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.
I love Tom Johnson’s antique restoration channel. This video is one of my favorites because of his range of skills and meticulousness.
There is a certain expectation—picked up from the tourism industry, perhaps—that the ideal place the live is a “beautiful” one, a place with a “view.” It is thought that life would be more full or satisfying when the eye can consume such beauty every day.
Far be it from me to deny the central importance of beauty in human life—but the above expectation seems to be a consumerist expectation, not an aesthetic one. That is, this expectation is one more facet of the consumer economy.
Rootedness is one alternative to the consumerist attitude toward one’s homeplace. Rootedness is an interlacing of people and place with threads of stories. What counts is not the view—though beauty can be found in any beloved place—but the connections built up over the course of a relationship.
Am I saying that rootedness is the only acceptable way to relate to a place? No. There are any number of reasons why people cannot maintain relationships with a place over time. I would say, however, that the consumerist relationship is poisonous. And I do say we should reject the silly stigma attached to someone living in the same place their whole life long. That stigma is born of the consumerist fantasy.
I never tire of opening a new bar of Dr Bronner’s hippie soap and seeing “All-One!” stamped across it.
