A couple of cops had a car stopped in front of our house last night around 2am. Probably a drug arrest, since they were searching the car. First thing I thought: they’d better not run because they’ll end up stepping on one of our plants. Thankfully, they did not.
Soon I will be well again. I’m a patient man because I was trained to that end. Woodworking, as with all hand crafts, demands that we live and work within the parameters of our human limitations.
I love this: “I’m a patient man because I was trained to that end.” Patience is often seen as a sort of inborn trait: you either have it or you don’t. This, however, reminds us that patience is trainable, particularly as a result of long attentiveness to a craft.
It’s May Day and you know what that means around here, don’t you? Watching Wicker Man! I’ll be working from home this afternoon so I’ll be playing it then.
Rachel and I have been complaining about these “whole body deodorant” commercials (which of course target women). You know what? You’re a biological organism interacting with the real world of heat and microorganisms. You’re gonna smell a little funny. It’s fine. Don’t believe marketing bullshit.
Finished reading Sourdough and The Suitcase Clone by Robin Sloan. I liked Sourdough even more than Mr Penumbra. All the books were good fun. Next up: Why We Drive by Matthew Crawford, because @tinyroofnail won’t leave me alone about it. ;)
Letter from C.G. Jung:
Dear Frau V.,
Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.
It may seem, from the infant’s point of view, that he’s achieving something. But in fact, the mother is doing almost all the work. However, the reactions of that infant are part of the birth process. He doesn’t have to know what to do, though. But if you were a stillbirth, the birth would be a lot harder. So the aliveness of the baby being born is actually helpful to the birth process. And the same is true of our aliveness. And all of our anguished desperate and hopeful attempts are futile attempts to invent rituals and invent myths. They do not create the real rituals and the real myths that we will live in. But they are part of the creation of the rituals and the myths that we will live in.
I don’t subscribe to that many newsletters/substacks/etc. but it’s clearly too many, judging by the unread email in my inbox. New rule: if I don’t consistently read it immediately (or at least want to), unsubscribe.
I mentioned over the weekend that a tree frog has been hanging out at our pond, calling late into the night. (Click that link for audio.) He’s at it again this morning. It’s a wonderful sound, one of those I would describe as homey. Other examples: chicken chatter, the chorus of crickets and katydids on summer nights.
I suspect our frog is a Cope’s Gray tree frog, both because of the sound of its call and because our DNR says it’s more likely here in southern Indiana.
I don’t recall hearing tree frogs here in our neighborhood until we put in our wildlife pond two years ago. I may be misremembering. Maybe it’s that I’m paying more attention, now that we’re more engaged with trans-species collaboration and increasing relatedness on this small, city lot. I hope that we are creating an increasingly diverse and thriving niche. Even if we’re not changing the world, or even our city block, we’re (to link to myself one last time) changing the world inside our heads–and that’s not nothing.
There’s a frog at our pond and he’s talking to some neighbors. I think it’s a gray tree frog. Here’s hoping for tadpoles soon.