We’re in the “path of totality” for the solar eclipse on April 8. I found out this morning that IU is cancelling classes across the state and holding an event with William Shatner. I find this hilarious and adorable.

I slip into sleep naming gratitudes:
A litany against fear.
Night-voices may wake and shake me,
But I’m learning not to hear.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (p158):

Sometimes, a haunted old woman, I wander about in this house that Nathan and I renewed, that is now aged and worn by our life in it. How many steps, wearing the thresholds? I look at it all again. Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift.

I’ve heard it said that grief is the price of love, and that seems true to me. Love is a great risk; only the indifferent are safe. But what good is such safety?

Snow day at the Abel house! Green Man’s Grotto is chilly.

Is there a mechanical need for motorcycles to be revved or are these men who feel like their voices are not being heard?

“Why return-to-office mandates fail”

Remote work can be productive if managers are willing to adapt. Problem is, too many managers are unwilling to do so. (Can’t remember where I came across this article, so apologies if I’m not giving one of you credit.)

So, my daughter has an interest in doing some volunteer work before college–both in order to get some life experience and figure out what she’d like to do. Something like the Peace Corps. Does anyone know of good organizations or resources to find such organizations? Can be domestic or overseas.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter:

There can be places in this world, and in human hearts too, that are opposite to war. There is a kind of life that is opposite to war, so far as this world allows it to be.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter:

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room [of love]. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

… No big happiness came to me yet, but little happinesses did come, and they came from ordinary pleasures in ordinary things: the baby, sunlight, breezes, animals and birds, daily work, rest when I was tired, food, strands of fog in the hollows early in the morning, butterflies, flowers. The flowers didn’t have to be dahlias and roses either, but just the weeds blooming in the fields, the daisies and the yarrow. I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.

Our little pond is mostly frozen now, except where a little water flows. I wonder if Nessie is still there.