to face it would change his vote? What if I started yelling outside his office? And this is on the state level. Do you really think anything I say—in any way I choose to say it—will change policy on a national and international level? There have been few larger protests in world history than the 2020 BLM protests. And I took part in two of those, one of which was in my hometown at which we were surrounded by armed and angry counter-protestors. And what came of all that? Privileged office workers like me got Juneteenth off work. You can’t, at the same time, believe both that the government is corrupt and that citizen protest alters government policy.
2. I may not have enough information. I am neither a pragmatist nor a centrist. I am, and have been for a number of years now, a leftist and an idealist. At the same time, I have lived long enough to know that complex situations cannot be simplified by force of will. I do not say this as a mealy-mouthed centrist who wants to support the status quo through acquiescence. I say this as someone who has run enthusiastically into political fights and later found out the situation was not as clear as it seemed to me at the time. Which leads me to…
3. I do not want to add to the current asinine, brain-dead polarization. I have been politically aware since the Clinton administration and the impulse to immediately and unwaveringly and irreversibly choose sides has never been this strong. A new issue arises and within 30 minutes the teams have been chosen on Twitter and we’re all supposed to go along with this idiocy. No thanks. I will exercise my judgement as best I can—and that includes judging whether I need to have a position on an issue and whether I need to speak about it publicly.
4. I completely reject the idea that if I do not condemn situation X then I am complicit in it. To say that I’m complicit in some horrible events on the other side of the world because I’m not saying something about it on my hilariously, inconceivably uninfluential blog is nonsense. Am I also complicit in—oh let’s pick something at random—Amazon’s horrible labor practices because I’m not constantly talking about them? What about the genocide that is surely happening somewhere else in the world at this very minute? I could keep giving examples. There is always something horrible happening. Occasionally there is something especially horrible happening. Sometimes mini-apocalypses are happening and no one in America has ever even heard of them. Am I seriously complicit in all of these things? Nonsense. There isn’t enough time in the day to keep up with all the horrible news in order to ensure that I make a post listing All the Terrible Things I Am Condemning Today. Which leads me to…
5. I have other things I am called to do. I am a husband and father. I am the son of an aging mother who needs more help all the time. I have a full-time job that keeps me busy and people for which I bear some responsibility. I am a gardener who is trying in some small way to make something welcoming to the forms of life on my city lot and, in this way, fight against the rolling environmental crises. I am a person who is sometimes genuinely afraid of the future and sometimes tries to make something—a poem, a post, a handmade book, a useful object made of wood—that makes the world a tiny bit more beautiful. I have plenty to do, sometimes too much. I am like a tree planted in a certain place, under certain conditions. Those factors ensure I grow in certain ways. I cannot be what you want me to be; I must grow and produce fruit according to my own nature. Which leads me to…
6. I am a grown-ass man. I am judged before the tribunal of my own conscience, not anyone else’s. I have lived my life in as ethical way as I can. I have made hard decisions and had hard conversations. I have forgone opportunities because they conflicted with the way I wanted to live my life. No one will ever be harder on me than I am myself. I am 47 years old and I will not be ordered or compelled or guilted into doing anything anyone else says I must do. I have certain things that I have prioritized in my life and those priorities will decide what I will do on a day-to-day basis. That’s it. You might just have to assume—stay with me here—that I am not a reprobate who supports The Terrible Thing.

The world, it seems, is full and overflowing with events, any one of which would have seemed world-historical in any other age. On some days, it feels like a feat to face the day without falling apart. Most of us are small creatures attempting to live our lives with something like responsibility and peacefulness. We are also subject to powers and their servants, over whom we have no control. Those powers do not deserve and must not have our allegiance.

But for each other, we must have some grace. We are, many of us, doing what it is ours to do—or at least trying to figure it out. Let’s assume the best of each other, until we are given sufficient evidence otherwise. Let’s not make enemies of each other.

Part two in a series.

Two definitions of “weird” from Merriam-Webster:

1. Of strange or extraordinary character: odd, fantastic
2. Of, relating to, or caused by witchcraft or the supernatural: magical

By capitalizing The Weird, I’m obviously intending it to mean something more than the everyday, first sense of “weird”: unusual. When people say something is weird, they mean that it is something they don’t have a ready explanation for. The paradigm they inhabit is not sufficient to explain it. So weird becomes a placeholder.

The Weird, as I’ll be using it, will be something closer to the second sense, though not exactly. The key difference is better expressed by J.F. Martel in his essay “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”:

A thing can be strange in effect or strange in fact. In philosophical terms, the first kind of strangeness might be called epistemological, meaning that it has to do with how we perceive things; the second kind of strangeness might be called ontological, meaning that it has to do with the way things actually are at their inmost.

Martel illustrates this with the example of Bigfoot. If cryptozoologists were able to prove that Bigfoot is a hitherto-unknown species of rare ape, the whole phenomenon would be shown to have been an instance of epistemological strangeness—that is to say, weird. Epistemological strangeness is temporary; once further information is acquired, it is no longer strange. Epistemological strangeness is something we can deal with.

Ontological strangeness, however, makes us moderns more uncomfortable. Ontological strangeness says that some things absolutely refuse rational explanation—that is, The Weird. They are not perceivable in the usual way and do not obey the usual rules. In the case of Bigfoot, there is a group of interpreters of the phenomenon who see it as something ontologically strange. That is, Bigfoot “forever eludes capture even though people have been seeing it for centuries in the wilderness of North America and will probably continue to do so for as long as there are forests for sheltering mysteries.” It will elude capture because it is not, in fact, a rare ape but a phenomenon that cannot be measured, weighed, or examined.

And so Martel gives us our first attempt to define The Weird: “things that elude all possible explanation because they are rooted in unreason.” The next few posts will be other attempts to define The Weird.

Part one in [a series].

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

The passing of Labor Day Weekend means—to me, at least—the end of summer and the opening of Halloweentide. Never mind the heat wave. And what better time to launch something I’ve been thinking about for a while now?

I am increasingly convinced that the only way forward in These Weird Times is to embrace The Weird. What do I mean? I hope to answer that in this occasional series. I have an idea of the direction I’m heading but I also hope to be surprised a few times.

So let’s begin with what could be the epigraph of this series. From “Nyarlathotep” by H.P. Lovecraft (hat tip to the Weird Studies episode on Lovecraft):

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

Keeping everything in one spot. Will be updated over time.

• Wikipedia article. Useful as links to other sources.
• Plutarch’s report of the death of Pan. In some Christian tellings, connected to/occurred at the death of Jesus.
• Pan and the Nightmare by James Hillman. The first half by Hillman is excellent. The second half by Roscher was less interesting for me.
• Elizabeth Barret Browning:
  • “A Musical Instrument”
  • “The Dead Pan”, in which EBB rejoices in the death of Pan and the superiority of Christianity. Perhaps contrary to authorial intent, I was really feeling her mournful description of the silence of the Greek gods in the first half–then came the “good riddance” and I was less sympathetic.
• The Great God Pan: The Survival of an Image by John Boardman. Brief art history book. Nice photographs, but not quite what I was looking for.
• Weird Studies podcast episode on Pan. I’ll be re-listening to this one in order to make some notes.
• Hellier documentary. Ends up having a connection to Pan. I love this series, if for no other reason than the joy of watching people having a paranormal investigation adventure. There’s also a Weird Studies episode on Hellier.
• The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. Great short story from an early horror writer. What happens when a guy says he can make someone see the spirit world with just a bit of minor brain surgery?
• “Sketches of the Goat God in Albion” by Gyrus. Excellent essay. Not a lot new in terms of lore or analysis after reading the above (in fact, he is relying on some of these same sources) but this essay adds some excellent stories and experiences.

To be read:

• The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece by Philippe Borgeaud
• Pan the Goat-God by Patricia Merivale

Freddie deBoer’s recent essay about the escapism built into much of online life is well worth your attention. When I was first drafting this post yesterday, I wrote that Freddie missed some important points. I’ve now re-read it a few times to ensure I wasn’t misreading him and I suspect he wouldn’t necessarily disagree with what I say below. So just take this post as a “yes, and…” to Freddie’s.

Freddie is entirely correct when he says that tech companies are designing their products to lure us away from self-knowledge and the necessary risk of being human. There is a fundamental challenge to being human and to avoid it is to miss a difficult and invaluable gift. He is also correct to encourage us to take the risk of actually engaging with real world human beings. Actual human relationships are important. On the other hand, they are not the sine qua non of humanity (more on that momentarily).

Two things I would add to Freddie’s essay:

1. The value of relationship with the nonhuman world
2. The value of solitude

On the first I’ll be brief—mostly because I’m attempting to learn it myself right now and I don’t have much to say beyond “try it for yourself.” I do know that when I go for too long without time in the woods or the garden, I can detect it in my mood. I become grouchy and more pessimistic. (More, I say. My baseline is always pessimistic.) But when I’m in contact with the nonhuman world, sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can feel the swirl of life around me. That brings me to clarity and peace. Freddie wants us to engage with actual life and the problem of being human. Engagement with the nonhuman world does this and more.

I’m mostly writing this, though, because I want to emphasize the value of solitude, without denigrating the beauty of relationships. In fact, not just the value of solitude as an occasional practice, but as a deliberate choice of life.

Peter France opens his book Hermits: The Insights of Solitude by asking why hermits through the ages have been seen as sources of insight into the problems of personal and social relationships when the hermits themselves deliberately live outside those relationships. Perhaps it is the case (it is definitely the case) that it is difficult to properly understand a situation in which one is immersed. The fish doesn’t know what water is.

It would seem, therefore, that not only are those who live outside typical human relationships healthy, but in some way contribute to the health of those of us who live within typical human relationships. It has become accepted wisdom that relationships are required for human flourishing. The tradition of hermits and monks and solitaries speaks otherwise.

But aren’t loners weird? Sometimes, sometimes not. And what is weird anyway? Nonconformity to social rules? Are we begging the question? In any case, there are plenty of weird people among the sociable humans I see around me.

Some people work better (work in every sense of the word) in solitude or semi-solitude. Now that bosses are wanting their employees back in their chairs at the office, the business press has so many opinions about the importance of human interaction for creativity and productivity. This ignores the reality of people like me who have actually worked much better (worked in every sense of the word) alone at home for the past three years.

And almost everyone would benefit from periods of solitude. “All of humanity’s problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” If we want to take Freddie’s sound advice to engage with the challenge of life, there is no better way than to sit quietly in a room alone. Relationships, in this way, can be just as numbing as the damn phones and social media.

Risk engaging with actual human beings, yes. Also, engage with the nonhuman world. Also, maybe some of us require less human interaction than others. (That’s okay. You’re no weirder than anyone else.) Also, almost all of us could do with more periods of solitude. The important point is that you engage with the challenge of life, in whatever way your nature requires.

The Tao makes no effort at all
yet there is nothing it doesn’t do
if a ruler could uphold it
the people by themselves would change
and changing if their desires stirred
he could make them still
with simplicity that has no name
and stilled by nameless simplicity
they would not desire
and not desiring be at peace
the world would fix itself

Taoteching verse 37, translated by Red Pine

Verse 37 opens with a famous and enigmatic saying of the Taoteching: The Tao accomplishes everything, yet it makes no effort. This is otherwise known as “wu wei”, i.e., “effortless action.”

It is important to note here that a popular misconception of yin-yang is that it represents an eternal, static harmony. Rather, yin-yang is a dynamic, creative tension that moves the cosmos along. Change is inherent in the idea. It is likewise inherent in the idea of wu wei. Action always results in change but, in the case of wu wei, it is effortless action.

Change is the way of nature; change is Tao. In a society following the Tao, Lao-Tzu says here, people would change by themselves, without interference from the ruler. But this is not change driven by desire (i.e., [mimesis]). There is a difference between change driven by dissatisfaction (desire) and change as adaptation to changing circumstances. The latter is the way of nature; the former is the cause of all conflict.

The wise ruler—the sage—the one who rules themselves—responds to the stimulation of desire by invoking “nameless simplicity”—the Tao itself, that which cannot be named. The Tao calls us away from mimesis, back to our own natures. Once aligned with our own natures, we can adapt as necessary, out of an interior stillness not driven by desire. The problems of a society full of such people would be solved effortlessly.

The Tao, doing nothing, leaves nothing undone.

This is week three of a continuing series of letters with Jason Becker. Week one is here and week two is here.

Dear Jason,

Your description of Tulum was very interesting. It’s the first I’ve heard of it. And, yes, I can see what you mean by it being a contradiction. I like the idea of lifting people out of poverty; at the same time, it sounds like the usual corporate greenwashing.

I can imagine this sort of thing being the future of what you might call “conscious travel.” Where Walt Disney built a theme park in a swamp and then later brought in people from around the world to set up a pale imitation of their cultures at Epcot, developers will appeal to modern sensibilities by trying to pay lip service to local cultures and environmental sustainability in order to draw in the “conscious travelers.” Yet, as you say, it’s the same unsustainable model.

I completely agree with you that the lifestyle we have come to expect will destroy the relationship we have with a place. And I also suspect that climate change is something like the planet’s immune response to our lifestyle. At the same time, I would say that the problem is the modern lifestyle, not humans themselves. After all, humans evolved alongside the rest of life on earth; this is our home every bit as much as it is for any other creature. The problem is the cluster of ideas and practices that have been developing in Europe and America for the last few hundred years. That is where you’ll find the true contradiction that is echoed in Tulum: economic prosperity that destroys the material basis of life.

And here I sit typing these words on an iPad. I also embody the contradiction! To quote the Apostle Paul, “O wretched man that I am; who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

But I do not think we should resign ourselves to continuing in the same way while attempting to mitigate the destruction our lifestyles have caused. I do not think human flourishing requires the destruction. Depending, of course, on what you mean by flourishing. Most pre-modern human societies lived in far less destructive ways than we do. Of course, their lives were much harder—which is why I don’t advocate for living in exactly the same way as our predecessors did. There has to be some way of third way of renouncing the poisonous cluster of ideas and practices that have landed us here while also not rolling back the clock according to some simplistic primitivism. Something new. Some way of living in relationship with the non-human world.

One of the core ideas we must renounce is control over the world. That idea has led to our present situation of world-altering power lying in the hands of a relatively few people. There is simply too much power up for grabs (and when I say “up for grabs” I mean among the elite—we will never gain that power) and those incredibly high stakes has led to the total obsession over politics. Every election season we are told by politicians that it is the most important of our lifetimes—and there is a sense in which that is true! That much power should not be available because it appears that we are not suited to it. It’s not a matter of finally getting the right person in control. Like Gandalf when offered the ring, we must recognize that, however much we hope we would use such power for good, that level of power must be renounced.

This is why I have increasingly moved toward a more anarchist politics. I have lost faith in the ability of humans (particularly a handful of wealthy humans!) to solve global problems on a global scale. And I will certainly grant you that in the present circumstances I do not really trust local people to make good decisions either. There are too many warped incentives. These warped incentives, however, are the result of our poisonous system. Free people from that, give them local knowledge, and maybe love and care can flourish, thus breaking the tyranny of small decisions.

I will admit that my politics are utopian. I also believe that utopian politics can be actually useful when the system we were told represented the end of history is crumbling around us and all “realistic” options seem to be more of the same.

As for strengthening relationships with the nonhuman world, I think hiking is an excellent way to start! It’s where I started. My one piece of hiking advice is to refuse to see it as exercise. Shut off trackers and timers. And whether you are hiking or simply taking a daily walk, find places that appeal to you, where you can stop and rest and listen and observe. Learn to identify trees and flowers. Getting the identification right is actually secondary; the real goal is careful attention to the plants.

Attention is key. In order to integrate nonhuman beings into our world, we must stop seeing them as set decorations in the human drama. Simone Weil called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” The beginning of any reciprocal relationship with the nonhuman world begins with generous attention.

Sincerely,

Jeremy

Hi Jeremy,

Well, I’m back at ~40,000 feet so it seemed like a great time to write this letter. Busy week again, this time hopping over to LA for a conference for a day and a half before heading back home to Baltimore.

There has to be some way of third way of renouncing the poisonous cluster of ideas and practices that have landed us here while also not rolling back the clock according to some simplistic primitivism. Something new. Some way of living in relationship with the non-human world.

I think where I am at in my own evolution is believing precisely in this third way. But in my mind, this third way is already here. It’s not primitive, but it is a return, certainly compared to how American cities were developed. I’d like to see us abandon the false pastoral sheen of the suburbs and sprawling human habitation and move into human-scaled urban cities. I think to return to nature we have to separate from it. Less land use that’s far more efficient. We need to create places for human flourishing and interaction. I think we’ve spent so much time separating from each other physically so that we can collide with nature all over. Instead, I think we need to collide with each other a lot more and nature a lot less.

Maybe this where my politics are utopian as well, but from a different direction.

I think what’s interesting about your descriptions of how to interact with nature and how it informs your “treehugger” identity is that each time I read it, I think about how it can and should apply to our human relationships as well. Take generous attention, a phase I love and will now forever cherish. How often do we practice generous attention with each other? These letters are, in some ways, about generous attention.

Let’s turn to a different topic. It’s still kind of the start of the year. And while I haven’t thought of a theme or anything yet, I have been thinking about what I’m looking forward to and what I’m hoping for.

At work, my team has been growing and we’re pursuing some work that I’ve been looking forward to for years that I think has the potential to make a step change in our business. It’s difficult and sometimes slow going, but it almost feels like a senior thesis in that it combines everything we’ve learned and worked towards for a decade.

At home, I’m looking forward to continuing to regularly play volleyball, which I started to do again about a year ago now after a 17 year hiatus. I’m also hoping to finish off some last home projects, including a deep clean out of my office and our pantry. And of course, I’m looking forward to this project, Letters, which has now filled up for the year.

Until next week (which is already almost upon us),

Jason

This is week two of a continuing series of letters with Jason Becker. More information and the letter from week one can be found here.

Dear Jason,

It was interesting to read about your history online and a little more about the motivations for this project. I sincerely hope this project leads you to the interactions you are looking for. With that, let’s move in the direction you’re wanting to go. You’ve asked some excellent questions!

So, treehugger. First we must digress into the terminological. “Tree hugger” is, of course, a word used for environmentalists, but I wouldn’t call myself an environmentalist per se. I think of myself as something like an animist. An animist is, in the well-received words of Graham Harvey, someone who recognizes “that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others.”

Environmentalism, to me, feels more purely political. Another variety of activist. And I love activists! I have been one at points in my life. But when I think about what forms my actions from day to day, the belief crystallized in Harvey’s definition is far deeper and central than any particular political identity. To live in an ongoing relationship with the Cosmos around and within me is my goal, however imperfectly realized.

Notice that this situates me in a web of relationships. This brings up another uneasiness I have with the term “environmentalist” (and I picked this up from an animist writer named Gordon White). The “environment” is something which surrounds you and from which—crucially—you are separated. It is out there. And the thing out there must be preserved. But for the animist, there is no out there as opposed to in here. Everything is connected in a living relationship and any damage done to one is done to all and to one’s self. To be clear, I’m not saying that environmentalists would disagree with this; I’m only pointing out a weakness in the term.

At this point I think it would be useful to answer your question about how I arrived here, because the answer will lead me to your other questions. The short answer is Wendell Berry twenty years ago and Richard Power’s The Overstory three years ago.

If you’re not familiar with him, Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer from Kentucky. He has been immensely influential over the last half-century—his writing is a thread woven throughout the ecological movement, farm to table cuisine, technological criticism, regenerative agriculture and more. When I encountered his writing, I was a young libertarian who believed that capitalism was a liberating force that may cause pain in the short term but would, in the end, be an engine of human flourishing. Berry dissolved that illusion and replaced it with something much more humane. One of his key ideas is “local knowledge”, but more on that in a moment.

Berry has been a figure that has been central to my life at times and at other times he has moved to the periphery. By the time I picked up The Overstory, Berry was on the periphery for me. By the time I finished reading The Overstory, he started moving back to the center. I’ve said before—and I don’t know how much I mean this literally and how much metaphorically—that the trees called to me through Richard Powers’ novel. I got back out into the woods and started paying attention to that web of relationships again. The web of relationships, moreover, in the woods near my house and, eventually, my own backyard.

And here we arrive back at local knowledge. In Berry’s way of thinking (and also according to indigenous people, though I’m far less familiar with them), we must act in accordance with local conditions. One of the main reasons we are in the mess we are in is that we have imposed our wills on the land upon which we live, rather than learning from it how we ought to live. And, crucially, the land asks different things from its humans in different places.

So my response to your point about urban versus suburban and the various fractures in the environmental movement is, therefore, that the land of Manhattan Island asks different things of its people than that of Lawrence County, Indiana. I cannot say what ought to be done in other places. The responsibility for those places falls on those places’ biotic communities. This is, importantly, not a dodge but a fact of life.

So how do we all become treehuggers? Again, Wendell Berry tells us: we do not set out to save the world—that is a task beyond the scale of our competence. We learn from our land and work within our web of relationships. When we do that, we become part of a community based on mutual love.

Sincerely,

Jeremy

Hello there Jeremy,

At first, I was delayed in responding because I wanted to try and spend a little time with the thinkers you’ve introduced me to in this letter. Then I was delayed because the week just got away from me, so I didn’t have time for that. This was our last week in Mexico after a two and a half month sojourn there, and in fact, I’m writing this response from somewhere over Georgia on my way home.

For the last week, I’ve been in Tulum. It’s a contradiction. It’s very white, and very wealthy when you’re an American tourists. But it’s also very much not white, and has incredible poverty and inequality if you go slightly off the beaten path. Those who are looking to sell foreigners on their new playground will insist on certain ideas– this is a place that is still very much a part of the jungle. We have large ecological zones and restricted areas for building. Our architecture and many decisions, down to the winding roads and the decor, are about listening to this lands that we’ve been stewards of for so long. You can almost see, if you squint real hard, a kind of idea of respect for the indigenous people and culture of the Yucatan.

At the same time, you’ll see the concrete that creates so much carbon. You’ll notice the stacks of diesel generators along the eco-friendly beach hotels and restaurants. You’ll notice the incredibly car-oriented infrastructure that makes no sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I like spending a short time in Tulum. I appreciate how much it caters toward the upper and upper middle class foreigner and brings me comforts with just the right tinge of exoticism. In many ways, the architecture and landscape avoid the Shoppy Shop and Blands of the single global culture. There’s honestly still something distinct about Tulum, which is more than I can say for most places I’ve visited. In reality, Tulum, like much of the “Riviera Maya” is an economic project catering to foreigners to lift people out of poverty. It’s a playground in a jungle that has been occupied for a long time. It is a place that is very much alive, quite unique, filled with traditional foods and languages that is developing in ways that very much are not listening to the land.

I admit though, while I find this kind of animism appealing, my consequentialist insides bristle a little. What do I think all the land is telling us? Go away. Our world, the population and life styles we expect, are not consistent with any place. There’s an element of the push for density, urbanism, and my environmentalist politics which is all about a simple fact: human lives of health, flourishing, and dignity are inherently destructive, and the best harmony we can achieve requires collective action to minimize that destruction. I’m not quite ready to leave Lawrence County to Lawrence County. Not because I don’t believe in local knowledge (hell it’s the one Hayekian idea that as a former bureaucrat I cannot escape thinking about), but because I believe in global challenges. We’re often at risk of the tyranny of small decisions – a series of seemingly correct small decisions made locally add up to a horrible end result. Each person may be rationale for making the decision to drive a large crossover or SUV, but the total impact on emissions and pedestrian safety is massively negative.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom and personal peace to be found in considering your local surrounds and truly listening. And I think that offering genuine respect to the life and geography around us is critical. My partner, Elsa, finds it hilarious how even when visiting major cities like Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Mexico City, the pictures I take the most are of trees that I like.

But I’m worried. I worry a lot about the small decisions. I worry a lot about failing to understand how independence of individuals and decentralization fails to consider the cumulative effects. I worry about big problems created across generations and borders creeping up on us without having good responses.

I never feel more at peace than when I recognize the environment is not “out there”, but it’s also so disturbing when I assess the health of “in here”.

What do you do to strengthen your web of relationships to the persons of the world, human and otherwise? This project is a way I’m trying to strengthen my relationship to the human persons out there today, and maybe long into the future. While I do take daily walks, often through local parks, and sometimes go on hikes on weekends, I’m not sure I’ve been doing much to cultivate my relationships to the non-human persons around me. I think I can and should add more of that to my plans for 2023.

From 38,000 feet,

Jason

I reserve the right to celebrate holidays in my own way, and today is no exception.

Candlemas appears to be another of those holidays that is a mix of traditions. (In my mind, there’s no need for this to be a controversial statement. Blending and adapting traditions is just what humans do. To be clear, this is different from the colonial impulse, which is about force and monocultures.) In the Christian tradition, Candlemas is a remembrance of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple as well as the ritual purification of the Virgin Mary. It is the last feast of the Christmas cycle, so all those lingering Christmas decorations have to come down today! (We still have up Christmas lights on the bushes out front. I like to leave them there well past Christmas because it gives a little life to the neighborhood on these dark evenings.)

It is also a time for blessing candles to be used in the church for the remainder of the year. Hence the name. It’s a festival of light, which hints at its likely pre-Christian origins as an early spring holiday.

Other forms of this holiday are Imbolc and Saint Brigid’s Day. I don’t know enough to go into any details on the likely cross-pollination of these holidays but there are plenty of places to read about it online. My point here is just to talk about how I celebrate the day.

Around here, it’s still very much winter. However, in February I start thinking “spring thoughts.” The days are getting noticeably longer. The maple sap will begin running in the next few days. The pro cycling season starts later this month. (Hey, that’s important to me.) It’s also the time to start germinating seeds indoors in preparation for the gardening season.

So today we will light some candles, make Crepes Suzette—crepes being a nice symbol of the returning sun—and plant a few seeds. Spring is coming!

A couple of months ago, Jason Becker created the Letters project in which he and a volunteer correspond for a month via email. I volunteered and was given the month of February. We will be cross-posting these between our blogs. Here is the link to his post containing these letters.

Dear Jason,

I was immediately interested when I saw your post about a letters project for 2023 and grateful that you accepted me when I volunteered. I also have some thoughts on your motivation for this project, which I will share after I briefly tell you a bit about myself.

Rachel and I are two months shy of being married for 25 years and we have a daughter who just turned 17. I’m a CPA working at a large nonprofit. I’m an unapologetic tree hugger who has started (with Rachel) a regenerative gardening project in my tiny backyard. I’ve blogged off and on since 2005 and I’ve recently started woodworking.

I resonated with your idea that public, online letters are an excellent way to discuss complex topics with more nuance. You said your favorite online world was that of personal blogs in conversation with each other. As I mentioned, I’ve been blogging since 2005 and that was definitely how it worked for me in those early days. In the circle of blogs I was part of, we were always either quoting-and-commenting on whatever we were reading or quoting-and-commenting on what others in our circle were saying. (So many blockquotes.) It truly was a form of public correspondence.

Correspondence should a series of responses, not just two people sending each other a series of monologues. There is give and take, and a measure of risk. You opened up this project to volunteers with no assurance that you wouldn’t get a bunch of bores! I signed up for this project, not really knowing you, hoping I wouldn’t come off as some weirdo.

Algorithmically driven reactions to “content” determined to be either popular or profitable are also not true correspondence. Algorithms, being engineered, do not open themselves to response in that more organic, human way.

And with that I’ll close this first letter and await your unpredictable human response!

Hi Jeremy,

Welcome to the project!

Let’s talk about the real world motivation behind this project. It’s not really just about capturing the old internet, it’s about capturing the kind of social life I want to have. I work remotely from home. I’ve done so for more than a decade, though there’s been a formal office for me to report to as desired on and off throughout that period. Before that, I was “online” more or less since the mid 90s. I still spent a lot of time on the phone, mostly talking to girls, in the early 2000s, but I was more or less permanently logged into AOL Instant Messenger since the availability of always-on cable internet around 2000/2001. Throughout college, I spent time on various online forums, on instant messenger, or communicating via email. Then, just as I graduated, the iPhone suddenly made being online something that wasn’t persistent just at home, but everywhere I went. Messaging became something I did on the computer to something I was doing constantly.

I am 35 now, and I would say that 80% of my social life has been through a screen, but in some kind of reverse Pareto principle, only 20% of the value has come from these virtual interactions.

The thing is, I think that socializing through screens has become worse over time, not better. When it was both less central, slower, and lower fidelity, I feel like I got so much more out of my online interactions.

When I thought about why it came down to a few factors.

1. Most online socializing was additive, not subtractive. I spoke to people I would have never met or interacted with on topics I may not have otherwise engaged in. What was online started as new, but now has become a substitute for other ways I might interact with folks.
2. Most online socializing was deeper than my in-person interactions. As a male teenager, it felt safer being vulnerable or exposed when conversations were mediated through a screen, often behind pseudonymity with other pseudonymous strangers. My identity could be more fluid, but also I could take risks about myself without feeling the same consequences. And in some ways, it was also critical that I could interact as a peer with adults.
3. Most online conversations were centered around interests, with long ongoing conversations that fueled a culture and debates. Subcultures not only generate belonging, they generate a certain set of knowledge that felt valuable and powerful and helped to shape how I think about important things.

With Letters, I am mostly hoping for an opportunity for ongoing interactions, with a person and possibly around a topic, that develops a mini-culture over time. I want to capture the value of my real world friendships and interactions– vulnerability that comes not just from pseudonyms or the comfort of hiding behind a screen but from deeper understanding, a conversation that spans hours and not seconds, and a true dialog that has no lead, but instead partners pulling and pushing and forming where we go.

So in the interest of driving the conversation away from the meta and into some meat, let’s talk about your identity as a treehugger.

My mother long styled herself an environmentalist. This comes from a real belief in how a toxic environment can impact individual and public health, as well as a love of nature. I grew up in a family that valued planting trees and hated the idea of corporations polluting without consequences or remediation.

And yet, as I grew older, I began to recognize the many ways that my mother’s environmentalism felt inconsistent with what might actually help the environment. She is an avowed suburbanite, living somewhere that requires the use of a car for everyday living. She fought against additional, denser housing in favor of open space as a part of her environmentalism. She disdained apartment buildings in favor of single-family housing and perceives city living as polluted and disgusting, not at all updating her perceptions of New York City in the early 70s compared to today.

I’ve come to feel deeply disconnected from the traditional environmental movement that fights for local control on zoning and building, extensive environmental review processes, and preservation of open space in already developed areas. My environmentalism is strongly pro-urban, pro-public transit, pro-density, and pro-building (especially renewable energy projects with almost no limits). Whether we call that collection of policy preferences YIMBY or neoliberal or what, it’s generally not associated with the treehugger label.

Which comes to my questions and curiosities. What drew you to environmentalism? How have your beliefs changed (or not!) over time? And how do you feel about the current schism that seems to have developed between, say, the Sierra Club v. the Sunrise Movement v. YIMBYism? These days the importance of environmentalism feels incredibly salient (though I’m sure the horrific air and water pollution of the mid-20th century didn’t make things feel any less urgent then!), but the movement of people who are concerned with the environment and the natural world feels more fractured than ever.

How do we all become treehuggers?

In Hunger Mountain, David Hinton describes the Taoist cosmology as it developed in ancient China as a “spiritual ecology” in which the Cosmos is divided into two elements: Presence/Being and Absence/Nonbeing.

Presence is simply the empirical universe, which the ancients described as the ten thousand living and nonliving things in constant transformation; and Absence is the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges, although it should not be conceived in a spatial sense, as if there were a pool of emptiness somewhere in the universe. Within this framework, Tao (Way) can be understood as the generative process through which the ten thousand things appear out of Absence and disappear back into it, and Lao Tzu often employs female terminology to describe the elemental contours of Tao, where Absence looms large as the enduring source of it all: “mother of all beneath heaven,” “nurturing mother,” “dark female-enigma.”

There is creativity at the heart of the Cosmos.

In “The Habits of Highly Cynical People,” Rebecca Solnit discusses cynicism as a defense mechanism:

Cynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis.

I take Solnit to mean that this cynicism is naive not because it lacks experience or information (in fact, it is often a reaction to too much information (hence it is the house style of Twitter)) but because it is simplistic and untested. Naive cynicism is the apologia of those who have given up. In the words of Solnit again, it “flattens out the past and the future” and shuts down nuanced conversations, preferring instead to use words as weapons and turn every conversation into a war.

Such cynicism has forgotten the creativity at the heart of the Cosmos.

Such cynicism has fallen into a mechanistic, billiard-ball conception of the Cosmos in which, to quote the proverb, “life is just one damned thing after another.” (If you’re tempted to say that physics has ruled out novelty or free will, please read this.)

Despite the insistence of naive cynicism, we know there are novel, unexpected events. If the ancient Taoists were right, this is exactly what we should expect. And if we live in an animate Cosmos, then we are not the only actors at work in the world. (Humans may have attained the status of a geological force, but the climate crisis may be Earth mobilizing an immune response against the lifeways of some of her hubristic children.) The Tao may bring us any number of unforeseen possibilities. The Cosmos is far from dead.

One of the main goals of the functionaries of Empire is to bring everything and everyone into the imperial system. Totalization is, in fact, the motivating impulse behind Empire.

Empire has a remarkable ability to assimilate threats to the system. Protest movements turn into think tanks. Rebels become a marketing segment. Empire will validate your criticism as a healthy expression of free speech and award you with a position guaranteed to shut you up by paying you off.

Vote, we’re told. Write to your representatives. Attend peaceful protests. Stay current with the news. These are the bounds of acceptable behavior for those unsatisfied with the world. Bounds set by Empire itself. The one thing you must not do is disengage. That is irresponsible and lazy and tacitly hands power over to whomever is today’s enemy.

Why does Empire insist on our investment in their system? Because it legitimizes it. Because it makes us (insignificant) characters in the story Empire tells about the world. Nothing pleases the functionaries of Empire more than to see people raging—from all points on the political spectrum—about today’s news because those people are fighting the wars of Empire on terms set by Empire.

What do I have to do with Empire? What are their concerns to me?

Empire is just a story. Constitutions, economic systems, legal systems—these are not the laws of nature but institutions created by the powerful to preserve and expand their own power. We believe this story because it is the only one we’ve ever heard, or allowed ourselves to hear.

What if we refused the imperial story and told our own? What if we were impractical utopians who practiced alternative modes of living? I don’t know if it would change a damn thing and I have no idea what the future will be like. I do know, however, that the imperial story is becoming less believable every day. Now is the time for new stories.

David Hinton’s new book is an exploration and treatment of the wound deep in our culture—the illusion of separateness from the natural world. Our Greek and Christian cultural inheritance tells us that we are spirit-centers standing outside and above our fellow-travelers on the planet and our truly important kinship is with the divine, immaterial world. The result has been climate change, deforestation, pollution, mass extinction, and the malaise within humans themselves.

But we have not always held the illusion of separateness and we are beginning to recover from it again. He discusses the thought of Lao Tzu and the influence it had on an ancient China that is in many ways similar to the modern West. He traces the beginnings of a recovery from the illusion of separateness here in the West beginning with the Romantic poets, through Robinson Jeffers, and into ecological thought.

He does not, however, present this modern recovery as assured. One of the most mind-shifting points he makes is that the illusion of separateness and its later manifestation in colonialism and capitalism are in fact a successful short-term evolutionary adaptation. Obviously, it will be a disaster in the long-term—and we’re in the beginning stages of that disaster now. It is not assured, however, that the powers-that-be will abandon that paradigm.

What we face, in fact, is a philosophical and spiritual problem. The wound is deep and technological fixes will never be sufficient. We need a philosophical and spiritual revolution that discards the illusion of separateness and re-integrates humanity into the natural world. With this book, Hinton convincingly lays out our task and leads us to ancestors who can guide us in it.

I have an longstanding interest in what could be called alternative modes of living. Examples:

• Hermits
• Tiny houses
• Permaculture food forests

In fact, I participated in an alternative mode of living by growing up in a radically fundamentalist Christian church that practiced separation from the world through strict rules for living. (When Rachel and I married we had neither wedding rings nor a television!) Having lived through experiences of what can only be called religious abuse, I believe I possess some clarity about the dangers of these exercises.

One trait I retained from that background is a dissatisfaction with the status quo. I left behind the paranoia and heavy-handed moralism but I have never shaken the feeling that to live conventionally is to fail to take up the necessary struggle of life. I’m aware, of course, that some people will now dismiss everything I have to say on this subject as internalized religious trauma. And that could be true—though I don’t think it’s that simple. You don’t have to grow up as a paranoid separatist to be dissatisfied with the world these days.

I am interested in these alternative modes of living because they present possibilities. They serve the same value as utopias: they undermine the supposed inevitability of the status quo.

They are also, at the same time, impossible. That is, they do not work as models of living for everyone or for society in general. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to induce the dynamic tension required for a new way of living to emerge. That new way of living will be neither this nor that, but something else, and unforeseen.

Over the last few days there has been an ongoing conversation about the dangers of smartphones and whether we should all move to flip phones. Yesterday, I advocated for a third way that avoids the binary choice of status quo smartphone usage or smartphone abstinence.

One of the things that I believe gets missed in these discussions is precisely what I’ve said above: those who have traded their smartphones for flip phones are engaging in an alternative mode of living. They are undermining the status quo, which is quite obviously deeply unhealthy. You are not required to imitate them but you ought to pay attention to them.

When we have collectively recovered from our current insanity, we will neither be continually staring at our damned screens nor giving up useful technology altogether. Something new will be happening, incorporating both the mistakes of the past and the wisdom of those impractical, impossible utopians.

Dave Danielson @ddanielson has a good post on the choices presented by a lot of writing about smartphone use:

The choice of device is not an all or nothing proposition, but is often presented that way. We can choose our own level of engagement with a device, and govern our behavior to use a device as we choose.

This is also useful to think about in the context of the NYT article on Luddite teens shared by Patrick Rhone. In it, the teenagers consider their choice to live without a smartphone—or at least to live with reduced use of a smartphone—in terms of class and wealth.

I could not be more sympathetic to people wanting to eliminate smartphones from their lives. I love videos and posts like these from Terry Grier and Anna Havron on their experience moving to flip phones. I have often considered doing it myself.

But there are some practical barriers for me. There are certain smartphone apps that make it easier to do my job. I also have a teenager that is a few months from driving on her own and, even though I started driving well before the advent of smartphones and my parents lived through it, I do appreciate the ability to know if she has arrived at her destination. I could go on listing a few smartphone features that feel very important but you get the gist.

This is where binary thinking fails us. (To be clear, I’m not saying anyone who has made the switch to a flip phone is thinking in a binary way. They have made a choice but that does not imply they saw it as a binary choice.) Binary thinking is always dangerous but it feels like a particularly besetting sin of our age, especially here in America. For this reason alone, any choice presented as binary should sound your alarms.

Binary thinking is fundamentalist thinking—achieving the illusion of simplicity by reducing the irreducible complexity of life. If you can find a way to live without a smartphone, no one will admire you more than me. But if you, like me, are in a position where eliminating a smartphone is difficult, that does not mean you should abandon yourself to tapping like some addled rhesus monkey.

Finding a third way is as difficult and complex as the way of abstention. (The only easy way is to give in to the addiction.) Whatever way you find to recover from smartphone addiction, you are part of the necessary healing.

Wendell Berry, “Word and Flesh” in What Are People For?:

The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence—that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.

What can accomplish this reduction? I will say again, without overweening hope but with certainty nonetheless, that only love can do it.

“Saving the planet” is the same imperialist way of thinking that has put the planet in danger. We have repeatedly found that the people enmeshed in the relationships of a particular place were already caring for and preserving that place. They didn’t need the help or methods of their would-be civilizers. That sort of local knowledge and care—indeed, love—is what is needed now to save and preserve our planet full of particular places.

It’s also worth highlighting that local care is on “the scale of our competence.” The aspiration to save the planet very often ends in paralysis or apathy. One person without great wealth or influence cannot act on that scale. (And those with great wealth or influence often make the problem worse.) Acting on the scale of your competence is liberating.

But this will come at a cost, Berry says. The industrialized nations live by robbing nature and “our standard of living demands that the robbery shall continue.” This must end.

We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make.

The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict’s excuse, and we know that it will not do.

… And the Mother of All gave to another of her children the gift of storytelling.

“With this gift, you will be able to remember me and your siblings to your own children. You and your children will dream whole new worlds. With the skills that come with your gift, some of your children’s dreams will become real and they will make things never before seen in this world.

“But your gift comes with unique dangers. If you ever fall out of right relationship with me and your siblings…”

The child was startled and interrrupted, “But, Mother, why would I ever do such a thing?”

“Hush,” replied the Mother of All. “Listen to me. If you ever fall out of right relationship with me and your siblings, your stories will become false and powerfully destructive. They will be stories only of you and your children, forgetting your Mother and siblings.

“I see your worry, child. I have given you a great responsibility. If, in the course of the long life of this place, such a time ever arises …

Bless the English teachers hearts, but the most boring question you can ask about a poem is “what does it mean?” It’s why people hate poetry.

Such a question assumes a poem is a riddle. That, for some reason, this writer decided to eschew plain speech in favor of “sounding smart.” That, if the writer wanted to, they could have simply used other, clearer words to say exactly the same thing.

Of course, some poetry is like this and it sucks.

There’s something weirdly Protestant about this idea of poetry. Poetry is a text that must have a hidden meaning that requires careful study. Salvation hinges upon understanding the text and peering into the mind of the author. There is only one right answer.

When you answer the English teacher’s question, doesn’t the poem suddenly feel dead? “Is that all there is to it?” Of course not. You gave an unsatisfying answer because you were asked a bad question.

Poetry is about evoking a reaction, expressing a feeling, capturing a moment. The question is not “what does it mean?”; it’s “how does it feel?” How it feels emotionally, but also how the words feel in your mouth. And maybe a particular poem doesn’t move you. That’s okay! Move on. Find the one that does. When you do, you’ll feel it unlock something within you.

Note: The thoughts here are my own but I wanted to get them down into words after reading some similar thoughts in this post by John Halstead.

When reading books or watching documentaries about sustainable, regenerative practices, it is a matter of when, not if, a person will quote Wendell Berry. The impact he has had on the world is amazing. He has had obvious impact on the environmental movement and “back to the land” organic small farms. He was also highly influential on Michael Pollan and Alice Waters—who in turn have become enormously influential.

Yet the Wendell Berry we admire might not have been. As a young man, he had a luminous path opening before him: studying at Stanford under the direction of Wallace Stegner with other soon-to-be-famous writers like Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey; awarded a Guggenheim fellowship that took him to Europe; teaching at NYU. But he decided to go home:

The last thing I learned in New York was that I was ruining myself by leaving. I was under thirty, still. People I respected were saying, “Here you are, in the literary capital of the universe, and you’ve got a good job and you’re meeting other writers.” And so I came back here with some fear and trembling, but also a sense of doing the right thing. People give us credit for knowing what we were doing. We didn’t. We came back here because we wanted to. The justification has come in the form of a kind of happiness, but we didn’t anticipate that.

I do remember getting on the Jersey Turnpike when we were coming home. We had everything we owned in a Volkswagen Beetle. I don’t want you to make me sound like some kind of mystic, but, you know, I felt a great, deep relief—as if I was following, at last, my true path.

He had published Nathan Coulter by this time, so I don’t intend to imply that he would have been a wholly different sort of writer than he became. But he would not have been the farmer poet who writes about the care of the earth with Kentucky soil under his fingernails. That difference, I believe and—more importantly—he believes, made him what he is.

The lesson here is not that a decision to leave behind an extractive lifestyle in order to know and care for a particular place will make you famous and influential. I promise you it almost certainly will not. It will, however, bear fruit—literally and metaphorically. This is because the practice of care is a practice of reciprocity.

As I said earlier today, I finished reading In Limestone Country by Scott Russell Sanders. While I was recording that fact in my reading log (which stretches back to 2005!), I realized that it was the first book I’ve finished since April. To be fair, I’ve been busy and a lot of my reading over the past several months has been articles, etc., aimed at helping Rachel and me with our gardening project. But, still, I haven’t gone that long without finishing a book in ten years.

The good news, however, is that I have a new reading project ahead of me. I’ve joined the Ancient Order of Druids in America out of a desire to link up with a community that is on a similar path to my own, i.e., nature spirituality. I may or may not say more about this in the near future. I’m in no danger of a cage stage—I’m not a young man anymore—but I want this decision to mature and settle quietly.

In any case, one of the several requirements to advance beyond candidacy in the order is to read nine books on your local ecosystem. In Limestone Country was the first of those. The remaining eight I’ve committed to are:

• Geology of Indiana by Robert Hall
• A guide to caves and karst of Indiana by Samuel Frushour
• The natural heritage of Indiana by Marion T. Jackson
• Habitats and ecological communities of Indiana, ed. Whitaker
• 101 trees of Indiana by Marion T. Jackson
• Mammals of Indiana by John O. Whitaker
• The birds of Indiana by Russell Mumford
• Indiana’s weather and climate by John E. Oliver

I also received two other books in the mail today: Wild Mind, Wild Earth by David Hinton and Sacred Actions by Dana O’Driscoll.

David Hinton is best known as a translator of ancient Chinese poetry, but he’s also written a few superb books that try to apply ancient Chinese ideas (especially Taoist and Ch’an Buddhist ideas) to modern life. This latest book is in that vein, and also draws in the work of Robinson Jeffers. I’ve never pre-ordered a book so quickly in my life.

Dana O’Driscoll is the leader of the AODA, so that obviously has some bearing on my interest in the book. Specifically, though, I’m interested in how she links up acts of sustainable living with the seasons of the year.

No more seven-month stretches of unfinished books. Time to get busy.

Nothing makes the commonplace come alive quite like the work of a skilled writer. I’ve lived in limestone country all my life. I’ve heard the stories of how our stone built some of the great public buildings in America and brought prosperity to our area in the early twentieth century. Today, limestone monuments can be seen on buildings and in graveyards throughout Lawrence and Monroe counties. Porches, like mine, made of limestone. Enormous blocks sitting at the edges of quarries. It’s a common sight—but Sanders has helped me see it with new eyes.

The book itself is almost forty years old. It’s a look into the past from a vantage point that itself is now passed. The book’s portrait of the limestone country of its own time is one I remember from my childhood. My hometown and the towns around me are portrayed as towns in decline—and I remember those days as being days of greater prosperity and activity than today. It’s like reading Hesiod describing the ages of humanity, in which he places his own time as the latest and most degraded. Yet we see Hesiod’s Greece as a golden age. It’s always the apocalypse somewhere.

In a recent post, Robert Rackley riffs on an article by Jon Askonas at the New Atlantis arguing that Jon Stewart paved the way—however unintentionally—for Tucker Carlson. I haven’t yet read the piece (I will over the weekend) but I have to say that I agree with the premise.

The Iraq War, the War on Terror, the Bush presidency generally were formative times for me. Voting for Bush in 2000 was the last time I voted for a Republican for president. Those years moved me from the conservatism I grew up with to being an anti-war, left-leaning liberal. I voted enthusiastically for Obama, (naively) believing he represented something genuinely new.

Though this whole process, Rachel and I were watching Jon Stewart. He felt like a kindred spirit. In fact, it was watching one of his interviews with John McCain during the 2008 election that finally flipped me from third-party protest voting to Obama.

But then Rachel and I went to a live show he did at IU in 2011. We loved the show. During the Q&A, however, someone asked him to do some Bush jokes and the crowd roared their approval. Mind you, this was well into the Obama administration. A nagging worry crystallized into a coherent thought in that moment: Jon Stewart’s purpose was to flatter liberals by talking about how dumb conservatives were.

I realize, of course, that is not entirely fair. I do believe Jon Stewart is a sincere person, with real convictions. But somewhere along the line, he was consumed by the entertainment machine.

He is not even close to the only one. Politics are, at this point, a team sport: cheer your side, hate their side, no matter what. And there are only the two sides. Did Jon Stewart contribute to this atmosphere? Yeah, probably. So did Newt Gingrich back in the nineties. Plenty of people can be blamed, including me with my Facebook rants.

How do we fix this mess? I have no idea. I only know that I’m out of the game. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

In July 2020 I wrote the following:

Two reasons people change:

1. “Mugged by reality.” Someone’s experience creates an irreconcilable rupture with their previous beliefs. At this point they either double down on the previous beliefs and ignore experience or they change.
2. Participate in the universe’s ongoing process of change. This requires a disciplined openness to reality. This does not come naturally; rather, it is spiritual work. It may be, in part, what the Taoists meant by wu-wei.

I’d like to add one more, via a story about Samwise Gamgee. In Book One, while Frodo, Sam, and Pippin are headed east toward Rivendell but before they leave the Shire, they encounter a group of High-Elves. Sam had been hoping to meet Elves. After spending the night with them and sharing in their trippy, midnight feast, Frodo asks Sam what he thinks about them now that he’s met them:

“They seem a bit above my likes and dislikes, so to speak,” answered Sam slowly. “It don’t seem to matter what I think about them. They are quite different from what I expected—so old and young, and so gay and sad, as it were.”

Frodo looked at Sam rather startled, half expecting to see some outward sign of the odd change that seemed to have come over him. It did not sound like the voice of the old Sam Gamgee, that he thought he knew. But it looked like the old Sam Gamgee sitting there, except that his face was unusually thoughtful.

“Do you feel any need to leave the Shire now—now that your wish to see them has come true already?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. I don’t know how to say it, but after last night I feel different. I seem to see ahead, in a kind of way. I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can’t turn back. It isn’t to see Elves now, nor dragons, nor mountains, that I want—I don’t rightly know what I want: but I have something to do before the end, and it lies ahead, not in the Shire. I must see it through, sir, if you understand me.”

Three reasons people change, an incomplete list:

1. “Mugged by reality.” Someone’s experience creates an irreconcilable rupture with their previous beliefs. At this point they either double down on the previous beliefs and ignore experience or they change.
2. Participate in the universe’s ongoing process of change. This requires a disciplined openness to reality. This does not come naturally; rather, it is spiritual work. It may be, in part, what the Taoists mean by wu-wei.
3. Encounter with the numinous. Some encounters can be so disorienting or paradigm-shifting that they (sometimes instantaneously) re-order or even expand our affections. These experiences are by definition non-rational and can include things like an experience of natural beauty, religious conversions, and near-death experiences.

Jack Leahy makes a a defense of hypocritical asceticism. Basically, we have to start somewhere. Even small efforts have an effect.

In the process of living out a hypocritical asceticism a funny thing happens–we are changed. … In practicing hypocritical asceticism I am carving out a little zone of freedom within myself.

This is similar to what I said in this post, that a better goal than purity is the avoidance of servitude.

It is important at this point, however, to add in some Sallie McFague. Asceticism should not be an individualistic practice:

In neither case, Weil’s nor Woolman’s, is this an ascetic move for individual purity or salvation; rather, it is a renunciation or self-emptying in order to live a more abundant personal life as well as a more just public one. In both cases, the first step appears to be breaking out of the conventional world, which supports the satisfaction of individual egos, by some “wild” action. … The point is not that deprivation is good, but it appears to be necessary to burst the bubble of egotism.

Asceticism—the wild space opened up by nonconformist behavior—should be action for others (including nonhuman others), not for the sake of the self. It is a way to escape the self and embrace the truly interdependent nature of reality.

Because of that, even ambivalent and incomplete efforts can be transforming because they are instrumental in breaking the spell of the self.

The way we organize our year is a reflection of our values—that is a commonly observed truism. My family and I share many of the usual holidays with the wider American culture. We also decline to observe a few of them for various reasons. In some cases, we weight the days differently than usual, or attach differing significance.

The seasonal change we’re experiencing here in Indiana has me thinking about all of this. Because I am an enormous nerd, I thought it would be fun to make my own personal calendar, complete with explanatory margin notes. (If you’re on a mobile browser, these should appear as expandable + signs). (Also, thanks to Pete Moore for the Tufte theme that allows for this.) I used the ranking of days associated with liturgical calendars with one exception; namely, I have used “commemorations” instead of “memorials” since not everyone whose birthday is marked is dead. I have also omitted my family’s birthdays and anniversaries since this is a semi-public site.

I’d love to see your own version of a personal calendar.

Just as earlier writers would cite scripture to prove their arguments, modern writers cite science. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Science often makes claims that intersect in intriguing ways with religion.

Nevertheless, I am suspicious of supporting religious claims with scientific findings—and not for the usual reasons given by those influenced by the New Atheists, i.e., science is “true” and religion is “false” or, at best, pre-scientific attempts to explain the world. This false dichotomy has arisen out of the past century’s “science versus religion” fights, which have damaged both science and religion. The underlying falsehood believed by both New Atheists and fundamentalist believers is that science and religion attempt to uncover the same sort of truth.

Science is a venture into the unknown, the end of which is to return with provable facts. More importantly, though, it builds the expectation of being proven wrong into its method. “That is, every scientist tries to be (a) slightly less wrong than the scientists who came before them, by proving that something we thought was true actually isn’t, and (b) wrong in a way that can be tested and proven, which results in the next scientist being slightly less wrong” (h/t Robert Van Vliet). Unfortunately, many advocates for science these days have forgotten that science is a method, not a revealed religion. A human endeavor that requires the obsolescence of the past can only ever intersect obliquely with religion.

Religion is a venture into the unknowable, the end of which is the venture itself. Religion, at its best, does not attempt to give us facts; it is deep calling unto deep. It is the place where humans face the questions that have no answers.

Charles Eisenstein makes an important point here:

My main message to the environmental movement is to shift the narrative away from our own destruction. From “Change or we won’t survive,” to “Change or we will continue to lose what is beautiful and sacred.” It is a shift into love.

This is important for three reasons: two practical and one spiritual

1. What if (if!) the threat from climate change has been overstated, especially by those who have fallen prey to the imperatives of social media to drive engagement through hype and fear? If one faction has said we must stop climate change or die and climate change doesn’t kill us then the other faction will say, “See? We told you those people were crazy! Drill, baby, drill!”
2. Another possibility: a corporation or a billionaire finds some “technological” fix to climate change. Something that blunts the effects without requiring much, if any, change to our behavior. At that point, those who refuse to acknowledge the harm done by the systems we have set up would be able to say that the problem was fixed, no further change is necessary.
3. As Charles Eisenstein says elsewhere in the linked article, survival isn’t our main goal. Death comes for all: persons, nations, civilizations, and planets. The question is how best to live. Given that our current mode of life is wildly destructive, change must happen. And any call for change in response to our various ecological disasters must be a demand for — to use Christian language — repentance and amendment of life. Anything short of that kicks the can down the road. The total solution requires that we “uncenter our minds from ourselves.”

And, with that, a ten plus year relationship with Audible has come to an end. Since I started working remotely in 2020, I just don’t listen to audiobooks anymore. Before the pandemic, 45% of all the books I read were audiobooks – that’s easy to do when your commute is 1.5hrs per day.

It feels like the end of an era. Audiobooks and me go much further back than my Audible subscription. I used to spend my lunches browsing the hundreds (thousands?) of books on cassette tape offered by the local library.

Greatest audiobook I’ve ever listened to? How Green Was My Valley narrated by Patrick Tull. I don’t think it’s even available anymore.

Oliver Burkeman:

A life fully lived just is painfully bittersweet, the joy inextricably intertwined with loss. The major chapters of life, such as your children’s childhoods, just will feel like they’re over too fast, pretty much whatever you do.

I am forty-five years old and I’m still trying to accept this, even after years spent reading in wisdom traditions that teach this very thing. It is as if there is a small part of me that knows it is true while everything else within me fights it.

Burkeman writes that it is only when you realize “it’s worse than you think” – that is, you’re not just struggling to get what you want done, you will never get everything you want done – that you can shift your focus from the impossible tasks to the merely difficult ones.

In my ideal life, I would be husband, father, hiker, gardener, philosopher, and writer. In my actual life, I am a husband, father, and accountant who sometimes finds time for those other things. I would dearly love to develop a coherent vision of dark green religion, integrating Robinson Jeffers, Lao Tzu, Wendell Berry, and pantheism – then write about it beautifully and live it every day. What I actually do is throw some semi-coherent thoughts on this blog and try (alongside Rachel) to build a decent backyard garden that attracts bees and butterflies. It’s the trade-off that everyone who has to work for a living is familiar with, and I freely acknowledge that my situation is better than most.

Life is full of decisions that close the door on an unknown number of opportunities. There are many things I could have been that I will never be. And yet, I’m very happy with my life. This is due in some ways to sustained work and in other ways to pure luck. (That’s my answer to the question of how to have a good marriage: hard work and dumb luck.) This combination of will and accident is what makes us humans rather than gods. It is difficult to accept the reality of limits: so many possibilities live within your mind yet virtually everything is out of your control. This is the fundamental contradiction and much of the evil in the world exists because of its denial.

In the stirring closing lines of Carmel Point, Robinson Jeffers writes:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little

But how is this to be done? One way is surely as a philosophical practice that builds ways of thinking with the more-than-human world instead of thinking about it. That is essential.

Yet for those of us who tend to live too much in our own heads, what practical actions can be taken?

In discussing Bill Mollison’s statement “everything gardens,” Gordon White explains that permaculture aims to mimic forests in the way it builds and stacks and interconnects systems: “running chickens and geese through and orchard to control insects in fallen fruit and fertilise the soil, having bird systems follow ruminant systems on pasture to spread the manure and break the maggot/fly cycle.”

But if this is successfully brought about then what is actually happening is that the human is being decentred. The whole project becomes the sort of trans-species collaboration Donna Haraway and Bayo Akomolafe are talking about–and this holds true on any scale from a broad acre cattle ranch to an aquaculture setup on an apartment balcony.

Here is a practical way to “uncenter our minds from ourselves”: trans-species collaboration. To consciously work alongside the more-than-human world in whatever way presents itself to you. Recognizing and respecting the agency of the beings around you–from the charismatic megafauna to your plants to the soil itself–is a step toward right relations.

In the course of this article on future agricultural possibilities that actually build the soil, George Monbiot passes on some interesting facts about plant interaction with soil. Plants release between 11% and 40% of the sugars they make into the soil, into the area around the plant called the rhizosphere. These released sugars activate bacteria in the rhizosphere needed for the plant’s health and growth. The rhizosphere acts as an “external gut” for the plant.

Two things:

• The soil is part of a web of relations, and to build the soil, to act in its interests, is to involve yourself in that web of relations.

• Where does the being of the plant end and the being of the soil begin? The usual way of thinking would say the plant ends at its outermost layer of cells. But is that true? The plant could not survive without that area of soil known as the rhizosphere–but we separate the plant and the soil for the purposes of our systems of classification. Is our language part of the problem? Do we impose separation where there is none, simply because of the biases of our mental models?

When the communities around you are policing their borders and in a state of war with other communities, it is madness to preach the need for community.

When tech companies are mining our behavior in order to organize us into affinity groups more easily targeted by ads, you cannot trust the algorithm’s recommendations.

When the world can only offer you conformity and exploitation, you must refuse them both. You must take the gnostic road.

One of the mantras of those that believe what public health officials have been telling us about COVID-19 is “trust the science” (or sometimes “believe the science”). While I am one of those that trusts the public health officials, I have some reservations about “trust the science.” Not because I am an anti-vaxxer or even doubt the scientific consensus. My problem with the phrase is that is betrays a certain dangerous sloppiness.

The science vs. religion binary runs through so much of the way we talk about these issues. Like so many other people, I think that binary is mistaken. It is, however, pervasive. It has even shaped the way science defenders talk about science - and that gets to the heart of the issue here.

When people say “trust the science,” they are making an appeal to authority that mirrors the science-doubter’s “believe the Bible” or “trust in God.” It is an appeal to eternal verities as a ground for action in the world. The problem is that science is ever-changing; that’s the whole point. If science is a monolithic authority then how is it not just another pope?

Science is meant to deliver real knowledge to us without deference to what was called knowledge even five minutes beforehand. It is a process of knowledge acquisition - a scientific method.

Someone might respond that this is silly arguing over words. I would reply that the past two years are a perfect illustration of how these words matter. You can see a pattern in some of the most common arguments of the COVID skeptics: Fauci changed his mind on masks; lab outbreak theory used to be called disinformation; public health rules change constantly. These arguments only make sense if one believes that science is a monolithic authority, like (much of) religion.

It would be easy to say it’s no surprise that science doubters misunderstand science. But part of the reason they have that misunderstanding is because of science defenders. Whenever science defenders (either through misunderstanding or sloppiness) mirror the appeal to authority style argument, they are setting themselves up for failure because the doubters will always point to the “inconsistency” of science to undermine the authority of the secular pope.

If we want a catchphrase, might I suggest “trust the method?” It has the virtue to putting the focus back on the scientic method as a process of acquiring knowledge instead of the altogether more dubious idea of Science as a singular repository of truth.

Blyssid be the tyme
that appil take was!
Therefore we mown syngyn
Deo gratias!

– Final stanza of “Adam Lay Ybounden”

Years ago, back when we all still went to public libraries, I checked out a collection of Christmas carols performed by the Choir of King’s College. One of the most curious carols was the one linked above - a six-hundred year old English song by an unknown author, existing only in this manuscript.

The idea expressed by the writer was, to me, even stranger than the language: blessed be the Fall. Come to find out, it was a sentiment known as felix culpa, expressed fairly regularly within Christianity all the way back to the ancient liturgical text Exsultet:

O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem
O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer.

It has been worth all the suffering brought about by sin, these writers say, to experience the love of God manifested in the life of Jesus.

Back in February, I wrote about the Fall as the mythological rendering of human self-consciousness. When Adam and Even ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they acquired a discriminatory knowledge that separates into subject and object. This self-consciousness was the decisive break from the more-than-human world. Subject-object separation has moved humans from participants in the natural world, to observers, to manipulators, to, finally, a geological force capable of altering natural processes on a global scale, causing mass extinctions of nonhuman animals, and potentially destroying itself in any of several ways.

It is nevertheless true that, just as with the felix culpa in Christian theology, the destructive force of self-consciousness has brought a great deal of beauty into the world. Would art be possible if we were not able to somehow float free of natural processes, watching ourselves and others?

As Oliver Burkeman (quoting Heidegger) points out in Four Thousand Weeks, we do not have time - we are time. Our subjective experience is not that of grasping and manipulating time but of undergoing it. We do not know how nonhuman animals experience time (in fact, it may not be possible for us to know), but we experience it as beings constituted of story and memory. We connect our moment-by-moment experience through stories. These stories constitute our self-understanding.

This subjective experience of being time brings us some of our most exquisite moments of joy and pain. The joy of companionship with your beloved and your pain at their loss exist because you share a story together. In order to tell this story, you must be able to mentally separate you and your beloved as subject and object. Without this discriminatory knowledge, what meaning could love have?

And so, felix culpa. Our joy and pain, our creativity and our apocalypse arise from the same source. This is, in one sense, simply the way of nature. In our case, however, the stakes are very high.

Is there a state of life that is identifiable as “meaningful?” What does that look like? Is the questioner imagining a person who spends their time doing charitable work, or meditating, or finally making their way through their to-read list?

But that may not count as “meaningful” for everyone. Those are generally seen as good things, but there are also a lot of other good things, some of which may be in competition with other good things.

What if we stop talking about a “meaningful life” as a state to be achieved and instead simply live a “meaning-making life?” That is, the struggle to understand, to live according to that understanding, is the meaningful life. The struggle is the goal.

One of the first questions to ask when you’ve uncovered an ideology is, “who does this benefit?” Let’s take the example from the linked post, that of activism as the only correct way to be an engaged citizen.

Who would have an interest in perpetuating the activist model of constant engagement with the news, contacting legislators, attending protests, and voting? The following comes to mind:

• News organizations and social media companies have a direct, obvious, and well-documented stake in keeping your attention on their firehose of content.
• The powers-that-be in the form of the major political parties, politicians, and the attendant legions of lobbying groups plus all the corporations that rely on their favor have an interest in maintaining citizens' belief in the central necessity of the current political arrangement. This involves encouraging the idea that contacting legislators and voting is an essential act of making your voice heard and participating in the political process.
• Similar groups have an interest in political protests. This may seem counter-intuitive on its face. When protests are held in socially approved ways, it is seen as validation for the legitimacy of the political process in which it is a part. You could see this in the ongoing arguments over the acceptability of various modes of Black Lives Matter protest. Any actions that disrupted the social order too greatly were seen as giving aid and comfort to the enemy or somehow discrediting the movement. (Not that I support the more extreme actions; I use them here as an illustration of my point.)

Again, I will point out that some of these things are not entirely bad. My concern here is to show the underlying interests of a particular ideology. Those interests may align with yours. They may not. It is my opinion, though, that questioning our various ideologies lies closer to the heart of what being an engaged citizen actually is.

Whenever you bump into an idea that people seem to accept without knowing why and, in fact, bristle when it is questioned, you have uncovered ideology. Ideology is not always bad, but it is always worth investigating.

Among American liberals today, there is a certain idea of what it means to be politically engaged: constant engagement with the news (reading news, watching news, doom-scrolling social media¹), contacting legislators, attending protests, and voting (this latter takes on the quality of a sacrament and to question its efficacy is heresy). This is to say that for American liberals, to be politically engaged is to be an activist. It is worth noticing that this is an ideology. And, again, this is not all bad, though certain parts of it are, in my opinion.

Is it true that this is the only way to be a responsible, engaged citizen? Of course not. You can begin to see the underlying assumptions of this ideology when you start questioning it. That is always worth doing, even if you come out on the other side still holding similar beliefs.

¹ Twitter is “a fandom app for current events”

Introductory note: The following is an edited transcript of a video I posted in the early days of the pandemic. (You know, those days when we had no idea what would happen next so we started making YouTube videos in order to distract ourselves. Also, having watched it now two years later, it’s clear I have no future as a YouTuber.) The video discusses the book Dark Green Religion by Bron Taylor. (More information about the book on Taylor’s site). I’m posting it here because I’ve been thinking again about the idea of dark green religion as I read Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters by Mary-Jane Rubenstein. I will almost certainly be posting in the future about her discussion of pantheism. One final note: I’m not so sure about the third implication of “dark” below. If I recall correctly, I added that myself, i.e., it’s not discussed by Taylor. While I still believe ideas in that point, I may have been stretching the meaning of “dark” there.

First, let’s define dark green religion. Dark green religion holds that “nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care”. Let’s break apart that definition:

1. Nature is sacred. Theistic religions that believe in a transcendent God, separate from the cosmos and its source, believe that holiness resides in God. Christianity goes on to say that the cosmos is fallen and needs reconciliation with God. Dark green religion, on the other hand, states quite the opposite: the cosmos is holy, the source of our lives.
2. Nature has intrinsic value. The cosmos does not derive its value from anything else. It is not valuable because it has a relationship to anything else, or is useful to anything else. It is valuable in itself.
3. Nature is therefore due reverent care. Because the cosmos is holy and is valuable in itself, we are obligated to care for it with reverence. We care for it, not because it is an obligation laid on us by something separate from the cosmos, but because it is the source of all life.

Dark green religion flows from a “deep sense of belonging to and connectedness in nature”. It believes that all species are intrinsically valuable regardless of their usefulness to humans. Dark green religion holds at its heart certain values:

1. There is a kinship between all of life. The entirety of the cosmos has rolled out from the Big Bang. The heavy elements that make life possible were born in the heart of stars. Every creature alive on Earth evolved from ancient common ancestors. Today we exist in a web of being, much as we humans may forget it.
2. Dark green religion brings with it feelings of humility before the cosmos and a corresponding critique of the belief in human superiority. The last 150 years of our ever-increasing understanding of human evolution has shown us that humans are not the pinnacle of life on Earth. We are not the destination; we are just a branch of life.
3. Dark green religion holds to an ethics of interconnection and interdependence. It believes about the cosmos what Dr. King said about humanity: “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Taylor differentiates dark green religion from green religion, the latter of which he uses as a name for environmentally-conscious traditional religions. So, “green religion” refers to your local parish celebrating Earth Day - which is coming up on April 22nd, by the way. Green religion is a denomination divesting of fossil fuel stock holdings.

All of this is good! But the question remains: can traditional religions - religions that differentiate between God and the cosmos, that believe the cosmos is fallen - carry us into a green future? It may be the case that Christianity, for example - however sincerely green - may be irretrievably focused on humans. It is built on the relationship between God and humanity and its central message is concerned with restoring that relationship. An ecological ethic can sometimes feel like an addition to your house that doesn’t quite flow with the architect’s design.

On the other hand, an ecological ethic and reverence for the cosmos is part of the fundamental design of dark green religion. That is its whole purpose. This is not to say that green religion, environmentally-conscious traditional religion is any way bad. It is only to question whether it is the best vehicle into the future we need.

What makes dark green religion “dark”? This, for me, is one of the most fascinating aspects of it. The word “dark” has so many resonances. Let’s lay out a few based on Taylor’s book as well as my own thoughts:

1. Dark in the sense of depth. Think of the green leaves on a street-side tree versus the dark, shadowy greens in a forest. Dark green religion is deeply committed to the sacredness of the cosmos. It seeks meaning in the world as it lays in front of us instead of transcendence in some heavenly realm.
2. Dark in the sense of the shadow side of dark green religion itself. Any group of deeply committed people has a shadow side they must face, namely, the dangers of violence, fanaticism, and moral superiority. While I believe the dangers of so-called eco-terrorism are greatly exaggerated, fanaticism always presents real dangers.
3. As we just said, there is a shadow side within dark green religion itself. The last point I’ll make here is how dark green religion presents a danger to those committed to the old, destructive ways of living. Just as dark green religion is built upon different premises than many traditional religions - even those attempting to green themselves - dark green religion is built upon values that are in direct opposition to the short-term thinking that dominates politics and growth-driven, profit-motivated economics. Make no mistake about it: if dark green religion got what it wanted, the world would be a different place and the powers that be would be de-throned. Yes, it would be different, but it would also be a world in which all of life would flourish and live peacefully together.

One final point to discuss is Taylor’s division of dark green religion into four categories - or maybe it would be better to call them tendencies because there are no hard boundaries between them.

The first division is between Animism and Gaian Earth Religion. The second division, within the first one, is between a naturalistic or a supernaturalistic flavor.

The difference Animism and Gaian Earth Religion is where you locate the sacred. In Animism, the world is full of intelligences and life-forces. They’re everywhere and everywhere is sacred because of this wild multiplicity. Within animism, there can be either a naturalistic or a supernaturalistic flavor. The supernaturalistic variety sees a world full of spiritual intelligences that are more than natural. The naturalistic variety sees a world full of life-forces that are explainable in terms of the sciences but are no less worthy of reverence because of that.

In Gaian Earth Religion, it is the cosmos as a whole that is sacred, alive, and conscious. It is a living system that must be venerated. The supernaturalistic variety sees the cosmos as a god, or some aspect of god, or some term along those lines. The naturalistic variety still sees some consciousness and life in the cosmos as a living system, but is satisfied to describe this in more scientific terms.

At 20:30 in this video, Charles Eisenstein talks about something that has also nagged me. He says that one of the problems with climate change discourse is the way it has been framed as a matter of survival. The point he is making is that survival isn’t our ultimate purpose. Not least because we’re all going to die. Our purpose, he says, is to live in service to and in gratitude for the gift of life.

What if we could find a way to live on a dead Earth, like in some sci-fi novel? Eisenstein asks if that would be considered a successful response to climate change. And we say no, of course. Because we know - or at least those of us who care about life know - that survival isn’t good enough. In such a future, Eisenstein says, we would have survived but we would be living in hell.

This is my fear about technological fixes to climate change. There may be ways to head off its worst effects: releasing substances into the atmosphere to reflect the sun away from Earth, strip mining mountains to find new sources of the minerals needed for efficient batteries, clearing forests to make more room for wind farms. Hell, we could even colonize Mars.

Would any of these be considered success though? In my opinion, no. These technological interventions would save us from the worst consequences of our actions - and continue the same pattern in imposing human will on the living Earth. That impulse - to dominate life in service to what are perceived to be human ends - is the fundamental error. Technological fixes that serve only to perpetuate that error may ensure human survival, but they fail to secure a livable future.