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.
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.
French Lick trolley
Lunch at the West Baden Springs Hotel
I have an longstanding interest in what could be called alternative modes of living. Examples: Hermits Tiny houses Permaculture food forests In fact, I participated in an alternative mode of living by growing up in a radically fundamentalist Christian church that practiced separation from the world through strict rules for living. (When Rachel and I married we had neither wedding rings nor a television!) Having lived through experiences of what can only be called religious abuse, I believe I possess some clarity about the dangers of these exercises.
Dave Danielson @ddanielson has a good post on the choices presented by a lot of writing about smartphone use: The choice of device is not an all or nothing proposition, but is often presented that way. We can choose our own level of engagement with a device, and govern our behavior to use a device as we choose. This is also useful to think about in the context of the NYT article on Luddite teens shared by Patrick Rhone.
Wendell Berry, “Word and Flesh” in What Are People For?: The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence—that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.