I’m going to have to make this pine needle soda. Easy and, according to Old Farmers Almanac, more vitamin C than orange juice.

There aren’t many videos on the Daoist Foundation’s YouTube channel but I was impressed by the one I watched over the weekend: Lundao 1: The Daoist Tradition. I plan to make my way through the rest. Their site also has a lot of good resources.

Amazing story (via @ayjay) on newly discovered ways that redwoods survive fire. We went on Tom’s Muir Woods walking tour in 2022. He told us that redwoods are practically immortal, if only humans would stop screwing things up.

Daniel Immerwahr, via @tinyroofnail:

If small, rugged farms have not filled the countryside, what has? … For the past century, rural spaces have been preferred destinations for military bases, discount retail chains, extractive industries, manufacturing plants, and real-estate developments.

Yup, about right. The small town I live in depends economically upon a Navy installation, a GM plant, a cement plant, and Indiana University. The Ford/Visteon plant closed in 2007, and its space was filled with defense contractors. There are seven Dollar Generals within a ten minute drive.

We have reached that point in the annual audit that I feel like an old-timey telephone switchboard operator during a gossip emergency.

Look, I’m glad people are re-discovering HP Lovecraft but some of us have been living in fear of malevolent gods from the briny deep for a while now.

Viktor Frankl: Idealists are the true realists.

A little Solstice berry gathering along the Milwaukee Trail

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.