When we first began our garden in 2020, we intended it not only as a collection of pretty flowers and vegetables but as a flourishing habitat. One of the keystones of that habitat is our tiny wildlife pond. We were amazed at how quickly life starting showing up in it; even larger critters started drinking from it regularly.

This is Morty. He’s a raggedy neighborhood cat who first showed up last winter to drink from our pond. He disappeared by the spring and then returned a few weeks ago, again to drink from the pond during the late summer drought. This time, though, he seems to have decided to stay.  

Rachel was the first to notice that he is blind in one eye and hard of hearing. That combined with his shagginess makes us think he’s pretty old. After he started showing up every day and laying by the pond, Rachel named him Morty and started feeding him. While he never lets us get near him, he has stopped running every time we go outside.

He’s almost always by the pond, either napping or watching whatever is going on in it. At first we were concerned he would kill a bird, but he doesn’t seem to have enough energy for that.

Our garden is only peaceful if you’re an apex predator—but that cycle of life and death is part of the deal when you’re trying to build a flourishing habitat. I’m glad Morty is spending some part of that cycle in our backyard.

We’re finished with the floors for today. Now I’m sitting here in this upset of furniture waiting on Rachel and Darcy. There’s the most delicious breeze, stirring the wind chimes into a sound like singing bowls. All originating in a ferocious, deadly hurricane 750 miles south of here.

Two rooms ready for sanding. Both have a rectangular section in the middle with an older finish. Like something semi-permanent was there at one time and someone finished the floor around it. A mystery. Also, we’ll replace that plywood patch by the window with some good flooring cut from a closet.

You never know what you’ll find when you pull up the carpet on a 114 year old house. Someone covered a hole with a peanut lid. We plan to leave it; the bookshelves will cover it anyway.

We’re pulling out the carpet in the front half of the house today. In every project Rachel and I have worked on she has three essential tools: needle nosed pliers, a crowbar, and a butter knife. If it can’t be done with one of those three, she says, it doesn’t need to be done.

Rachel is repainting the front half of our house. All the books (plus some records and CDs) had to be moved to the dining room. Quite a pile! I’ll be taking this opportunity to thin the collection and rearrange them before reshelving when the project is done.

We are five days from “pencils down” on the audit. It’s been a tough one. No problems, just a lot lot lot of detailed questions and follow-ups. My plan is to have a few four day weeks followed by a week off in October. Then we replace our general ledger about a month from now. Shew.

I won’t pretend that I have a sophisticated understanding of AI or a nuanced idea of where and how it can be safely used. I do, however, have some principles that will guide my own personal approach to the technology. And, unsurprisingly, they can be found in a passage from Wendell Berry (from Life is a Miracle):

And so I would like to be as plain as possible. What I am against–and without a minute’s hesitation or apology–is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

Creatures before machines. That’s the crux of it for me. Machines are useful tools, but the health of creatures is far, far more important. We are in the age of unconstrained machines and we creatures are suffering for it.

And in this age of unconstrained machines, the old boundary markers are unimportant. What matters now is not whether you are liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or atheist or pagan. What matters now is this: are you on the side of life or are you a servant of machines? As a leftist pagan, I find more in common with some traditionalist conservatives than I do with mainstream liberals–despite having more agreement with them on the traditional political topics. Many mainstream liberals seem perfectly content to serve the machines and nod sedately along with whatever the “realist” technocrats say is necessary.

Creatures before machines.

Creatures before machines.

Creatures before machines.

Righteousness is a hell of a drug.