![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/56576/2022/dc256afcca.jpg\")
Gregory Cello: “Your town needs you, not your nation.” Or to quote myself: On a human scale, nationalism is no better than globalism.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-30T21:05:57-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/03/30/gregory-cello-your-town-needs.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/03/27/pull-quote-from-an-interview.html", "content_html": "Pull quote from an interview with Kingsnorth in the latest Mortise and Tenon.
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/56576/2026/6e8e490c9d.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-03-27T07:36:07-04:00",
"url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/03/27/pull-quote-from-an-interview.html",
"tags": ["Quote posts"]
},
{
"id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/03/26/reinhold-niebuhr-the-irony-of.html",
"content_html": "Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History:
\n\n\nNothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
\n
Saving this here for future me.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-26T09:33:57-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/03/26/reinhold-niebuhr-the-irony-of.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/03/12/new-old-word-hearthfasted.html", "title": "New, old word: hearth-fasted", "content_html": "Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age:
\n\n\nThe free play of patriarchy within the household is arguably conditioned by the free play of patriarchy outside it. At the extreme, this involves a kind of untrammelled and predatory male collective violence - essentially the Viking problem of a heroic-styled warrior culture or of what’s sometimes termed ‘masterless men’.
\nMany societies have recognized the dangers of this and sought ways to counter it. For example, Anglo-Saxon England emphasized ‘hearth-fasting’ men - linking them to a home and hearth, to the possibilities of local status and livelihood. In Edo Japan, the wakamono-gumi associations of young, unmarried peasant men mobilized them as nightwatchmen, firefighters and festival organizers, and linked them into wider local knowledges and systems. Age-set systems and initiation rituals have served similar functions in many societies. The emphasis is less on the man being the master of the household, and more on making the household the master of the man.
\nBut - as demonstrated by Melissa Kearney’s work, mentioned earlier - we’re not doing a particularly great job of this in contemporary liberal-modernist society. Education, employment and financial systems almost seem set up to fail and marginalize many young men, especially from low-income families. The erosion of kith, kinship and positive local associational possibilities adds to the risk they’ll turn to misogynistic and violent ideologies to make sense of their situations. Models of society based on making widespread the possibility for men to become kith-and-kin connected, livelihood-making householders rather than atomized, internet-connected consumers of masculinist self-images adrift in a hostile job market can mitigate against this. Something to aim for, perhaps, in a postliberal dark-age future?
\n
That second paragraph in the original text includes a reference to Azby Brown’s Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture and Design (2022) and Rosamund Faith’s The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England (2020).
\nI love that phrase: hearth-fasted. Fixed to a hearth.
\nI haven’t read the book but based on what I can find online, a hearth-fasted man was a freeman in Pre-Norman England with social standing, public duties, and reciprocal responsibilities with neighbors. They were not dependents.
\n“Domesticated” is a word that comes to mind here, though that clearly has a negative connotation. A domesticated man is one that has been beaten down, reduced, “whipped.” That idea has roots in a sexism that sees women as shrews and marriage as a power struggle.
\n”Hearth-fasted”, on the other hand, is a man in service to his household. (Obviously I’m riffing on the language here, making no comment about actual pre-Norman history about which I know nothing.)
\nIt feels something like “yeoman”, “citizen”, and (a word from my childhood that I rarely hear anymore) “family man.” Definitely a word I’ll be keeping in my back pocket, both because it is pleasing language and because it represents something deeply important to me.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-12T07:34:10-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/03/12/new-old-word-hearthfasted.html", "tags": ["Quote posts","Peasants"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/02/24/wiped-away.html", "title": "Wiped away", "content_html": "Tara Couture, Radiance of the Ordinary:
\n\n\nWe douse the meat in chemicals to make it look vibrant and fresh, then wrap it in cellophane. We wash the eggs and dip them in chlorine to ride them of the gift of a feather from the soft underbelly of the mother hen. We remove all trace of connection—a leaf, hair, bones, hide, crumbs of soil. And in every little thing wiped away, so too the wiping of our awareness. Nothing here has died for us. No need to think of such things. And the blessings, like the clumps of earth that once clung to that carrot, are washed away.
\n
“And in every little thing wiped away, so too the wiping of our awareness.” Perfectly said. You cannot forget the connection between your breakfast and an actual clucking hen when the eggs have feathers—or even a bit of shit!—stuck to them.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-24T19:49:47-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/02/24/wiped-away.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/02/22/tara-couture-on-the-other.html", "title": "Tara Couture on the other side of pleasure", "content_html": "In Radiance of the Ordinary, Tara Couture opens the chapter “The Dance” with a truly cozy (there’s that word again) description of an early winter morning on their farm. Waking up, starting a fire, reading on the couch, standing barefoot in the grass to greet the sun. She continues:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-02-22T11:25:43-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/02/22/tara-couture-on-the-other.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/02/16/chris-smaje-on-realignment.html", "title": "Chris Smaje on realignment", "content_html": "It’s all lovely, yes? It’s as lovely as we’ve crafted it to be. And as much as I’d like to leave us there, cozied up by the hearth, I cannot. As romantic as the soft days of this country life may sound, they are only soft because of the hard days. There’s nothing wrong with romance—I quite like it myself—but to only show that side of things is dishonest, and it’s important to identify that dishonesty wherever it exists, especially in this time, in this world, where we are inundated with images of endless pleasures. Where our culture sells us on the idea that hard work is beneath us, or out of reach. Where entertainment is our highest calling. That strife and disappointment are wrong, frustration somethign to run from, discomfort something to avoid at all costs. None of these things are true, and they keep us locked in a perpetual chase with no fulfilling destination. They are romance as a gloss, a thin veneer of gauze and plastic roses meant to keep us eating without ever being satiated. And because of that, I need to pull us out of that warm winter nest of pleasures and into the reality of what makes it so profoundly and deliciously pleasurable—and that reality is work. Hard and demanding work.
\n
Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age (thanks to Donny for the recommendation):
\n\n\nJust as mainstream left and right politics realigns around a joint commitment to tech-heavy liberal-modernism, so it’s possible to imagine, in the words of Stephen Quilley, ‘a realignment built on the overlap between libertarians, Burkean localists, and religious communitarians currently (sometimes unwillingly) camped out on the political right on the one hand, and green/anarchist anti-moderns on the left!"
\nThis book represents an attempt by one particular writer inclined to green anti-modernism on the left to find the overlaps with those groups camped out on the right. An easy point of agreement is on the benefits of rich, local associational communities grounded in livelihood-making. Letting go of currently high levels of fossil-fuelled plenty may be a harder journey for both left and right, but if my arguments about our impending dark age are accurate, we don’t have much choice about that. Probably most challenging to traditional left or anarchist thinking is the need to let go of a sense of individualist freedom and self-fashioning, and to embrace the idea that self-realization is possible only within the limiting (but also enabling) structures of already given communities and families - and, what’s more, communities with spiritual underpinnings.
\n
This has been my trajectory for a while now. “Left” and “right” are two drunks having a bar fight: sure, I walked into this bar with one of them but the whole thing is getting stupider by the moment. I’m far more interested in connecting with those on the side of life, against technological death.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-16T08:49:08-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/02/16/chris-smaje-on-realignment.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/02/13/the-work-of-the-river.html", "title": "The work of the river flowing through Clairvaux Abbey", "content_html": "Leaving aside my nagging worry about what this meant in terms of pollution, the following is beautiful simply as a piece of prose personifying the river flowing through the Clairvaux Abbey. From Lewis Mumford (The Myth of the Machine), as quoted by Michael Updegraff (“Transitions of Power,” Mortise and Tenon tenth anniversary issue):
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-02-13T08:38:20-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/02/13/the-work-of-the-river.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/02/09/a-portion-of-the-deers.html", "content_html": "The river enters the abbey as much as the wall acting as a check allows. It gushes first into the corn-mill where it is very actively employed in grinding the grain under the weight of the wheels and in shaking the fine sieve which separates the flour from the bran. Thence it flows into the next building, and fills the boiler in which it is heated to prepare beer for the monks drinking, should the vine’s fruitfulness not reward the vintner’s labour. But the river has not yet finished its work, for it is now drawn into the fulling-machines following the corn-mill. In the mill it has prepared the brothers food and its duty is now to serve in making their clothing. This the river does not withhold, nor does it refuse any task asked of it. Thus it raises and lowers alternately the heavy hammers and mallets, or to be more exact, the wooden feet of the fulling machines. When by swirling at great speed it has made all these wheels revolve swiftly it issues foaming and looking as if it had ground itself. Now the river enters the tannery where it devotes much care and labour to preparing the necessary materials for the monks' footwear; then it divides into many small branches and, in its busy course, passes through the various departments, seeking everywhere for cooking, rotating, crushing, watering, washing or grinding, always offering its help and never refusing. At last, to earn full thanks and to leave nothing undone, it carries away the refuse and leaves all clean.
\n
A portion of “The Deer’s Cry”, or “St Patrick’s Breastplate”:
\n\n\nI arise today
\n
\nthrough the strength of heaven, light of sun,
\nRadiance of moon,
\nSplendor of fire,
\nSpeed of lightning,
\nSwiftness of wind,
\nDepth of sea,
\nStability of earth,
\nFirmness of rock.
Reminded of this by John O’Donohue in Anam Cara. Also, don’t miss Arvo Pärt’s setting of another portion of the prayer, if you’re not already familiar with it.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-09T14:35:11-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/02/09/a-portion-of-the-deers.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/01/26/a-bit-of-hope-our.html", "content_html": "A bit of hope. Our kids will be better prepared to build something better after these next few awful years have passed.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-01-26T11:18:33-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/01/26/a-bit-of-hope-our.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/01/14/byungchul-han-on-digital-selfsurveillance.html", "title": "Byung-Chul Han on digital self-surveillance and passivity", "content_html": "Thinking about the fact that when Beatrix started at her current school in 6th grade, a few months into school Covid happened. Now, a few months into her senior year, this siege is happening.
\nThese kids are going to be prepared for anything.
\n
Byung-Chul Han is very quotable. From Psycho-Politics:
\n\n\nJeremy Bentham’s panopticon isolated inmates from each other for disciplinary purposes and prevented them from interacting. In contrast, the occupants of today’s digital panopticon actively communicate with each other and willingly expose themselves. That is, they collaborate in the digital panopticon’s operations. Digital control society makes intensive use of freedom. This can only occur thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self-exposure (Selbstausleuchtung und Selbstentblößung). Digital Big Brother outsources operations to inmates, as it were. Accordingly, data is not surrendered under duress so much as offered out of an inner need. That is why the digital panopticon proves so efficient.
\n
A couple of pages later:
\n\n\nNeoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics – in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.
\n
\n\nThe transparency demanded of politicians today is anything but a political demand. Transparency is not called for in political decision-making processes; no consumer is interested in that. Instead, and above all, the imperative of transparency serves to expose or unmask politicians, to make them an item of scandal. The call for transparency presupposes occupying the position of a shocked spectator. It is not voiced by engaged citizens so much as by passive onlookers. Participation now amounts to grievance and complaint. With that, the society of transparency, inhabited by onlookers and consumers, has given rise to a spectator democracy.
\n
This “spectator democracy” is entirely different from the politics described by Teddy Macker in which political thought is (in the words of Wendell Berry) “a continuous asking how best to conduct oneself as a member of a community or a polity.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-14T11:58:30-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/01/14/byungchul-han-on-digital-selfsurveillance.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/01/09/byungchul-han-kicking-off-psychopolitics.html", "content_html": "Byung-Chul Han, kicking off Psycho-Politics with a banger:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-01-09T17:15:07-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/01/09/byungchul-han-kicking-off-psychopolitics.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/01/06/tolstoyans.html", "title": "Tolstoyans", "content_html": "We are living in a particular phase of history: freedom itself is bringing forth compulsion and constraint. The freedom of Can generates even more coercion than the disciplinarian Should, which issues commandments and prohibitions. Should has a limit. In contrast, Can has none. Thus, the compulsion entailed by Can is unlimited. And so we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Technically, freedom means the opposite of coercion and compulsion. Being free means being free from constraint. But now freedom itself, which is supposed to be the opposite of constraint, is producing coercion. Psychic maladies such as depression and burnout express a profound crisis of freedom. They represent pathological signs that freedom is now switching over into manifold forms of compulsion.
\n
Today I learned about the tolstoyans. I knew about Tolstoy’s beliefs here but I was unaware that there were attempts at building a movement specifically based on Tolstoy. Reproducing Markus Baum’s footnote:
\n\n\nRegarding the tolstoyans: Count Leo Tolstoy, the great nineteenth-century Russian novelist and thinker, taught that the meaning of life could be found through the literal application of Christ’s teachings, especially the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy sought to rescue the true teachings of Christ from what he perceived to be the irrelevant, irrational doctrines of faith. He emphasized the creed of absolute nonresistance (thus, incidentally, Tolstoy made a profound impression on Gandhi). This creed included the abhorrence of physical force, detestation of legalized exploitation of the poor, condemnation of private property (because ownership was secured by force), and a rejection of government (since it existed primarily for the sake of the rich and powerful). Many of Tolstoy’s followers banded into colonies, but Tolstoy himself distrusted such organized efforts, and most colonies did not last long.
\n
Tolstoy’s distrust of organized efforts reminds me of another writer who distrusted movements. The same guy who said:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-01-06T08:30:25-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/01/06/tolstoyans.html", "tags": ["Quote posts","Inspiration"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2026/01/06/karl-heim-as-quoted-in.html", "content_html": "When they asked me to join them I wouldn’t,
\n
\nand then went off by myself and did more
\nthan they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said
\n‘go and organize the International Brotherhood
\nof Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing
\neverybody who was against peace?’ So be it.
Karl Heim, as quoted in Against the Wind: “Every compromise between the Sermon on the Mount and the power politics of this world is like a water ditch dug by human firefighters – it limits the movement of divine life, dampens the spirit, and prevents the holy fire from spreading.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-06T07:11:15-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2026/01/06/karl-heim-as-quoted-in.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/10/16/robert-saltzman-an-aphorism-is.html", "content_html": "\n\n\nAn aphorism is a pithy observation that contains a general truth. Aphoristic words condense a complex idea into a brief, exact, memorable form.
\n
\n\nAphorism doesn’t build a case; it flashes. Shining for a moment, it either lands or it doesn’t.
\n
\n\nAn aphorism is both too little and too much—too little to be explanatory, too much to dismiss.
\n
\n\n“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” —Rumi
\n
\n\nSometimes an aphorism enacts an insight rather than describing one—a linguistic event rather than a proposition.
\n
\n\n“Every word is a stain upon the silence.” —Emil Cioran
\n
\n\nSometimes an aphorism asserts an entire worldview in four words—leaving no room for escape or elaboration.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2025-10-16T11:00:27-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/10/16/robert-saltzman-an-aphorism-is.html", "tags": ["Aphorisms","Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/10/15/peter-hahn-angels-in-the.html", "content_html": "“Hell is other people.” —Jean-Paul Sartre
\n
Peter Hahn, Angels in the Cellar:
\n\n\nBefore I settled on the vineyard, my life was intensely cerebral, sometimes physical, but tremendously lacking in the sensual. These days, however, I’ll find myself unconsciously bringing any number of things up to my tongue to taste or to my nose for a whiff. Walking through a forest, I’ll pull a few pine needles or leaves from a tree, roll them between my palms, and smell. I’ll pick up a handful of soil and do the same. At the farmer' market, as I go down the stalls selecting my fruit and vegetables, I’ll inevitably and discreetly lift one of each to my nose before filling my basket. Not only will doing this reveal something to me about the ripeness of the fruit or flavour of the vegetables but it also just makes the whole experience of food shopping richer. And while I have always enjoyed food as more than just fuel, it has now become a keen pleasure.
\n
Consciously engaging my senses is something I need to be doing more.
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-15T09:29:55-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/10/15/peter-hahn-angels-in-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/10/02/adam-kotsko-you-and-i.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n", "date_published": "2025-10-02T08:20:29-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/10/02/adam-kotsko-you-and-i.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/09/18/alan-jacobs-its-especially-important.html", "content_html": "\nYou and I are not voting on what will happen by having an opinion. The world has never worked like that, and it definitely doesn’t work like that in the Trumpocene.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2025-09-18T17:49:23-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/09/18/alan-jacobs-its-especially-important.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/09/03/nicely-observed-there-are-no.html", "content_html": "It’s especially important to remember that people love hating their enemies — they love that more than anything. So the worst thing you could do to them, as far as they’re concerned, is to diminish their hatreds. To those of us who don’t happen to share those hatreds, their behavior might look like wearying, pointless repetition. But from the inside, those hatreds are the primary instrument of myth confirmation. They give security, and people want security.
\n
Nicely observed.
\n\n", "date_published": "2025-09-03T09:53:01-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/09/03/nicely-observed-there-are-no.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/06/23/rhyd-wildermuth-the-world-is.html", "content_html": "\nThere are no “side effects.” There are only effects you like and effects you don’t like. To say otherwise is merely marketing.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2025-06-23T11:21:11-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/06/23/rhyd-wildermuth-the-world-is.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/06/17/kenneth-s-cohen-the-way.html", "content_html": "The world is a mess and will only get worse. But that world isn’t our world. That world — the world of wars and strife and empty glittering things — has no place for beauty and no place for us. Instead, all that is possible and all that is powerful are the worlds we create around us, the sanctuaries we build for the distinguished guests who arrive to create with us. Not one sanctuary and not one garden, but many sanctuaries and many gardens. Connected and transversed by the flights of birds and the commutes of hares, not one world, but many, many worlds built by each of us and where we welcome each other also as distinguished guests.
\n
Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2025-06-17T08:53:22-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/06/17/kenneth-s-cohen-the-way.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/06/12/it-is-important-to-have.html", "content_html": "The Chinese are fond of repeating, “To relax, you must be tranquil.” And we need to regard relaxation as a process of surrendering to a deeper wisdom, rather than acquiring, through effort, a new ability. Developing large muscles requires effort; cultivating relaxation requires letting go.
\n
“It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown.”
\n", "date_published": "2025-06-12T17:45:42-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/06/12/it-is-important-to-have.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/06/05/future-jeremy-if-you-ever.html", "content_html": "Future Jeremy: if you ever get the “oh my, my lord” earworm again, this is its source. “Shooby” by Nicole C. Mullen
\n", "date_published": "2025-06-05T22:00:12-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/06/05/future-jeremy-if-you-ever.html", "tags": ["Memories","Quote posts","Music"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/06/01/proverb-quoted-in-the-way.html", "content_html": "Proverb quoted in The Way of Qigong:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2025-06-01T11:19:03-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/06/01/proverb-quoted-in-the-way.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/05/27/kenneth-s-cohen-the-way.html", "content_html": "In stillness be like the pine.
\n
\nIn movement be like clouds and water.
Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2025-05-27T08:01:20-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/05/27/kenneth-s-cohen-the-way.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/05/17/genevieve-harrison-at-the-heart.html", "content_html": "\nAlan Watts used to say that angels, like Daoist Immortals, can fly because they take themselves lightly!
\n
\n\nAt the heart of Microsoft’s decision lies an uncomfortable truth about modern corporate governance: human lives have been reduced to variables in an optimization equation.
\n
\n\nFor those counting headcount reductions as merely statistics, remember this: Behind each of the 6,000 is a person who until yesterday believed they were valued members of one of the world’s most successful companies. People with families, mortgages, healthcare needs, and career aspirations.
\n
\n\nThe question that should haunt every corporate boardroom but rarely does: If a company at the pinnacle of capitalism, with virtually unlimited resources, treats human capital as its most dispensable asset, what hope exists for workers across the broader economy?
\n
\n\nAs one employee, a 14-year Microsoft veteran, posted on LinkedIn after receiving notice: “I helped build systems I was told would make all our jobs better. Instead, they made my job irrelevant.”
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2025-05-17T10:22:27-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/05/17/genevieve-harrison-at-the-heart.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/04/28/charles-eisenstein-lord-knows-i.html", "content_html": "\nThe algorithm of sacrifice demands efficiency above all else. And in the church of shareholder value, human capital has become the preferred offering.
\n
\n\nLord knows I tried long and hard to make the case for peace, going back a decade. … But now we are at a point where those who call for peace are branded by each side as an agent of the other.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2025-04-28T16:16:45-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/04/28/charles-eisenstein-lord-knows-i.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/04/04/hamilton-nolan-if-you-need.html", "content_html": "\nThat also is the point where miracles are necessary. What is a miracle? It is a happening that is impossible from within a current story, but possible from a new one. Therefore, not only does it seem impossible, but by happening anyway it invites us to question what else we have assumed that may not be true. That is the state of unknowing, the release of old beliefs and what we thought we knew, that prepares the soil for the miraculous in the first place.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2025-04-04T11:50:02-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/04/04/hamilton-nolan-if-you-need.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/03/27/imaginal-pollution.html", "title": "Imaginal pollution", "content_html": "\nIf you need a cause, if you need a purpose, if you need a crusade that will do the most to produce the world you want, it is this: Class war. The same damn class war! Taking wealth away from the rich and giving that wealth to the less rich. Our democracy, such as it is, will never, ever be stabilized until that happens. Do not allow yourself to be hypnotized by the myriad results of the rich having too much money. Keep your mind instead on the problem itself. The rich are too rich.
\n
\n\nPeople — many of them friends I’ve known to be otherwise reasonable — have become so polluted by feeding on algorithmic despair that they’ve lost any sense of what is real.
\n
\n\nIn such a state, you lose your mind, which is to really say you lose your body. You feed on and then feed into the despair, spread it, becoming vectors for imaginal viruses which plague your unconscious bodily dreaming.
\n
\n\nWe imagine the world as unsafe, and then we dream the world as unsafe, and then feel in our bodies that the world is unsafe. And this is an inverted order of things, the opposite of how our bodies come to knowledge.
\n
This is why time outdoors–in the sun, in the woods, doing something or simply being–is often an antidote to anxiety. It is taking your view of the world from reality around you, not adopting the timeline’s point of view as your touchpoint for reality.
\n", "date_published": "2025-03-27T10:38:14-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/03/27/imaginal-pollution.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/03/11/a-proverb-is-one-mans.html", "content_html": "\n\nA proverb is one man’s wit and all men’s wisdom.
\n
Lord John Russell, as quoted by Jackson Crawford in this (as always) excellent video “Odin and Wisdom.”
\n", "date_published": "2025-03-11T18:35:25-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/03/11/a-proverb-is-one-mans.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/03/05/josh-radnor-give-up-on.html", "content_html": "Josh Radnor: Give up on your war against reality
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2025-03-05T12:07:19-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/03/05/josh-radnor-give-up-on.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/02/20/this-from-alan-jacobs-is.html", "content_html": "When I fight reality, when I wail and moan that things should be going ‘some other way,’ I suffer. When I begin with acceptance and surrender – “Okay this is what is happening right now and where we are” – I don’t suffer. Or at least I suffer far less. And the next right actions are much much clearer than when I’m giving equal weight to each voice in my head.
\n
This, from Alan Jacobs, is one of the most clarifying things I’ve read in a while.
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2025-02-20T22:04:54-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/02/20/this-from-alan-jacobs-is.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/01/29/charles-eisenstein-economic-growth-is.html", "content_html": "\n
\n- In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed?
\n- Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community?
\n- What organizations serve and seek to protect those people?
\n- How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations?
\nOnce I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action.
\n
Charles Eisenstein: “Economic growth is finding something people used to do for themselves, taking it away and selling it back to them.”
\n", "date_published": "2025-01-29T15:35:46-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/01/29/charles-eisenstein-economic-growth-is.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/01/15/brian-merchant-blood-in-the.html", "content_html": "Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine:
\n\n\nIn 1589, William Lee of Calverton developed one of history’s most quietly revolutionary technologies. The legend goes that Lee was upset that his wife spent more time knitting than with him, so he devised the stocking frame to speed up the process. Lee’s machine, about the size of a large desk, allowed its operator to use pedals and bars to automatically mimic the movements of a hand knitter, making it much easier, and faster, to produce stock-ings, socks, tights, and other knit garments. (At the time, men wore tights, not pants.)
\nThe machine worked so well that he tried to commercialize it. But Queen Elizabeth refused to grant Lee a patent, and left him with a foreboding rebuttal: “You aim high, Master Lee,” she said, before expressing concern for the hand knitters his device would affect. “Consider… what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” Lee died broke, oblivious that he’d sowed some of the earliest seeds of the Industrial Revolution. His brother James Lee pressed on with his invention, however, and it later became a key tool in England’s booming textile industry.
\n
At our point in the timeline it’s virtually inconceivable that someone in authority would stop some new automation because of the harm it would do workers. We all look on helplessly because we know our tech overlords are unleashing destructive forces and we know no one in power will stop them because the economy must grow at all costs.
\n", "date_published": "2025-01-15T08:25:42-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/01/15/brian-merchant-blood-in-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/01/04/alexander-beiner-so-what-does.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n", "date_published": "2025-01-04T15:15:42-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/01/04/alexander-beiner-so-what-does.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/12/31/im-glad-to-have-encountered.html", "content_html": "So what does metaphysics have to do with the assassination of Brian Thompson? As I’ve argued already, what’s particularly powerful about this breach is that it re-embodies accountability. Here’s why it matters: the body is the source of qualitative experience. Implicit in a re-embodiment of accountability is a return to the primacy of qualitative experience. After Thompson was killed, many responded to the glee erupting online with reminders that he is a father and husband. This is an important point, and a telling one. What they are effectively saying is “he doesn’t only have an exchange (quantitative) value as a CEO, he also has an experiential (qualitative) value as a human being.”
\nThey are right, and also making exactly the point Mangione was making, knowingly or not. Big pharma treats living, breathing people with qualitative experiences as meaningless quantities. What the killing does, and what gives it so much power as a breach event, is to remind us that the body is the source of ultimate reality. It is the container of all qualitative value. It forces us to acknowledge that quality is more real than quantity.
\n
I’m glad to have encountered Lewis Mumford’s phrase “life cannot be delegated.” I’m also glad for the way L.M. Sacasas invokes Illich to relativize an idea that could become overly rigid–because, of course, a great deal of our work is delegated:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-12-31T09:30:30-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/12/31/im-glad-to-have-encountered.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/12/23/i-may-not-agree-with.html", "content_html": "The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost. It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.
\n
I may not agree with everything Charles Eisenstein says in this column, but I totally agree with his conclusion:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-12-23T15:52:18-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/12/23/i-may-not-agree-with.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/12/02/alan-jacobs-i.html", "content_html": "\nThe mindset that demonizes one’s political opponent is the same one that demonizes a foreign enemy to make war, or that demonizes a population to facilitate ethnic cleansing. Left unchecked, it will erupt into civil unrest, violence, and then tyranny. It may even lead to World War Three. I speak here as an American, but the same dynamics are rampant across the West. My country is not exempt from what it has sown in the world. The fate of Libya, of Iraq, of Venezuela, of Ukraine, of Syria, of Yugoslavia, of Lebanon, of Gaza could easily become our own.
\nWhat allows political authorities to commit heinous crimes against humanity? They are not, after all, superhuman. They don’t have special powers like Magneto or Darth Vader. So they must turn the population into willing accomplices in their own oppression. They instigate wave after wave of fear and hate, and ride each to new heights of power. As the Nazi Hermann Goering put it, “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
\nThere’s always a bogeyman. The insane escalation in Ukraine requires the bogeyman of Vladimir Putin leading the resurrected corpse of the Evil Empire (the Soviet Union). The wave of surveillance and censorship and persecution of dissidents in the West requires the bogeyman of “MAGA extremists” or “Russian agents” or “domestic terrorists” or “spreaders of dangerous anti-vax misinformation.” The razing of Gaza and slaughter of its people requires the bogeyman of implacable hate-crazed enemies of Israel thirsty for the blood of Jews.
\nEvery hateful word, every dehumanizing smear, every note of mockery and contempt, every denunciation and condemnation that we put into the public square feeds the powers that would manipulate us into war, genocide, and fascism. And so, politicians and media set the example of hate for us to follow. It isn’t even deliberate — that’s the thing. It is just the way things are done. I don’t mean here to set up politicians and media as the new evil. “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do.” But that is what they do. They divide us. They teach us to hate each other.
\nDon’t fall for it. That’s my request. Don’t fall for it. Instead, enter the political sphere with the questions that come from compassion and lead to love. That is the only revolution worth having.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2024-12-02T12:14:11-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/12/02/alan-jacobs-i.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/12/01/good-essay-from.html", "content_html": "I cannot, of course, provide documentary proof for that claim. But as the Marxists used to say I believe it is no accident that the shaking of the foundations of the global economy and “the longest period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history” happened just as the iPhone was taking serious hold on the imagination of the developed world, and Facebook and Twitter were becoming key components of everyday life in that world. On your smartphones you can get (a) a stream of prompts for visceral wrath and fear and then (b) games and distractions that accomplish the suddenly-necessary self-soothing. Between the wrath and fear and the subsequent soothing, who can remember what happened last week, much less ten years ago? Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia. “What is it I was so concerned about?”
\n
Good essay from @tinyroofnail:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-12-01T11:43:41-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/12/01/good-essay-from.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/11/23/going-to-the.html", "content_html": "But here again Farmer stands out as an example. He did not begin by trying to change the world, but by applying himself to something relatively small. Whether in Haiti or in downtown Augusta, each of us can be inspired to do the same.
\n
Going to the store on a Saturday with some small plumbing part in hand always makes me think of my dad. Of course, now I’m going to Lowe’s instead of the little hardware store in Oolitic but, still, a good memory. The smell and feel of those classic hardware stores was wonderful.
\n", "date_published": "2024-11-23T12:51:51-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/11/23/going-to-the.html", "tags": ["Memories","Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/10/28/nick-cave-says.html", "content_html": "Nick Cave says something I’ve often heard from Christians:
\n\n\nFreedom finds itself in captivity. Disorder, randomness, chaos and anarchy are where the imagination goes to die, or so I’ve found.
\nSo it is with matters of faith and the freeness of belief. I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church - that profoundly fallible human institution - that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.
\n
Cave appears to be talking about art–but I’ve heard this deployed in other contexts as well. My question, whenever I hear this is always: Do you mean something like the creative freedom that can be found, say, within the sonnet form? Or do you mean that true freedom can only be found within the rule of the Church? The former I can get with. The latter sounds quite Orwellian to those of us who aren’t Christians. Again, I believe I understand what is meant by most of the people who say this sort of thing. The phrasing, though, makes some of us twitchy.
\n", "date_published": "2024-10-28T10:28:26-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/10/28/nick-cave-says.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/09/11/charles-eisenstein-it.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n\nIt may seem, from the infant’s point of view, that he’s achieving something. But in fact, the mother is doing almost all the work. However, the reactions of that infant are part of the birth process. He doesn’t have to know what to do, though. But if you were a stillbirth, the birth would be a lot harder. So the aliveness of the baby being born is actually helpful to the birth process. And the same is true of our aliveness. And all of our anguished desperate and hopeful attempts are futile attempts to invent rituals and invent myths. They do not create the real rituals and the real myths that we will live in. But they are part of the creation of the rituals and the myths that we will live in.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2024-09-11T09:19:28-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/09/11/charles-eisenstein-it.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/09/04/john-michael-greer.html", "content_html": "The wheel of time has brought us back around to the earliest cathedrals, built into the landscape. We’ve returned to Lascaux Cave. The next stage of our spiritual development could just as easily take place—has probably already begun—in dark tunnels etched with strange graffiti, among the standing stones of unfinished overpasses. Initiates will follow hidden voices into cement chambers lit by candles; spray-painted sigils will hold mysteries for contemplation; the ceiling will disappear into the shadows above, stretching higher than the dome of any basilica, and it will be more than enough.
\n
John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism:
\n\n\nMuch of polytheist theology can be seen as the application of ecological thinking to religion.
\n
This snaps together several pieces in my mind. There has been a revival (relatively speaking) of polytheism in the years since the rise of ecological thinking. The dominant model of monotheism is of a king and the ruled, which has sometimes had what we might call poor historical consequences. A polytheism rooted in ecological thinking could be a shift from a hierarchical “great chain of being” to a relationship of reciprocity.
\n", "date_published": "2024-09-04T09:45:24-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/09/04/john-michael-greer.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/08/30/josh-radnor-the.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-08-30T08:49:06-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/08/30/josh-radnor-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/07/09/robin-wall-kimmerer.html", "content_html": "The most trustworthy people in the world are those who have been to the underworld. Those who’ve been torn open, rearranged, and made new by suffering. Myths are riddled with descents into the underworld wherein the hero confronts the darkness of the shadowy depths and reemerges with gifts and lessons. This is a kind of wisdom that is not on offer in the clouds or on earth. It can only be found below.
\n
Robin Wall Kimmerer:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-07-09T18:57:55-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/07/09/robin-wall-kimmerer.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/07/05/from-american-peasant.html", "content_html": "People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.
\nSomething essential happens in a vegetable garden. It’s a place where if you can’t say “I love you” out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans.
\n
From American Peasant, a new book by Christopher Schwarz:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-07-05T08:02:30-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/07/05/from-american-peasant.html", "tags": ["Workshop","Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/07/03/rhyd-wildermuth-a.html", "content_html": "\nSo then, what does the craft [of woodworking] demand? 1) An understanding of its essential tools, materials and processes; 2) a commitment to repeating them until they are internalized and performed competently; and 3) a level of competence that allows its knowledge and skills to be taught to others.
\nAnd no more.
\nThe craft welcomes you. And it begs you to find your place in it. To unearth a little bit of its history, embrace it and share it with others before we are drowned in a sea of plastic and petroleum by-products.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2024-07-03T10:21:03-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/07/03/rhyd-wildermuth-a.html", "tags": ["Gardening","Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/07/03/old-farmers-almanac.html", "content_html": "\nA garden is a gathering of spirits, of old friends and new, of allies and companions. They are great, thronging crowds of voices whispering, cajoling, and summoning you to the life you summon for them. And when you leave a garden, they come with you, long trains of spirits singing and laughing as you lead them across the earth to their new home.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2024-07-03T07:07:35-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/07/03/old-farmers-almanac.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/06/26/this-morning-i.html", "content_html": "The exact dates of the Dog Days can vary from source to source, and because they are traditionally tied to the dawn rising of Sirius, they have changed over time. However, most sources agree that the Dog Days occur in mid-to-late summer.
\nHere at the Old Farmer’s Almanac, we consider the Dog Days to be the 40 days beginning July 3 and ending August 11. These days occur soon after the summer solstice in late June, which also tends to be the beginning of the worst of summer’s heat.
\n
This morning I read the chapter “A Mother’s Work” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. In it, she reflects on the process of cleaning up a pond so that her daughters can swim in it. Best chapter of the book so far.
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-06-26T07:18:07-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/06/26/this-morning-i.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/06/17/a-more-elegant.html", "content_html": "So it is my grandchildren who will swim in this pond, and others whom the years will bring. The circle of care grows larger and caregiving for my little pond spills over to caregiving for other waters. The outlet from my pond runs downhill to my good neighbor’s pond. What I do here matters. Everybody lives downstream. My pond drains to the brook, to the creek, to a great and needful lake. The water net connects us all. I have shed tears into that flow when I thought that motherhood would end. But the pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn’t end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother.
\n
A more elegant way of saying what I was trying to say yesterday. Robin Wall Kimmerer:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-06-17T07:46:27-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/06/17/a-more-elegant.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/06/16/adam-kotsko-simply.html", "content_html": "\nWhen Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe Original Man, our teacher, part man, part manido, walked through the world, he took note of who was flourishing and who was not, of who was mindful of the Original Instructions and who was not. He was dismayed when he came upon villages where the gardens were not being tended, where the fishnets were not repaired and the children were not being taught the way to live. Instead of seeing piles of firewood and caches of corn, he found the people lying beneath maple trees with their mouths wide open, catching the thick, sweet syrup of the generous trees. They had become lazy and took for granted the gifts of the Creator. They did not do their ceremonies or care for one another. He knew his responsibility, so he went to the river and dipped up many buckets of water. He poured the water straight into the maple trees to dilute the syrup. Today, maple sap flows like a stream of water with only a trace of sweetness to remind the people both of possibility and of responsibility. And so it is that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.
\n… When my daughters remember our sugaring adventure now, they roll their eyes and groan, “That was so much work.” They remember hauling branches to feed the fire and slopping sap on their jackets as they carried heavy buckets. They tease me about being a wretched mother who wove their connection to the land through forced labor. They were awfully little to be doing the work of a sugaring crew. But they also remember the wonder of drinking sap straight from the tree. Sap, but not syrup. Nanabozho made certain that the work would never be too easy. His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2024-06-16T12:39:20-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/06/16/adam-kotsko-simply.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/06/12/thomas-berry-the.html", "content_html": "Simply put, the way we were taught the market for consumer goods is supposed to work does not seem to hold anymore. The market was supposed to incentivize businesses to offer attractive products, at competitive prices, in a convenient format, and then customers were supposed to respond to those positive signals by rewarding them with their business. Now businesses increasingly take actively customer-hostile actions — locking up products, replacing paper menus with cumbersome QR codes, and of course chronically understaffing everything, which is the root of all of these issues — and insulate themselves from any feedback.
\n
Thomas Berry: “the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.” (Via Braiding Sweetgrass)
\n", "date_published": "2024-06-12T07:37:43-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/06/12/thomas-berry-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/06/03/i-really-like.html", "content_html": "I really like this working definition of enchantment from R.G. Miga:
\n\n\nEnchantment is the process of creating and sustaining a symbolic interface that corresponds to one or more hyperobjects, in order to generate participatory consciousness.
\n
He applies this to the Green Man (a figure that those have followed my blog for a while will know is important to me):
\n\n\nGrowth is a hyperobject. It’s non-local, molten, phased, inter-objective, and viscous. Like gravity, Growth is familiar and necessary at human scale—but becomes horrifying and monstrous in its totality. We recognize that life depends on Growth at a measured pace; when it tips into a blind force, we instinctively recoil from it. Growth brings the corn up in the fields. Growth is also cancer. Growth is the visceral unease of being in the dense jungle, surrounded by a billion grasping mouths, all indifferent to anything but the pursuit of more. Our own Growth as a species keeps our children alive and safe, while cutting a broad swathe of murder and destruction across the planet. Time-bound humans have a hard time experiencing Growth as anything other than an acceleration toward Decay, its terminal opposite. And depending on which physicists you believe—Growth will eventually tear apart the fabric of the universe.
\nSomething like the Green Man could be seen as a symbolic interface that enables participatory consciousness with the hyperobject of Growth. The symbolic representation of the Green Man is, at once, a human face consumed by vegetal growth and vegetal growth itself, anthropomorphized.
\n… Establishing a participatory consciousness with the Green Man allows us to relate to Growth at a human scale: by understanding some of what it wants (its telos), forgiving its excesses, and finding ways of cooperating with it.
\n
Miga’s earlier essay, which is referred to in this one, is also worth reading.
\n", "date_published": "2024-06-03T13:37:58-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/06/03/i-really-like.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/05/30/this-from-freddie.html", "content_html": "This, from Freddie deBoer (via @ayjay), is true. I picked up the opinions habit early on because I thought it was what intelligent people were supposed to do. I’m now trying to unlearn it, in part because (as Freddie says) arguing over opinions is deeply unpleasant to me.
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-05-30T11:30:51-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/05/30/this-from-freddie.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/05/08/phil-ford-pleasure.html", "content_html": "\nFor a very large swath of the human population, probably the majority, constantly forming and expressing and fighting over opinions on contentious topics is an unusual and unpleasant activity. It’s not that many people out there just don’t naturally form opinions, on art and culture and politics, the way anyone does. But to think of those opinions as something to constantly bring into a state of contention with others, to argue all the time as a matter of day-to-day life, is intimidating even for many smart and principled people. It’s hard to recall now, but there was a very recent period in which most people had no greater opportunity to share their opinions than to say them out loud at work or a bar or during the fellowship service after church. The truly motivated might stand on the street with a bullhorn or start a paper newsletter or write letters to the editor. Most people never bothered. The cacophony of opinion we live in is very new.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2024-05-08T13:23:25-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/05/08/phil-ford-pleasure.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/05/08/rhyd-wildermuth-the.html", "content_html": "\nPleasure and pain, love and death, exist in an unresolved and irresolvable tension with one another. For the Preacher, only God is whole, and so we should seek God, not the broken and partial satisfactions of this life. The nihilist is a disappointed moralist, one who has given up on any principle of unity by which the broken fragments of existence can be brought together, save their negation. Thus at the heart of the nihilist’s cosmos is an endless blank void where God used to be. For Wotan, though, a principle of unity is never sought and so is never missed. To everything there is a season (a biblical line that Wotan could probably get behind), a season for each broken and unreconciled aspect of existence, and those seasons cycle endlessly. To a certain sort of mind this is a dismal prospect, an unmeaning cycle that grinds on forever. Such a mind needs a “higher purpose,” a telos, a meaning to it all, an ending to “redeem” or “transcend” the cycle. Such a mind wants a cure for the human condition. Wotan accepts the human condition as it is. He is the human condition. He is the human condition in the form of a god. There is no “cure” for him: he is enough.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2024-05-08T11:05:56-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/05/08/rhyd-wildermuth-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/05/01/paul-sellers-soon.html", "content_html": "\nThe longer the litanies of crises grow, the more favorable the winds become to return us to home. Not the idealized homes of the urban condo dwellers thumbscrolling digital catalogues of trade spoils from distant lands, nor the cramped apartments of workers crowded with cheap plastic and screens displaying simulacra of lives lived elsewhere. The home towards which these winds blow is not the “normal” we delude ourselves into believing will return after each crisis passes, nor the utopian fantasies that we can have everything we want without any of the effects our rapacious desire causes.
\nThe home towards which these winds come is a home we may not yet recognise, since it has been so long since we’ve been there. Much has changed since we left it: fewer forests, fewer insects, fewer animals, fewer wilds. A thick dust of forgetting has fallen over every room, obscuring what we once cherished as dear and celebrated as beautiful. Too long at sea seeking wealth and wonder, we may not even remember how to live the kinds of lives one lives at home.
\nFortunately, it is mostly only a matter of remembering, and it’s most often all joy. What is it like to grow a bit of one’s food at home, rather than shop for it in garishly-lit warehouses? What does one do without a screen to tell you what to think? How does one meet other humans without algorithmic filters telling you who “likes” you? How do we provide for ourselves without capitalist networks of distribution, employment, and management?
\nIt is mostly only a matter of remembering, but it will also be a matter of learning anew, and this will not always be joy. We will need to learn anew how to survive without being told how to survive, without anyone managing our desires, telling us what we need, and re-assuring us that it’s all under control. We’ll need to wean ourselves off the opiates of lies, false visions of a future where the earth does what we want it to, rather than what it does. We’ll need to learn what addicts in recovery learn, that our sense of control was always only an illusion of control.
\n
\n\nSoon I will be well again. I’m a patient man because I was trained to that end. Woodworking, as with all hand crafts, demands that we live and work within the parameters of our human limitations.
\n
I love this: “I’m a patient man because I was trained to that end.” Patience is often seen as a sort of inborn trait: you either have it or you don’t. This, however, reminds us that patience is trainable, particularly as a result of long attentiveness to a craft.
\n", "date_published": "2024-05-01T21:00:53-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/05/01/paul-sellers-soon.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/04/29/letter-from-cg.html", "content_html": "Letter from C.G. Jung:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-04-29T19:30:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/04/29/letter-from-cg.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/04/29/charles-eisenstein-it.html", "content_html": "\nDear Frau V.,
\nYour questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2024-04-29T15:59:09-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/04/29/charles-eisenstein-it.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/04/25/emphatically-agree-with.html", "content_html": "It may seem, from the infant’s point of view, that he’s achieving something. But in fact, the mother is doing almost all the work. However, the reactions of that infant are part of the birth process. He doesn’t have to know what to do, though. But if you were a stillbirth, the birth would be a lot harder. So the aliveness of the baby being born is actually helpful to the birth process. And the same is true of our aliveness. And all of our anguished desperate and hopeful attempts are futile attempts to invent rituals and invent myths. They do not create the real rituals and the real myths that we will live in. But they are part of the creation of the rituals and the myths that we will live in.
\n
Emphatically agree with this article. And I do not say that as someone who cannot manage technology; I do okay. I say that because it is increasingly apparent that high tech is a hassle with zero resilience.
\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-04-25T14:06:48-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/04/25/emphatically-agree-with.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/04/22/i-was-looking.html", "content_html": "Things used to work in this country. This is the stock complaint of the Baby Boomers, and if you are lucky enough to inherit a piece of their technology, you may find yourself agreeing. But when I say “things used to work,” the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy
\n
I was looking for the “always convalescent from some small illness” quotation a few days ago and found it (where else?) on Alan Jacobs blog. Recording it here for the next time I’m looking for it:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-04-22T16:36:10-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/04/22/i-was-looking.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/03/22/two-things-that.html", "content_html": "In the work that would make his name as one of the finest medievalists of his generation, The Allegory of Love (1936), he pauses at the end of a learned exposition of the poems of Ariosto and Tasso to make a confession: Samuel Johnson, [C.S. Lewis] says, “once described the ideal happiness he would choose, if he were regardless of futurity” — that is, if he did not need to consider any future consequences of his choice. “My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.”
\n
Two things that prompted the memory of quitting social media I just posted:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-03-22T09:18:01-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/03/22/two-things-that.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/03/18/eff-congress-should.html", "content_html": "In the process of breaking my years-long addiction to social media, it was the internalized self-limiting framing of writing with which I struggled most. This kind of reduction and flattening are seen best in the formulaic way in which the algorithms train us to write, the repetition of meaningless phrases like “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but;” “Unpopular opinion, but”, “Okay, sooo,” or the meme-derived rephrasing of opinions in the form of conversational comparisons between “literally nobody ever” and the target of the post.
\nBecoming trained to read and write by computers, we begin also to think like computers. Our writing becomes as processed as the food available in supermarkets and our thinking as standardized and as unremarkable as its flavors.
\n
EFF: “Congress Should Give Up on Unconstitutional TikTok Bans.” This bit is particularly worrying to me:
\n\n\n[The bill] would also give the President the power to designate other applications under the control of a country considered adversarial to the U.S. to be a national security threat.
\n
And the following seems obviously true. If they’re worried about our data being misused, why not ban the collection of such data altogether? Because such data collection profits those who really matter to the politicians.
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-03-18T15:26:58-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/03/18/eff-congress-should.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/03/13/rhyd-wildermuth-has.html", "content_html": "The only solution to this pervasive ecosystem is prohibiting the collection of our data in the first place. Ultimately, foreign adversaries will still be able to obtain our data from social media companies unless those companies are forbidden from collecting, retaining, and selling it, full stop. And to be clear, under our current data privacy laws, there are many domestic adversaries engaged in manipulative and invasive data collection as well.
\n
Rhyd Wildermuth has just published an excellent article on degrowth (paywalled).
\n\n\nPut as simply as possible, degrowth states that the relentless expansion (“growth”) that capitalist economies rely upon to survive (and to outrun the crises they create) has a limit. Once that limit is reached and can no longer be postponed, they will then contract in often violent and tragic ways.
\n
And he uses an excellent analogy with credit cards:
\n\n\nReaders in the United States will already be familiar with the analogy I’m about to use for this, while European readers will no doubt struggle with some disbelief that such a thing is even possible. In America, it’s possible to get a credit card without sufficient funds or collateral to show you can pay back what you borrow. Wilder still, once you’ve spent the limit of that first card, you can then get another one from a different provider, max it out, and then get a third, fourth, and even more. You can even use the credit from one card to pay down the minimum balance on another or even transfer balances, constantly juggling your debt load until you’ve gotten yourself into a terrifying abyss.
\nWhat often happens for the person using this strategy is that each subsequent credit card comes with a higher interest rate than the previous ones, and there’s a system of debt tracking (a “credit score”) which determines what this rate will be and what the credit limit will be. The more in debt you get, the higher the interest rate you’ll have to pay back, and eventually it all catches up to you.
\nDegrowth asserts that this is precisely what capitalist societies have been doing since the very beginning: borrowing against a future moment in which they hope they’ll be able to pay it all back.
\nFossil fuels are the best example of this problem. They function as a line of credit to allow increased production, consumption, and accelerated technological change, while their invisible consequences (atmospheric carbon release) accumulated the way compound interest on a credit card does. We’re now starting to max out this line of credit, and will soon need another line.
\nSolar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear are potential alternatives, but again as with the credit cards, they each come with their own hidden fees and variable interest penalties. For all those alternatives, you need a large initial input of energy just to build them. The minerals required to build solar panels and the batteries involved all require energy to mine, refine, and create, while uranium mining and refining also require large initial energy inputs.
\nWhere does that initial energy come from? Currently, fossil fuels — from one line of credit to another — all to make sure we can keep increasing the amount of energy available for technological solutions to the other problems our technologies cause.
\nDegrowth looks at this problem the way most of us might view a friend constantly getting new loans to pay back other loans. Just as we might ask, “why not cut back on your spending?” degrowth proposes we question the core value of capitalist expansion. It then asks what life might be like if we tried to live within our limits, tried to pay down the debts we’ve accrued (in the form of environmental damage and resource depletion). What might it be like if we stopped borrowing against the future?
\n
My first real introduction to degrowth was Jason Hickel’s book. And based on Rhyd’s article, looks like I need to read this book by Kohei Saito.
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-13T11:12:14-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/03/13/rhyd-wildermuth-has.html", "tags": ["Quote posts","Books and reading"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/03/12/worth-reading-the.html", "content_html": "Worth reading: “The IKEA Humans” by Samuel Biagetti
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-03-12T08:51:38-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/03/12/worth-reading-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/03/11/peter-larson-a.html", "content_html": "Jennifer and Jason are drawn to IKEA because it reflects who they are: they too are modern, movable, and interchangeable, their wants satisfiable in any neighborhood with a food co-op and a coffee shop. More fundamentally, Jennifer and Jason are untraceable, a “composite material” made from numberless scraps and pieces. They have a long catalog of home towns, and their accents are NPR neutral. They can probably rattle off the various nationalities in their family trees — Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Jewish, maybe some Venezuelan or Honduran for a little color. From these backgrounds they retain no more than a humorous word or phrase, a recipe, or an Ellis Island anecdote, if that. They grew up amidst a scramble of white-collar professionals and went to college with a scramble of white-collar professionals’ kids. Their values are defined mainly by mass media, their tastes adorably quirky but never straying too far from their peers’, and like the IKEA furniture that they buy in boxes, they too cut themselves into manageable, packaged pieces and market themselves online. They are probably “spiritual but not religious.” They have no pattern or model of life that bears any relation to the past before the internet. For all intents and purposes, they sprang up de novo in the modern city.
\n
Peter Larson, A Year and a Day on Just a Few Acres:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-03-11T18:21:14-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/03/11/peter-larson-a.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/02/20/really-illuminating-post.html", "content_html": "Every place on the Earth has its own, unique energies. When I was an architect, I learned how to sense these energies, define them, and put them into terms others could understand. Healthy, living places were made, or most often grew, via working with, not against, their underlying energies. I think people used to sense these energies of place more than they do now, and used to value them more than they do now. The loss of this sense had increasingly allowed economics to dictate the qualities of places, and resulted in the creation of more and more “dead” places: shopping strips, placeless housing subdivisions, whole centers of communities blown out for corner drug stores and parking lots.
\n
Really illuminating post by James Shelley (via @patrickrhone):
\n\n\nWhether papyrus or the internet, humans doggedly write for influence, status, wealth, conviction, and pleasure. But the so-called sanctity of “authorship” is only a very recent idea. These “rights” of authorship are only true if they are enforced. They are a kind of fiction that only make sense in occasional times, places, and cultures. For the next chapter of the human experiment, I wonder if “authorship” will again recede into the background, as it often seems to do in times of disruptive changes in communication technology.
\nBut the banishment of the author doesn’t mean writing ends. Writers still write even when “authorship” functionally means nothing. And what they write still influences their world, with or without the universe dutifully paying homage to their bylines. In the long arcs of history, what is written typically goes on to mean much more than who wrote it. The future, like today, is built on ideas, not on the people who had them, because people die but ideas never stop evolving.
\n
As we used to say, read the whole thing. I’m particularly struck by his invocation of ancient anonymous and pseudonymous works. It’s the ideas that matter, less so the author.
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-20T09:21:28-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/02/20/really-illuminating-post.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/02/13/adam-kotsko-the.html", "content_html": "Adam Kotsko, “The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesis”:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-02-13T10:09:15-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/02/13/adam-kotsko-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/01/16/wendell-berry-hannah.html", "content_html": "The near-total context collapse we are now experiencing was already baked into the workings of the Mosaic web browser and the dream of the “information age” that it encapsulates. Information does want to be free, as it turns out — free of context, free of pleasure, free of empathy, even free of comprehension. The effort to just cut to the chase and give us the information has actively destroyed the conditions for understanding and using that information in an intelligent way.
\n
Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-01-16T08:29:21-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/01/16/wendell-berry-hannah.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/01/02/catching-up-on.html", "content_html": "There can be places in this world, and in human hearts too, that are opposite to war. There is a kind of life that is opposite to war, so far as this world allows it to be.
\n
Catching up on @dwalbert’s “Road to Jockey’s Ridge” this morning. Loved this from “The Changeable Woods":
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2024-01-02T12:21:43-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/01/02/catching-up-on.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/12/19/in-this-house.html", "content_html": "I walked the same acre of woods every day for seven years, and a trail by a river almost every week for about that long, and the light of each discovery was, like the stars in the sky, one more pinprick in the vast darkness of my ignorance. I learned enough to feel my way along familiar paths; I had an idea what to expect and when to expect it, but I was often enough surprised. And that was one place. Give me a different forest on a given day, say spruce pine forest on a mountainside in early June, and it’s just a pretty picture again. Having come to know one place over months and years, you may at least sense the changeability of another, merely in passing, even if you don’t understand it. You know, at least, that the snapshot is only a snapshot. You know enough to wonder. But even to know that much requires sustained attention.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2023-12-19T14:21:44-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/12/19/in-this-house.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/11/02/james-hillman-the.html", "content_html": "In this house we say Happy Holidays because even though we celebrate Honda Days, others may celebrate Toyotathon or Lexus December to Remember.
James Hillman, “The Poetic Basis of Mind”:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-11-02T08:05:41-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/11/02/james-hillman-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/10/20/alan-jacobs-if.html", "content_html": "\nBecause symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind–that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listening. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. Just this same attitude is what the soul needs in order to be felt and heard.\nSo it is often little wonder that it takes a breakdown, an actual illness, for someone to report the most extraordinary experiences of, for instance, a new sense of time, of patience and waiting, and in the language of religious experience, of coming to the center, coming to oneself, letting go and coming home.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2023-10-20T09:50:51-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/10/20/alan-jacobs-if.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/10/02/alan-jacobs-wherever.html", "content_html": "\nIf you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated.
\n
\n\nWherever power is, the corrupt will be drawn to it by an irresistible magnetic force. So the only answer is to reduce the scope of power everywhere. That’s why I’m drawn to anarchism.
\n
Precisely this. I see anarchism as necessary for our survival. The only way to a truce in our political and cultural wars is to lower the stakes by spreading power so thinly that no one can gain enough to blow up the world.
\n", "date_published": "2023-10-02T09:23:02-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/10/02/alan-jacobs-wherever.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/09/15/aesop-rock-has.html", "content_html": "Aesop Rock has announced a new album and it looks like he’ll be doing some tech critique. The first release “Mindful Solutionism” indicates that we’re looking at another great album.
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-09-15T11:35:41-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/09/15/aesop-rock-has.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/09/02/erik-davis-sometime.html", "content_html": "\nLandmines, Agent Orange, leaded gas, cigarettes
\n
\nCameras in your favorite corners, plastic in the wilderness
\nWe can not be trusted with the stuff that we come up with
\nThe machinery could eat us, we just really love our buttons
\n\nSometime it really pays off to be a perpetual student of religion and the occult. Travel, especially, can be unexpectedly transfigured if you equip yourself with a well-honed sacred radar, especially one tuned to animist and esoteric frequencies. With this sort of spirit-tech in hand, or in mind, even banal and hyper-touristy environments can pack a spectral punch.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2023-09-02T08:24:33-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/09/02/erik-davis-sometime.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/08/28/martin-shaw-bardskull.html", "content_html": "[… T]he sacred is in the eye of the beholder. I’ve also had convulsive epiphanies at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, the gritty bare-bones ruins of Eleusis, and a James Turrell Skyspace in Seattle. There is a lesson in this for the sacred tourist: the entire earth is filled with portals.
\n
Martin Shaw, Bardskull:
\n\n\nThey say the best way to die is to let go of everything. To lack a centre. To lack self-centre. That if you spent a life putting others first then it’s easier to go. I’m not sure I qualify for that sort of ease, but I think I believe the suggestion. And that’s hard for a pagan romantic. I love attachment, I adore it, I sink my fangs into the rump of attachment. I am sensualist, I am driven, I reach out to the world. And one day I will have to reverse that behaviour.
\n
I liked this section but the book was too opaque for me and I didn’t finish it. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad book; it’s just not for me.
\n", "date_published": "2023-08-28T10:42:07-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/08/28/martin-shaw-bardskull.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/08/27/master-hsueh-as.html", "content_html": "Master Hsueh, as quoted in Road to Heaven by Bill Porter:
\n\n\nYou can learn the basics anywhere. There are books. As to learning the inner secrets, when your practice reaches a certain level, you’ll meet a teacher. But you can’t be in a hurry. You have to be prepared to devote your whole life to your practice. This is what is meant by religion. It’s not a matter of spending money. You have to spend your life. Not many people are willing to do this. If you’re ready to learn, you don’t have to look for a teacher. A teacher will find you. Taoism is very deep. There’s a great deal to learn, and you can’t do it quickly. The Tao isn’t something that can be put into words. You have to practice before you can understand. Lao-tzu teaches us to be natural. You can’t force things, including practice. Understanding is something that happens naturally. It’s different for everyone. The main thing is to reduce your desires and quiet your mind. Practice takes a long time, and you have to stay healthy. If you have a lot of thoughts and desires, you won’t live long enough to reach the end.
\n
Be patient. Be natural. Reduce your desires. Quiet your mind. Stay healthy.
\n", "date_published": "2023-08-27T09:10:40-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/08/27/master-hsueh-as.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/08/26/master-hsieh-as.html", "content_html": "Master Hsieh, as quoted in Road to Heaven by Bill Porter:
\n\n\nLao-tzu said to cultivate tranquillity and detachment. To be natural. To be natural means not to force things. When you act natural, you get what you need. But to know what’s natural, you have to cultivate tranquillity. Huashan has long been famous as a center of Taoism because it’s quiet. There used to be a lot of hermits here But now the mountain has been developed for tourism. The tranquility is gone, and so are the hermits.
\n
In a recent essay, Bob Turner (local Presbyterian pastor) quotes Gordon Hempton (acoustic ecologist) on the difference between silence and quiet:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-08-26T08:06:44-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/08/26/master-hsieh-as.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/08/23/whew-this-is.html", "content_html": "Real quiet is not the absence of sound [which is the definition of silence] but the absence of noise.
\n
Whew, this is good. So much here to think about.
\n\n", "date_published": "2023-08-23T11:48:21-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/08/23/whew-this-is.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/08/21/bill-porter-road.html", "content_html": "I wrote a denunciation of apps.
\n
Bill Porter, Road to Heaven (1993):
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-08-21T07:43:04-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/08/21/bill-porter-road.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/08/09/the-narrow-road.html", "content_html": "One of the mountains we visited was Tailaoshan just inside the northwest tip of Fukien Province. A Buddhist layman we met on the trail led us to a cave where an eighty-five-year-old monk had been living for the past fifty years. In the course of our conversation, the monk asked me who this Chairman Mao was whom I kept mentioning. He said he had moved into the cave in 1939 after the spirits of the mountain appeared to him in a dream and asked him to become the mountain’s protector. He hadn’t been down the mountain since then. Disciples and local villagers brought him the few things he needed. And he didn’t need much: flour, cooking oil, salt, and once every five years or so a new blanket or set of robes. His practice was the name of the Buddha: Amitabha, Buddha of the Infinite.
\n
The Narrow Road to the Deep North:
\n\n\nFinally, I sold my house, moving to the cottage of Sampū for a temporary stay. Upon the threshold of my old home, however, I wrote a linked verse of eight pieces and hung it on a wooden pillar. The starting piece was:
\n\n\nBehind this door
\n
\nNow buried in deep grass,
\nA different generation will celebrate
\nThe Festival of Dolls.
What did the next homeowner do with the paper containing a handwritten verse of Bashō?
\n", "date_published": "2023-08-09T07:34:46-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/08/09/the-narrow-road.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/08/02/andy-couturier-the.html", "content_html": "Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-08-02T07:39:02-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/08/02/andy-couturier-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/07/28/five-remembrances-thich.html", "content_html": "“This is the same fire that burned with the blast from Hiroshima,” Masanori Oe says to me, pointing to a small brass lantern on a table in front of us with a tiny flame burning inside.
\n“This very flame?” I ask, taken aback somewhat.
\n“Yes. It has been kept burning, passed on from person to person to help us each remember what happened that day, and how it must not happen again.” He explains that in August of 1945, a woman who lost her son in the bombing went to the city while it was still burning and, believing that the spirit of her son was inside that flame, captured a bit of fire and brought it to her home a hundred miles away. She kept it burning for more than twenty years, and then passed it on to a Buddhist priest, who decided to make it a symbol of peace, and took the flame on a walking pilgrimage across Japan, burning in a lantern, and passed it on to others, lighting new lanterns for those who would take the flame. “We have it here for some time before we pass it on,” Masanori says.
\n
Five Remembrances (Thich Nhat Hanh version):
\nI used to repeat these every day and I think it might be time to get back to that.
\n", "date_published": "2023-07-28T06:44:48-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/07/28/five-remembrances-thich.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/07/26/anonymous-discord-user.html", "content_html": "Anonymous discord user, speaking the truth:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-07-26T12:39:19-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/07/26/anonymous-discord-user.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/07/07/three-things-that.html", "content_html": "A degree of stillness then a confrontation with the unconscious. A decent into the underworld. These aren’t much mentioned in your HR department’s mindfulness drive.
\n
Three things that (synchronistically?) fell into my world this week:
\n\n\n“Most people spend their time relating entirely to things that are made solely for the purpose of keeping the economy spinning, of making money for someone, such as television and television shows, and eating food that’s not good for them. And to get that money, everyone throws away their own time that was free before, even if the work they do is not useful. Everyone around them thinks it’s natural and normal. Even though they’re incredibly busy on the physical, body level, moving around all the time, they are empty on the level of spirit.”
\n“So why do they do it, do you think?”
\n“Because they don’t stop to consider, Why is it that I as a human am alive?”
\n
\n\nThe soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.
\nAs explained by the greatest of later Platonists, Plotinus, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice–and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.
\nSo that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth and, in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it.
\n
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.356
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-06-12T21:46:51-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/06/12/jung-memories-dreams.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/06/08/jung-memories-dreams.html", "content_html": "It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything that happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.
\n
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.300
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-06-08T09:34:15-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/06/08/jung-memories-dreams.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/06/06/jung-memories-dreams.html", "content_html": "We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a “going beyond all that,” but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives experience a glamor which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should.
\n
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.235:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-06-06T09:19:52-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/06/06/jung-memories-dreams.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/06/04/jung-memories-dreams.html", "content_html": "Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. … Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present.
\n
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p223:
\n\n\nGradually, through my scientific work, I was able to put my fantasies and the contents of the unconscious on a solid footing. Words and paper, however, did not seem real enough to me; something more was needed. I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired. Or, to put it another way, I had to make a confession of faith in stone. That was the beginning of the “Tower,” the house which I built for myself at Bollingen.
\n
![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/56576/2023/f73ba80c61.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2023-06-04T08:23:50-04:00",
"url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/06/04/jung-memories-dreams.html",
"tags": ["Quote posts"]
},
{
"id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/05/31/jung-memories-dreams.html",
"content_html": "Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections p.161:
\n\n\nI was never able to agree with Freud that the dream is a “façade” behind which its meaning lies hidden—a meaning already known but maliciously, so to speak, withheld from consciousness. To me dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or animal seeks its good as best it can. These forms of life, too, have no wish to deceive our eyes, but we may deceive ourselves because our eyes are shortsighted. Or we hear amiss because our ears are rather deaf—but it is not our ears that wish to deceive us
\n
This (unsurprisingly) jives with that Weird Studies podcast I mentioned a few days ago
\n", "date_published": "2023-05-31T07:59:18-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/05/31/jung-memories-dreams.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/05/30/jung-memories-dreams.html", "content_html": "Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.143-144:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-05-30T06:52:17-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/05/30/jung-memories-dreams.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/05/28/lisa-m-rose.html", "content_html": "Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic—that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves. I am speaking of those who can not tolerate the loss of myth and who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.
\n
Lisa M. Rose, Midwest Foraging:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-05-28T08:08:17-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/05/28/lisa-m-rose.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/05/22/jung-memories-dreams.html", "content_html": "The end goal of foraging actually isn’t gathering delicious wild edibles for a meal to grace your table, although it is certainly a great benefit. By adding wild edibles to the table, we start to value the wildness in our city neighborhoods and make space for the wild in our yards, gardens, play areas, parks, and open spaces.
\n
Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-05-22T16:52:12-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/05/22/jung-memories-dreams.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/05/12/william-anderson-green.html", "content_html": "Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition., When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.
\n
William Anderson, Green Man:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-05-12T07:25:40-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/05/12/william-anderson-green.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/04/06/martin-shaw-bardskull.html", "content_html": "\nThe image of the tree that speaks, prophesies or warns seems to express a recurrent need of the soul—something that we can all experience. When we stand beneath a copse of beeches roaring in a high wind, we seem to hear one of the voices of Nature only our innermost being can comprehend. It sends a message that indicates that nothing we claim for ourselves is ours, that the life force that sustains us is as beyond our power to control as the wind is beyond the power of the trees to resist its lashings, and that we are rooted only for a short time in history, far shorter than the lives of the beeches singing and chanting above us. When we surrender our hearts and minds to their sounds, we undergo a purification which is tinged with the feeling of sacrifice and of making holy everything we have been given - a feeling echoed by many of the tinest representations of the Green Man we will come to consider.
\nThe Green Man is the guardian and revealer of mysteries. In his mask form he is linked to the universal significances of the mask which are those of a part in a drama to be taken up and dropped again and of the world of spirits and of what lies behind death. As the disgorger or devourer of vegetation he speaks of the mysteries of creation in time, of the hidden sources of inspiration, and of the dark nothingness out of which we come and to which we return. As the fruit of vegetation, he signifies the mystery of law and intelligence in natural forms and expresses our own instinctive desire to anthropomorphize everything that is beautiful, touching or powerful in the world about us. In all his forms he is the Poet who in revealing mysteries opens up even more wonderful and enticing mysteries beyond the words he speaks.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2023-04-06T07:30:12-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/04/06/martin-shaw-bardskull.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/03/21/jay-owens-morethanhuman.html", "content_html": "\nBecause for the sore awfulness of this century we need more fur, not less.
\nThat’s the root of the trouble: a hairless mind. Hairless mind has us far distant from cormorant and eaglet, from birch bark and anaconda.
\nUnderstand me, there’s a great deal about people I like. There’s a vigorous gleam of the unique in a few. Danger lurks in the observation, but it’s undeniable. But humanness seems truest and most vivid when smeared into the petri dish of the mad-bad-and-beautiful expressions of a wider earth.
\nTo have a bald mind is to have black-magicked yourself away from those wider nerve endings.
\nA pox on the house that brewed that up.
\n
\n\nMore-than-human thinking isn’t just about recognising the near-to-human cleverness of certain animals, but recognising agency and interdependent relations across every kingdom of life, from the single-celled extremophiles known as archaeans, to fungi, animals and plants.
\n
The article mentions several books that have been on my reading list for some time now. This needs to be the year I finally read them.
\n", "date_published": "2023-03-21T09:50:28-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/03/21/jay-owens-morethanhuman.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/03/16/alan-jacobs-the.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-03-16T06:51:07-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/03/16/alan-jacobs-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/02/10/poetry-is-a.html", "title": "Poetry is a bodily art", "content_html": "The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist; it is, rather, the key means by which we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of passions that the people who make our smartphone apps would like to see dominate us.
\n
Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-02-10T10:44:31-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/02/10/poetry-is-a.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/01/18/paul-kingsnorth-on.html", "title": "Paul Kingsnorth on conscientious objection to the Machine", "content_html": "The theory of this guide is that poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.
\nMoreover, there is a special intimacy to poetry because, in this idea of the art, the medium is not an expert’s body, as when one goes to the ballet: in poetry, the medium is the audience’s body. When I say to myself a poem by Emily Dickinson or George Herbert, the artist’s medium is my breath. The reader’s breath and hearing embody the poet’s words. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal, and individual.
\n… I hope to focus on the way an extraordinary system of grunts and mouth-noises evolved by the human primate has been used as the material of art. … I presume that the technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individual life span; to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to express feelings and ideas rapidly and memorably. To share those feelings and ideas with companions, and also with the dead and with those to come after us.
\n
Paul Kingsnorth, saying something similar to my post from yesterday:
\n\n\nThe alternative [to living for the Machine] has always been the same, for millennia, across the world. The alternative is self-denial. It is living within limits, refusing to consume for the Machine, refusing to give the Total System what it wants. It is planting your feet on the ground, living modestly, refusing technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom. It is building a life in which you can see the stars and taste the air. It is to live on the margins, in your home or in your heart: to scatter the pattern. It is to speak truth and try to live it, to set your boundaries and refuse to step over them. It is to be a conscientious objector to the Machine.
\nYou will never do this perfectly, and you should never try. This is not a puritan endeavour. It is a rebellion: a mode of existence-as-resistance. It is hard and messy and ongoing and to even begin it is a victory. To do it alone is a deep achievement; to do it with others, to build a community around it if you can, may help. To understand the nature of the Total System, and then to do what you can in your own life to resist it, and refuse to feed it: this is the work. See it as a crusade to ‘save the world’ and you are doomed; nothing so bombastic can ever be within our power. But see it as an escape hatch and maybe you can begin to reclaim some measure of human freedom.
\n
Also, his reminder that “this is not a puritan endeavour” reminds me of this post where I discussed Jack Leahy’s idea of “hypocritical asceticism”.
\n", "date_published": "2023-01-18T11:13:23-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/01/18/paul-kingsnorth-on.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2023/01/04/excellent-post-by.html", "content_html": "Excellent post by Caroline Ross on the value of small talk:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-01-04T14:07:58-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2023/01/04/excellent-post-by.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/12/23/moving-from-humancenteredness.html", "title": "Moving from human-centeredness to a land ethic", "content_html": "\nAs a form of simple hospitality, a few words about the weather cannot be beaten, they show interest, friendliness, openness to conversation. They put people at their ease. They show we are not above everybody else.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2022-12-23T18:15:13-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/12/23/moving-from-humancenteredness.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/12/08/ideology-is-too.html", "title": "Ideology is too narrow", "content_html": "\nWithin the West’s epochal cultural transformation, [Robinson] Jeffers held a crucial place. Although caught in the terminological limitations bequeathed him by his pantheistic forebears, he was a radical step beyond them. His vision was fundamentally post-Christian, for it was not at all human-centered. He valued wild earth in and of itself, for its own self-realization—not for how it can benefit or inspire humanity. And from this came Jeffers’ earth-based ethics—that we should love the whole, not the human alone—an ethics that led him to say “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.”
\nAldo Leopold’s widely influential “land ethic” (from his essay “The Land Ethic” in The Sand County Almanac, 1949) proposes a philosophical principle consonant with Jeffers’ spiritual vision, locating primary ethical value in ecosystem and earth:
\n\n\nThe land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the [ethical] community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land…
\nIn short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such….
\n…Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of social conscience from people to land.
\nThese principles led Leopold to a concise ethical imperative: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” This is, of course, wild mind acting as integral to wild earth.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2022-12-08T07:21:27-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/12/08/ideology-is-too.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/11/28/jack-leahy-distraction.html", "content_html": "\n[All ideologies seek to] contain the uncontainable cosmos in rational, propositional thought in order to fix it. But the cosmos and the earth are not flawed systems that can be reduced to their atomic parts and then rebuilt perfectly to our own ever-changing and unstable desires. In our attempt, we must reduce the mind-boggling complexity and vastness of reality to a set of knowable propositions. Everything, therefore, will be reduced in order to be comprehended. Therefore it won’t really be comprehended at all.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2022-11-28T08:37:48-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/11/28/jack-leahy-distraction.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/11/18/the-free-range.html", "title": "The “free range fantasy”", "content_html": "\nDistraction is nothing other than a way to avoid, in the short term, the radical discomfort of the necessary spiritual growth beyond this predicament. Distraction is now a very normal way of negotiating life.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2022-11-18T08:50:17-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/11/18/the-free-range.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/10/27/what-feminism-means.html", "content_html": "Another challenge that many of us trying to move into sacred action face is what I call the “free-range fantasy.” In the same way that many people of previous generations were lured into the “white picket fence” narrative in the United States, those interested in sustainable living are often lured into the free-range fantasy today. The narrative goes something like this: You and your perfect partner decide to quit your day jobs, purchase 30 acres in some remote area debt free, and build a fully off-grid homestead complete with solar panels, acres of abundant gardens, fields full of goats, happy free-range chickens, and two cute children covered in strawberry juice. Maybe you do have the opportunity to live off-grid in the circumstances I describe, and if so, you are certainly blessed! However, for most people, the free-range fantasy unfortunately sends the message that the only way to live sustainably is to live by this narrative. I was once trapped by this narrative, sorrowful and depressed that I didn’t have two cute, strawberry-eating children, or a handsome partner, or the ability to go completely off-grid and retire to the land. This made me feel like I was never doing enough because I wasn’t living this vision, rather than recognizing the good work I was doing in terms of sacred action and community building.
\nThe truth is, this narrative can be as problematic as the white picket fence because it limits your vision, and it prevents you from doing something now that helps move into sacred action, rather than dreaming of some far-off thing. Further, if every person wanted 30 acres, we wouldn’t have enough land available for all. Part of sacred action is about living better in the circumstances that make up our current reality, not dreaming of a lifestyle that doesn’t fit our current circumstances. … Everyone, whether living in an apartment, a suburban home, or rural land, will fund much they can do to engage in sacred action.
\n
”What Feminism Means to Me” by @Annie Mueller is excellent:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-10-27T13:10:54-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/10/27/what-feminism-means.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/10/20/luxury-surveillance.html", "title": "Luxury surveillance", "content_html": "\nI could do what I wanted, to a degree, and stay within the community, be part of the tribe. I just had to be okay with the most important parts of me being casually overlooked, ignored, or dismissed.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2022-10-20T14:52:11-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/10/20/luxury-surveillance.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/10/19/animism.html", "title": "Animism", "content_html": "\nThese “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior.
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\n\n\nAnimists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others.
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\n\nAnimism is a belief in the spirit of all things. Animistic views recognize that rivers, stones, trees, animals, human-created objects, and people all have spirits and that those spirits can be worked with, learned from, and honored in various ways.
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Amitav Ghosh, Nutmeg’s Curse as quoted in this interview:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-10-19T06:50:46-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/10/19/animism.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/09/27/choose-reality.html", "title": "Choose reality", "content_html": "\nThis is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.
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\n\n\nI think we’re looking at not one but two futures — a fork in the road for humans in Technopoly. … A few will get frustrated by the fakery, minimize their time on the internet, and move back towards the real. They’ll be buying codex books, learning to throw pots or grow flowers, and meeting one another in person.
\nThe greater number will gradually be absorbed into some kind of Metaverse in which they really see Joe Biden transformed into Dark Brandon or hear Q whisper sweet nothings into their ears.
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\n\n", "date_published": "2022-09-27T12:08:01-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/09/27/choose-reality.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/09/13/the-loss-of.html", "title": "The loss of the night sky", "content_html": "\nReality can be devalued by too much content consumption, especially when it’s content about content. Perhaps we should make sure to give ourselves intentional daily doses of first-order reality, in the same way we try to drink enough glasses of water, in the form of regular nature walks, physical hobbies, and face-to-face conversations.
\nHabits of automatic content consumption, such as always watching movies while you wash dishes, or always cruising Reddit while you go to the bathroom, seem especially dangerous. When those routines involve inexhaustible swiping or scrolling, it may not be inappropriate to consider the habit a properly dangerous one, because reality has so clearly lost the war for your attention in those situations.
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\n\n", "date_published": "2022-09-13T15:04:37-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/09/13/the-loss-of.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/09/13/the-problem-is.html", "title": "The problem is our solutions", "content_html": "\nThere are probably fewer greater illustrations of the alienation from our true human situation than the loss of the night sky. The more our technical civilization grows the brighter its artificial illumination shelters us from knowing where we truly reside. We navigate our brief lives by its lights rather than navigating by the stars. We are obscured from the cosmic situation in which we find ourselves and are befuddled and lost. We are increasingly indoor creatures. Protected by, and addicted to, our comforts and distractions. Lost, many of us without even knowing it, in a functional world broken off from the mystery of Being.
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\n\nThe entire canyon had become blanketed in by fog. No, not fog. Up here it isn’t fog. Up here we are in the clouds. The evening sky had been crystal clear the evening before so this caught me by surprise. There was only the slight hiss of misting rain. A bit of wind. The nocturnal song of insects now hushed. I could hardly even make out the other buildings a few hundred feet beyond me. It was beautiful.
\nThere is indeed something strangely beautiful in not being able to see clearly, or very far. There is something oddly familiar in the familiar becoming obscure. There is comfort in it. The comfort of letting go of the illusion that I can make things clear. And that by that clarity I can make things right. I can’t make things right because it turns out I actually don’t know how to do that. Things aren’t clear. No known effort of my own can change that. I should know by now that my efforts to know and fix the world have resulted in further chaos and less clarity. I am unable to even fix myself. Yet I keep trying and failing at both.
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I liked what I’ve read so far in Leahy’s Substack. I will admit to a bit of wariness about its title “Stillness in the West” because—let’s be honest—religious people talking about The West these days can get ugly. So far so good.
\n", "date_published": "2022-09-13T09:38:07-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/09/13/the-problem-is.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/08/31/what-do-we.html", "title": "What do we hold sacred?", "content_html": "\n\n\nToday I saw a monarch butterfly. It was the only one I have seen this summer, and I am sad. I have been preserving all the milkweed that has been coming up as a weed in my gardens. An insignificant gesture, but for me it is a little prayer.
\nI’ve loved these butterflies ever since I was a boy and my father told me about their migratory journey. In those days there were three kinds of butterflies that frequented our suburban yard—little white ones, little yellow ones, and the monarchs. They fluttered about in great numbers, and I never thought they could ever disappear. …
\nI could end this piece with “practical” proposals about soil regeneration, pesticide bans, wildlife refuges, wetland restoration, and so forth. But again, the problem is not that we don’t know what to do. It lies in what we hold—or do not hold—sacred. So here I will affirm what everyone already knows in their hearts. The monarchs are sacred. The lightning bugs are sacred. Not because they are “indicators” of ecological health. Not just for their “ecosystem services.” They are precious in their own right, beyond all measure. If they are not precious, then what is? As we embrace this truth, we will find the courage to apply the solutions we already know.
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Sallie McFague, Blessed are the Consumers:
\n\n\nEverything is interconnected. Philosopher Bruno Latour has imagined such a world. Its primary characteristic is that there is no “environment,” no external world that is our playfield. Rather, there is “one world,” a cosmos, a totality of things, all of which are “insiders,” members of the collective who have voice. Hence, “we must connect the question of the common world to the question of the common good.” In other words, the two key moral questions are: “How many are we?” and “Can we live together?” Here there is no nature versus human beings, but rather one world; here we must internalize the environment, which we used to think of as “another” world. In this view, when ecological crises arise, they do so as a result of what Latour calls “a generalized revolt of the means”; that is, those parts of the collective whose “voice” has not been heard, who have been utilized solely as means: “no entity—whale, river, climate, earthworm, tree, calf, cow, pig, brood—agrees any longer to be treated ‘simply as a means, but insists on being’ treated also as an end.” This is not sentimental embrace of the lowly creatures whom we have previously abused; rather, it is the hard-headed implication that the world really is one process, which will not work efficiently or productively if its parts are not valued as subjects (in some sense) rather than mere objects.
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Gordon White, Ani.Mystic:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-08-10T07:04:16-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/08/10/there-is-no.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/08/07/god-is-ultimate.html", "title": "God is Ultimate Concern", "content_html": "If you try to define an environment for yourself, you come up with something like “a demarcated area of the natural world and those organisms that inhabit it.” The two main problems there are, firstly, your demarcating lines are never fixed. What could you use? A seashore? They—like everything else—are in a process of continual change. And, secondly, how do you decide what “lives” in these surroundings? Do migratory birds count if they only visit your “environment” for two weeks a year? What about species that lived there during the ice age? If not, what about species that arrived two hundred years ago? What is the cut-off point for citizenship in your environment, when an organism goes from “introduced” to “native”? How many water samples will it take to make the decision of who does or does not belong in your environment? Which collection of materialist-naturalist techniques will be used to determine the excluded, the foreign, the impure?
\nThe whole concept of the environment is a sciencing up of the old imperial idea of Nature as both a delicate and precious woman in need of saving, as well as the audacious fraud that much of Nature can be described as blank, unclaimed “spaces” waiting for European flags to be planted in them.
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A reference post, to define what I mean by God. As to the ontological status of God, I’m undecided – or perhaps more precisely, indifferent.
\nPaul Tillich, The Essential Tillich:
\n\n\nGod is the answer to the question implied in man’s finitude; he is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be concerned about him. It means that whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him, and, conversely, it means that a man can be concerned ultimately only about that which is god for him.
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John Caputo, as quoted by Sallie McFague in Blessed are the Consumers:
\n\n\nThe name of God is the name of what we desire, of everything that we desire, but it is also the name of what desires us, of what desires everything of us. … We are called by God, which is our vocation, even as we call upon God, which is our invocation. We subsist in the space between these calls.
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Mary-Jane Rubenstein, at 8:30 in this video:
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-08-07T09:21:16-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/08/07/god-is-ultimate.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/05/02/harry-marks-and.html", "content_html": "\nThe word “God” has traditionally encoded our deepest values.
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\n\nAnd let’s not forget what everyone brings up when they talk about why “return to office” is so important. “Oh, it’s about collaboration! We have such a great office culture!” What “office culture?” Fluorescent lighting and no privacy? A pizza party in lieu of a proper raise?
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\n\nLet’s not mince words when it comes to discussing the return to the office and what it’s really about: capitalism. The banks have threatened to devalue office properties if the companies leasing them don’t use them. Apple spent billions on a brand new campus and it’ll be damned if people aren’t going to walk its sterile, glass hallways each day.
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Spot on. You should be suspicious whenever certain buzzwords–like “culture”–start getting repeated. That’s a sure sign of ideology and the first thing to ask when you’ve found an ideology is “who does this benefit?” In this case, it benefits those who stand to lose asset value on their balance sheets due to property value markdowns.
\n", "date_published": "2022-05-02T08:55:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/05/02/harry-marks-and.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/04/27/robin-sloan-the.html", "content_html": "\n\n\nThe speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.
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This is most certainly true.
\n", "date_published": "2022-04-27T09:37:00-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/04/27/robin-sloan-the.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2022/04/21/robin-wall-kimmerer.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-04-21T12:55:56-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2022/04/21/robin-wall-kimmerer.html", "tags": ["Quote posts"] } ] }The mosses remember that this is not the first time the glaciers have melted. If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember it to find it again and let it teach us.
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