Excellent post by Caroline Ross on the value of small talk:
As a form of simple hospitality, a few words about the weather cannot be beaten, they show interest, friendliness, openness to conversation. They put people at their ease. They show we are not above everybody else.
Looks interesting: Sonorous Desert by Kim Haines-Eitzen š This, of course, interests me because of my ongoing fascination with monks and hermits as well as the practice of silence in general. Discovered via Erik Davis' newsletter.
This looks good: Repair Revolution by John Wackman š I do try to repair as much as I can. Sometimes I think Iāve gotten kinda okay at itāand then I have a day like today when a DIY project caused a problem that cost a chunk of money. All part of the process, I guess.
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 āSomebody Feed Philā 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.
David Hintonās new book is an exploration and treatment of the wound deep in our cultureāthe 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.
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 devicesā¦ We no longer settle into the never ending now-time of the hands.
David Hinton: Within the Westās 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-realizationānot for how it can benefit or inspire humanity. And from this came Jeffersā earth-based ethicsāthat we should love the whole, not the human aloneāan ethics that led him to say āIād sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.