Having a really good time reading Neil Gaiman again. Right now I’m making my way through his short story collection Fragile Things.
Alan Jacobs makes an excellent suggestion, which I plan to implement:
You can also listen to music, ideally music not served up to you algorithmically. Buy one CD or vinyl record per month and listen to it all the way through, multiple times. Retrain your attention.
Hobbit Day is 33 days away
By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed) – Gandalf came by. Illustration by Maurice Sendak
How to be a good ancestor
Roman Krznaric’s TED talk: It’s time for humankind to recognize a disturbing truth: we have colonized the future. In wealthy countries, especially, we treat it like a distant colonial outpost where we can freely dump ecological damage and technological risk as if there was nobody there. We have colonized the future because we are leaving our ecological and technological problems for future generations to solve. We burden them with our problems and constrain their ability to create their own future.
What if climate change doesn’t kill us?
Charles Eisenstein makes an important point here: My main message to the environmental movement is to shift the narrative away from our own destruction. From “Change or we won’t survive,” to “Change or we will continue to lose what is beautiful and sacred.” It is a shift into love. This is important for three reasons: two practical and one spiritual What if (if!) the threat from climate change has been overstated, especially by those who have fallen prey to the imperatives of social media to drive engagement through hype and fear?
The end of the my audiobook era
And, with that, a ten plus year relationship with Audible has come to an end. Since I started working remotely in 2020, I just don’t listen to audiobooks anymore. Before the pandemic, 45% of all the books I read were audiobooks – that’s easy to do when your commute is 1.5hrs per day. It feels like the end of an era. Audiobooks and me go much further back than my Audible subscription.
Daily Dracula has been such a fun way to read the novel. And now the action is building up as we approach Halloweentide! Halloweentide begins, in our house, the day after Labor Day. Also, I know that it’s called Allhallowtide in the Christian tradition but this is our personal holiday. 😄
Ridiculously cute frog actually sitting on a lily pad in Green Man’s Grotto. Maybe he’s admiring the hyacinthh bloom.
Principles of Permaculture
A reference post. From Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden: The aim of permaculture is to design ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethics: caring for Earth, caring for people, and reinvesting the surplus that this care will create. From these ethics stem a set of design guidelines or principles, described in many places and in slightly varying forms. The list below is the version I use, compiled with the aid of many permaculture teachers and flowing from the work of Mollison, Holmgren, and their coauthors.
“The Reassurer” by Wendell Berry
A people in the throes of national prosperity, who breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat poisoned food, who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons that they breathe, drink, and eat, such a people crave the further poison of official reassurance. It is not logical, but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore their President who tells them that all is well, all is better than ever. The President reassures the farmer and his wife who have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have exhausted themselves to pay for it, and not have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the prosperity of corporations; he consoles the Navajos, who have been exiled from their place of exile, because the poor land contained something required for the national prosperity, after all; he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a substance used in the normal course of national prosperity to make red apples redder; he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of the floor of a mined-out stripmine; from his smile they understand that the fortunate have a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have a right to their misfortunes, and that these are equal rights.