I got a bit aggressive while sanding off the old finish and it introduced a waviness to one side of the table, which became obvious after I applied a finish. Today I’m going to sand that down and try again. My goal for this weekend is to completely finish the table and get started on the chairs.

There are several sparrows dustbathing among the flowers and sitting in the shade of the grape arbor right now. This’ll do.

I updated my Sanity Project page. This page is the story of our garden, from 2020 onward. Today I updated the page from Fall 2022 to the end of this past winter. Also updated the “future plans” section.

I had forgotten about the Twitter house style until I recently followed some folks on Mastodon via micro.blog. The silly non sequiturs. The heavy irony. The cliches. All very jarring. I unfollowed them, inwardly thanked @manton for micro.blog, and went back to reading folks with uncolonized brains

Isn’t this some beautiful kale and chard?

I really like this working definition of enchantment from R.G. Miga:

Enchantment is the process of creating and sustaining a symbolic interface that corresponds to one or more hyperobjects, in order to generate participatory consciousness.

He applies this to the Green Man (a figure that those have followed my blog for a while will know is important to me):

Growth is a hyperobject. It’s non-local, molten, phased, inter-objective, and viscous. Like gravity, Growth is familiar and necessary at human scale—but becomes horrifying and monstrous in its totality. We recognize that life depends on Growth at a measured pace; when it tips into a blind force, we instinctively recoil from it. Growth brings the corn up in the fields. Growth is also cancer. Growth is the visceral unease of being in the dense jungle, surrounded by a billion grasping mouths, all indifferent to anything but the pursuit of more. Our own Growth as a species keeps our children alive and safe, while cutting a broad swathe of murder and destruction across the planet. Time-bound humans have a hard time experiencing Growth as anything other than an acceleration toward Decay, its terminal opposite. And depending on which physicists you believe—Growth will eventually tear apart the fabric of the universe.

Something like the Green Man could be seen as a symbolic interface that enables participatory consciousness with the hyperobject of Growth. The symbolic representation of the Green Man is, at once, a human face consumed by vegetal growth and vegetal growth itself, anthropomorphized.

… Establishing a participatory consciousness with the Green Man allows us to relate to Growth at a human scale: by understanding some of what it wants (its telos), forgiving its excesses, and finding ways of cooperating with it.

Miga’s earlier essay, which is referred to in this one, is also worth reading.

The opening line of “Carmel Point” by Robinson Jeffers has been on my mind recently: “The extraordinary patience of things!”

Dear old Robin can be crotchety. In fact, he can be downright misanthropic. I sympathize.

But his vision was framed by what we’d now call deep time. Within this frame, human affairs seemed frivolous, and humanity evanescent. He’s been described as a nature poet. I’d call him Gaian. He doesn’t merely appreciate landscapes; he perceives the intelligence of the cosmos.

In “Carmel Point”, he describes Gaia as an unhurried, indifferent observer of frenetic human building. She knows all these housing developments will soon enough crumble into the sea.

If we adopt a similarly long view, he says, we will find our confidence. Anxiety is everywhere because confidence is gone and confidence is gone because we have become locked into the short term. We cannot see into the future.

To be fair, the short term is gloomy. And, furthermore, we may go extinct at any point. But what does that matter, really? We are at the service of life, for whatever time life grants us. Life will continue, in one form or another, for many aeons to come. This is enough.

I find myself in the strange situation that if I want to have any idea of what is going on with my friends and neighbors and community events and local news, I’m going to have to open a Facebook account again. Everyone around here is fully invested there.

I did finally get the finish right on the leaf and now I’m stripping the table itself. I know it’s better to restore than refinish but it really was in bad shape—flaking finish and scratched all over. Besides, this is a working table, not a museum piece.

On a human scale, nationalism is no better than globalism.