Happy 132nd birthday, J.R.R. Tolkien!
My wired headphones went through the washer AND dryer and still work. And even if they didn’t I’d only be out $20. Take that, AirPods!
Catching up on @dwalbert’s “Road to Jockey’s Ridge” this morning. Loved this from “The Changeable Woods":
I walked the same acre of woods every day for seven years, and a trail by a river almost every week for about that long, and the light of each discovery was, like the stars in the sky, one more pinprick in the vast darkness of my ignorance. I learned enough to feel my way along familiar paths; I had an idea what to expect and when to expect it, but I was often enough surprised. And that was one place. Give me a different forest on a given day, say spruce pine forest on a mountainside in early June, and it’s just a pretty picture again. Having come to know one place over months and years, you may at least sense the changeability of another, merely in passing, even if you don’t understand it. You know, at least, that the snapshot is only a snapshot. You know enough to wonder. But even to know that much requires sustained attention.
Skillful use of music in movies can heighten the mood to such an intense degree. Aren’t you glad your life doesn’t have a soundtrack? Allows for a certain obliviousness…
I made a New Year’s lucky lunch of sausage and sauerkraut and black eyed peas. I got choked on it. Gonna be a good year!
Some day trips I want to make in 2024:
- Prophetstown state park in Lafayette
- Turkey Run and Clifty Falls state parks, because they’re always worth visiting
- In 2023 I made a trip through New Harmony and then east along the Ohio River to Troy. This year I’d like to start at the other end of the Ohio and move west back to the center.
- Visit some of the notable trees in Magnificent Trees of Indiana
- More cemeteries, of course.
For various reasons, I didn’t spend as much time in the woods as I would have wished in 2023. I hope that will change in 2024. I’ve picked up my state park pass at the Spring Mill gatehouse in preparation.
The second trimming of the tree. For the next few days the tree will be another food source for the birds as the remaining needles drop as mulch for Green Man’s Grotto.
It is said that God is able to witness the multi-faceted suffering of the world, hear the prayers of its desperate creatures, and remain, nevertheless, eternally beatific.
Whatever your opinion of the ontological status of God, one thing is certain: we are not God.
The quantity of data created each day is staggering.
Data flow at these levels can only be managed by a vast infrastructure of computing machines. Not even the creators of algorithms and large language models fully understand what is going on inside their creations.
No organic life can be expected to survive undamaged when it is jacked into information moving at this velocity.
We are not God. We are not machines. We are organic life facing a destabilizing year. (Particularly those bits of organic life on Turtle Island.) Organic life requires rest. Organic life requires ebb and flow, creation and destruction—it requires cycles. Organic life cannot—must not!—be always on. Organic life needs to shit in peace and quiet.
As we face a time of uncertainty and increasing demands on our attention, we need to decide now: will we pretend to be God, who can see and know all with perfect love and equanimity? Will we imagine our minds to be made of silicon, capable of handling the endless flow of data? Or will we accept ourselves as organic life: limited, frail, and worthy of peace and compassion, come what may?
Has anyone read Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale? I had a nice copy of that book that I acquired from Caveat Emptor in Bloomington many years ago—but at some point I sold it or gave it away. What a poor decision! And, obviously, I never read it.