The song “Morning’s Here” from Friends is how I actually feel about mornings.
Greg Moore riffing on the litany against fear in order to make a point about new year resolutions. I posted my own thoughts about resolutions last year.
We just started watching “Somebody Feed Phil” and the dude is like the Mr. Rogers of food and travel TV.
I’ve been listening to Colter Wall’s “Western Swings & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs” on repeat for days now. This is proper country music. Favorite song: “Big Iron”. Rachel (who is the real country music fan in the family) thought she had heard it before and figured out it was a cover of Marty Robbins. Superior to the original, in my opinion.
The most important book I read this year: Wild Mind, Wild Earth
David Hinton’s new book is an exploration and treatment of the wound deep in our culture—the illusion of separateness from the natural world. Our Greek and Christian cultural inheritance tells us that we are spirit-centers standing outside and above our fellow-travelers on the planet and our truly important kinship is with the divine, immaterial world. The result has been climate change, deforestation, pollution, mass extinction, and the malaise within humans themselves.
The now-time of the hands
Caroline Ross: When we cannot touch, cannot be held, do not regularly make things with our hands, work so hard that we do not have time to press seeds into the ground in a garden, nor to sew the button back on our shirt, which is so cheaply made we throw it away rather than invest our precious finger-tip-time, which anyway we must keep sacred for our devices… We no longer settle into the never ending now-time of the hands.
Moving from human-centeredness to a land ethic
David Hinton: Within 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.
Today’s solstice celebration food: Swedish meatball soup and pistachio drop cookies. Both highly recommended!
Happy winter solstice! I went into the woods yesterday intending to cut a larger Yule log from a downed tree but working with a hand saw lowers your expectations. 😂
“Ten Theses on Intergenerational Stewardship” by Prince Michael zu Salm-Salm, a German aristocrat committed to long-term care of the land. I don’t hold with aristocracy but this is worth reading.