This is the final letter for my part of Jason Becker’s Letters project. Be sure to follow the rest of the project this year at Jason’s blog. Thank you very much to Jason for allowing me to take part in this. Week one. Week two. Week three. Week four. Dear Jason, Yes, it’s definitely hard to do anything outside during winter. To be fair, though, winter here in the southern half of the state isn’t all that bad.
Very wet here today. Poor squirrel at the feeder is soaked. Wind is whistling. It feels like we’re back in winter. But that’s what March is like around here: windy and stormy.
Thinking about this post from @patrickrhone tonight so I compared a cross section of end grain from leftover trim for our 1910 house with a modern 2x6. What a difference!
Important for the work I do: The difference between old growth wood and new growth wood. Via The Hammock Papers
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.
“The Sun is Alive, and Why That Matters” by Charles Eisenstein. Interesting case for the aliveness of the sun, without making “aliveness” an extra-material property.
I’m late cross-posting this fourth in a continuing series of letters with Jason Becker. Week one. Week two. Week three. Dear Jason, It’s interesting how we can both have the same goal, i.e., the preservation of the natural world, and such different paths to get there. (A point, as you say, that we’d do well to remember with human relationships also!) It would seem that in our visions of the future, you would have a healthy planet with pockets of humanity minimizing their impact of the world around them while I would have humanity more diffused but integrated with their ecosystems.
Progress picture on the bookshelf. I’m waiting to cut the joint for the bottom shelf until I get the trim (the width of which will determine where the bottom shelf sits). I’m the slowest woodworker ever!
I’m just not built for the hour-long TV dramas; I’m more of a “rewatch favorite sitcoms over and over” sort of guy. Over the years I’ve only ever really finished and enjoyed Mad Men and Deadwood. And only one do I absolutely love: Penny Dreadful. I even bought the DVD set.
Never has anyone complained about the neighbors so beautifully. (This is Jeffers, if you couldn’t guess.)
