Distraction 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.
Posts in: Quote posts
The “free range fantasy”
Dana O’Driscoll: 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.
”What Feminism Means to Me” by @Annie Mueller is excellent:
I 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.
Luxury surveillance
Chris Gilliard: These “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.
Animism
Graham Harvey: Animists 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. Dana Driscoll: Animism 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.
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings:
“Bilbo used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’”
Choose reality
Alan Jacobs: I 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. The 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.
Wendell Berry, “Family Work”:
Children, no matter how nurtured at home, must be risked to the world. And parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary, and not altogether possible.
The loss of the night sky
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.
The problem is our solutions
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.