Today I learned that “archeology” is an alternate spelling for “archaeology.” And the strange thing is that one website says the former is the American spelling while the latter is the British. As far as I can recall, I have never seen the former spelling used until today. What about you?

Rachel and I went on our first foraging expedition today and came home with a bagful of wood sorrel, which we added to green smoothies.

Really good Weird Studies episode on dreams, the underworld, and James Hillman. Appropriately enough, I listened to most of it during today’s walk in the cemetery.

This is cool: collage artist turns a corner store into an art experience. Things like this can only happen with local shops. Walmart and Dollar General will never do this.

Been playing with the bird sound identification feature of Merlin Bird ID this morning. We’re in town so we have a bit more limited variety of birds. It’s correctly identified the usual cast of characters:

• European starlings
• House sparrow
• American robin
• Chimney swift
• Northern cardinal
• Mourning dove
• House finch

If you’re still holding out hope that renewable energy is the future, you might want to read this.

Dougald Hine:

The fossil economy breaks the possibility of such a cycle [of human reciprocity with other living things]. How many million years of dying in the forests and seas of the ancient world go into one generation of living the way we have been doing around here lately? How could our lives ever be worthy of so much death? What could we possibly give back? And what would giving back even mean, when all that dying happened in the deep past of geological time? Committed to dependence on these vast underground reserves of death, the only response that remains is to silence such questions, to extinguish the ways of living which embody them, to make them unthinkable.

It’s as if we’ve discovered some powerful necromancy and we now we need a taboo on the practice. How is such a taboo established? How is it taught and enforced?

Goia says, “I’d pay more for trust.” What about those without discretionary income? Also, the trust crisis with regard to the tech companies means they have too much power. Nobody should have so much power that their ability to distort reality represents a crisis.

Following up on my previous post, it’s worth noting that he regards this as a counsel of perfection on the order of “love one another”, that is to say, ideals to be striven after even if never fully attained. Counsels of perfection, of course, bring monastic vows to mind. A lot to think about here.

The heart of Jeffers’ Inhumanist philosophy is the turn away from the human, toward the nonhuman. A shift in the locus of value and attention. From his preface to Double Axe:

Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity. This is not a slight matter, but an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity.