My book trimming station…
Smaller Is Beautiful :: Essays On Attention Paid
Presently, there is a crisis among the men and women of the mostly white patriarchy in my country. They are refusing to make room for people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people. They are insisting on extreme restrictions to the rights of women to manage their fertility. They are unwilling to make themselves smaller to be part of something larger.
From this morning’s walk…
There is also a crisis in our global economic system which is incapable of constraining itself to be in a sound relationship with the planet we depend on. A pathological relationship emerges when one part of a whole insists on being bigger at the continuous expense of other parts of the whole.
Apparently I was equal parts productive and creative with my screen time yesterday, and only a little bit distracted by social media…
Smaller Is Beautiful :: Essays On Attention Paid
To be in an intimate relationship, we necessarily have to make ourselves smaller in many ways. We have to make room for that other person. It’s not considerate to leave our clothes strewn all over the bedroom or our dishes undone in the sink, or to expect whatever we want whenever we want it. We have to make ourselves smaller to be in that intimate relationship. But, as most of us have experienced, there is great benefit to being in a good relationship.
Did you know that the two most reliable predictors of intelligence are reaction time and color discernment?
The reality is there’s no justification for today’s extraordinary concentration of wealth at the very top. Or for how little people at the bottom are paid.
Are we talking Story of O bad things? Bonnie and Clyde bad things? Or Thelma and Louise bad things?
From this morning’s walk…
I have decided to pursue the 1K Words of Summer Challenge… three straight days of 1K words or more! From this AM’s just do it email.
I am pregnant. I am stuck, against my will but with my consent, in a liminal space between two concrete phases of my life: childfree and childed. And it strikes me how similar this feeling is to being in the big swampy middle of a writing project. Writers talk a lot about beginnings and endings, but 90% of our time is spent in this watery space of creation between nothingness and a completed world. We are gods shaping the clay.
Hmmm…
The scientific world-view, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial people … Today we have no difficulty freeing logic from concrete referents and reasoning about purely hypothetical situations. People were not always thus.
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/jjOzFH9
… the microbiologist Brian Ford writes that ‘to equate such data-rich digital operations with the infinite subtlety of life is absurd’, since intelligence in life operates
”on informational input that is essentially Gestalt and not digital. [Living systems] can construct conceptual structures out of non-digital interactions rather than the obligatory digitized processes to which binary information computing is confined.”
— The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist a.co/41ZasuV
From this morning’s walk…
Smaller Is Beautiful :: Essays On Attention Paid
“So,” she said, “I have to make myself smaller for you? I’ve been making myself smaller for other people my entire life.” Yup, this is not about the jar or the bathing suit. At this point I felt it best to leave things alone for a while. We come to these impasses from time to time. We generally get through them in 24 hours or so, after we’ve had time to cool down and back away from whatever deep-seated trauma was expressing itself in the moment. And that is how it went.
The Paris Review - On Cormac McCarthy - The Paris Review
What connection do I have with the landscapes he conjures? What knowledge do I have of the kind of violence that is the subject and the fabric of many of his books? What place do I find in a world that is, among other things, nearly entirely masculine, hostile, rife with true desperation? The answer is none—unlike with much of my reading, I do not seek a mirror in McCarthy’s worldview—and yet there is something in its aesthetic articulation that has always resonated with me.
June 18, 2023 - by Heather Cox Richardson
That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
Is the world heading for disaster? I suppose so. We are constantly, relentlessly, told as much. Am I hopeful for its future? Well, yes, I am. I choose to be an optimist through a kind of necessity, because from my experience pessimism is a corrosive and damaging position to take – one that casts its shadow over all things, causing a kind of societal sickness, a contaminant that ultimately amplifies and glorifies the problems it professes to abhor.
– Nick Cave
Finally got a complete print of my accordion book, 15 Days by the Sea. The show can go on! Assuming I don’t screw up with the trimming and folding. I am quitting for today to reduce the odds of that.
On the other hand, the Grad-o-gram I sent my graduating nephew made it to the refrigerator door… 1 out of 75! On the other hand, his sister graduates in 2 years and I have set the bar high. At least I have time to figure out how to match the one I sent her brother:)
My photo printer keeps locking up while I am trying to print one of my accordion fold books. A 12’ long affair. I am blowing through a $100 roll of paper with nothing to show for it. My wife has had to don the earplugs to avoid the stream of profanities.
Smaller Is Beautiful :: Essays On Attention Paid
About making yourself smaller to be part of something bigger.
From this morning’s walk…
Safeguarding music | Global Music Vault | Svalbard
Well, apparently seeds are not the only thing being preserved in the event of apocalypse…