Excellent video of bobcats roaming the nature preserves stewarded by Sycamore Land Trust here in southern Indiana. (Sycamore is a great organization. Their properties are gems.)
My extraordinary wife Rachel has recorded a cover of “Oh Yeah by the Way”, a song from our favorite band Over the Rhine. It’s a very sad song to which she has attached some happy family pictures. đ She also has other covers there. And a few Battlefront videos.
Keep asking yourself: What sort of person do I want to be? You may fail to reach your goal. No one may ever notice your efforts. What you must not do, however, is allow others to steer your life, thoughts, decisions in directions that are in theirânot yourâinterests.
When I saw that @ayjay was reading Matthew B. Crawfordâs book Why We Drive, it inspired me to revisit Crawfordâs Shop Class as Soulcraft, particularly since Iâve started woodworking this year. I read the original article when it came out in 2006 (seventeen years ago!) and was thrilled by it and the book that followed. Rather than completing the re-read, though, Iâm moving on to The Word Beyond Your Head, which may be more relevant to what Iâve been thinking about lately.
The open future of the Tao
In Hunger Mountain, David Hinton describes the Taoist cosmology as it developed in ancient China as a âspiritual ecologyâ in which the Cosmos is divided into two elements: Presence/Being and Absence/Nonbeing. Presence is simply the empirical universe, which the ancients described as the ten thousand living and nonliving things in constant transformation; and Absence is the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges, although it should not be conceived in a spatial sense, as if there were a pool of emptiness somewhere in the universe.
I finished a wooden mallet today with some scrap leather on the ends. Itâs very amateurish but I am an amateur.
Okay I’m turning on this activity pub thingy that links to mastodon in some magical way I don’t understand. A few of the folks I used to talk with on Twitter several years ago are on mastodon now. (If you’re one of those and don’t recognize me, I used to be @eatingwords.)
Ted Gioia’s eight techniques for evaluating someone’s character. A solid list. Perhaps the most interesting to me is his first: “Forget what they sayâinstead look at who they marry.” Also, his second and fifth are common enough ideas but I believe that’s because they are indeed revealing.
Paul Kingsnorth on conscientious objection to the Machine
Paul Kingsnorth, saying something similar to my post from yesterday: The alternative [to living for the Machine] has always been the same, for millennia, across the world. The alternative is self-denial. It is living within limits, refusing to consume for the Machine, refusing to give the Total System what it wants. It is planting your feet on the ground, living modestly, refusing technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom.
Refusing Empire, telling a new story
One of the main goals of the functionaries of Empire is to bring everything and everyone into the imperial system. Totalization is, in fact, the motivating impulse behind Empire. Empire has a remarkable ability to assimilate threats to the system. Protest movements turn into think tanks. Rebels become a marketing segment. Empire will validate your criticism as a healthy expression of free speech and award you with a position guaranteed to shut you up by paying you off.