Jack Leahy: There 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.
Jack Leahy: The 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.
Charles Eisenstein: Today 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. I’ve loved these butterflies ever since I was a boy and my father told me about their migratory journey.
Sallie McFague, Blessed are the Consumers: Everything 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.
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. Paul Tillich, The Essential Tillich: God 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.
And 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?
Let’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.
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.
The 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.
This is most certainly true.
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.
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice.
There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale.
But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.
Self-imposed rules aren’t constraints, they’re good decisions made in batches.
That is a smart line.