Rachel and I went out to the nightmarescape that is our backyard in the dark after the rain. Slugs and snails everywhere, even eating each other. Enormous nightcrawlers that dive lightning-quick into the soil. Pill bugs everywhere. All doing good work, but goodness it was a bit of a horror show. 😄
A crow has showed up in our backyard a few times now to eat seed. We’re that much closer to our goal of making friends with a corvid…
“How Jung and Tolkien Tapped into the Collective Unconscious”
One of my finds from my Friday drive was a Stanley no. 80 cabinet scraper. $15, which I thought was a pretty good price for one in such good condition. There was minor rusting on the hardware that came right off after a few hours in vinegar. Replacement blade coming from Lee Valley Tools.
Wonderful, ten minute documentary about the Zuni Map Project—an art project to “depict the topography of myth, memory, and prayer embedded in the land, returning a tool of power to a space of connection.”
I made a frame for a scanned copy of the Civil War letter from an ancestor.
I’m on the road today—driving from Salem to Paoli to French Lick to Loogootee, looking for old tools in junk shops and flea markets. Listening to the Why We Drive audiobook, appropriately enough.
Beautiful lavender. Also, the grapes are doing something new! Turns out they’re flowering. What I noticed before were not actually grapes but flower blooms. (Which I would have know had I thought about it a bit more carefully. What can I say? I was excited.)
OFA on how to garden vertically. Because of our limited space, we’re trying to do more of this. For example, this year we put up a PVC arch on which we’ll grow some cucumbers and melons. We already have a pergola for the grapes and honeysuckle. The malabar spinach will be growing up a fan shaped trellis. And we’re going to try a three sisters planting again this year, where pole beans climb corn stalks. (It didn’t do well last year, we theorize, because 1. we planted it too late and 2. corn doesn’t like raised beds.) As Adam Savage says, “there’s always room on the z-axis.”
Pleasure and pain, love and death, exist in an unresolved and irresolvable tension with one another. For the Preacher, only God is whole, and so we should seek God, not the broken and partial satisfactions of this life. The nihilist is a disappointed moralist, one who has given up on any principle of unity by which the broken fragments of existence can be brought together, save their negation. Thus at the heart of the nihilist’s cosmos is an endless blank void where God used to be. For Wotan, though, a principle of unity is never sought and so is never missed. To everything there is a season (a biblical line that Wotan could probably get behind), a season for each broken and unreconciled aspect of existence, and those seasons cycle endlessly. To a certain sort of mind this is a dismal prospect, an unmeaning cycle that grinds on forever. Such a mind needs a “higher purpose,” a telos, a meaning to it all, an ending to “redeem” or “transcend” the cycle. Such a mind wants a cure for the human condition. Wotan accepts the human condition as it is. He is the human condition. He is the human condition in the form of a god. There is no “cure” for him: he is enough.