Caste by Isabel Wilkerson should be required reading for everyone on the planet. The book is endlessly quotable, but this one jives with my current life philosophy:
Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?
Highly highly recommended.
James Kochalka, via Austin Kleon:
It’s been my experience that if you’re a creative person, and you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at another thing. If you’re good at drawing, you might be good at writing, too. If you’re good at writing, you might be good at playing music, too. If you’re good at playing music, you might be good at pottery. If you’re good at playing guitar, you might be a good dancer! In order to create, there’s some little thing you have to let happen inside yourself, of just letting yourself be free. If you can turn that little switch on inside yourself in one medium, you can probably do it in another medium.
I agree with this, but I want to add that it doesn’t just happen. You do have to work for it, but I firmly believe that if you’re not having fun during the journey, then you won’t enjoy the destination.
Anton Troianovski in the New York Times:
It was a siege. It was a mob. It was anarchy. Or, as the Italian newspaper La Stampa put it in its front-page headline Thursday, “Once upon a time, there was America.”
Only 13 more days.
Nate Chittenden, a farmer from Schodack Landing, N.Y., quoted by Andrew Jacobs in the New York Times:
“I’m in charge of this entire life from cradle to grave, and it’s important for me to know this animal went through its life without suffering,” he said, stroking the head of one especially insistent cow. “I’m a bad person if I let it suffer.”
In 2011, I chose to stop consuming dairy products after I determined, and later confirmed, I was lactose intolerant. In 2017, I decided to be vegan. I didn’t do it because I thought eating animals was “wrong.” I did it because I felt I was eating too much meat and not enough vegetables.
Over time, though, as this lifestyle sustained me and made me feel better than I ever have in my life, I underwent a sort of spiritual transformation. After a year without consuming any animal products, I realized how unnecessary animal suffering was to sustain a human life.
I’m glad farmers like Mr. Chittenden exist, and I’m grateful that farmers and scientists are trying to figure out how to farm animals ethically, but I’m done consuming animal products. I don’t need to eat them to be healthy, and I’m confident most people don’t, either.
I came across this beautiful quote by Seneca:
There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.
At the start of 2020, a friend tried setting me up with a friend of hers. But then lockdown happened. Maybe things will change in 2021…
Writing about social media and anxiety, Emma Warnock-Parkes suggests this tip to improve attention:
Play a music track and practise listening to one instrument at a time, switching between instruments every so often.
I do this and it helps to calm me down all the time.
Ewan McGregor in episode 7 of Long Way Round, after a couple of Russians killed a black bear, skinned it, and took its gallbladder:
It’s a wild animal living in its own habit, and no one’s got any right to shoot it with a gun. It’s disgusting.
Goddamn right. I love this man.
In On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote:
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
In The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday wrote:
Every culture has its own way of teaching the same lesson: Memento mori, the Romans would remind themselves. Remember you are mortal.
I’ve been thinking a lot about memento mori today, about how little time I have to waste away, how I want to make every moment count. My biggest enemy is myself. I wish I could get out of the way sometimes, to slow down and appreciate the beauty all around me, to actually let the world inside my walls.
I went for a walk yesterday and found out Lake County will hold their annual fair this summer. A few days ago, Lake County reported its first death due to the coronavirus. He was a man in his 70s. Yesterday, Montana recorded over 200 new cases, a majority coming from young people. Last week, Dr. Fauci said that young people are propagating the pandemic because they don’t care if they get infected. “[I]t doesn’t end with you,” he said. “You get infected and have no symptoms. The chances are you’re going to infect someone else, who will then infect someone else."
School starts in a few weeks, and the voices of parents who are worried for their children are getting drowned out by those that are against wearing masks and want things to return to normal, at whatever the cost. Death has come to Lake County, kids don’t care if they get infected, and the adults are propagating ignorance and selfishness. I enter commercial buildings with signs up stating that masks are mandatory, but I continue to see people not wearing them. I’m reminded of Jonathan Hickman’s amazing East of West series. On the cover of each issue is this quote:
This is the world. It is not the one we were supposed to have, but it’s the one we made. We did this. We did it with open eyes and willing hands. We broke it, and there is no putting it back together.
As long as we can have our fair then who cares about everything else, right?
One day in high school, a teacher of mine went around his class and asked my classmates what they would be if they weren’t human. “My dog,” someone said. “A camera,” said another. “A bird,” I said. He asked me why I wanted to be a bird, a tinge of disappointment in his voice. “Because I want to fly far away,” I said. That tinge of disappointment made me feel bad then, like I lacked the imagination those around me seemed to have. He didn’t press me any further, and I haven’t thought of that moment until now.
Last year I read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, and in it she describes her journey toward slowing down and noticing the things around her. “When I travel,” she says,
I no longer feel like I’ve arrived until I have “met” the local bioregion by walking around, observing what grows there, and learning something about the indigenous history of that place (which, in all too many places, is the last record of people engaging in any meaningful way with the bioregion). Interestingly, my experience suggests that while it initially takes effort to notice something new, over time a change happens that is irreversible. Redwoods, oaks, and blackberry shrubs will never be “a bunch of green.” A towhee will never simply be “a bird” to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And it follows that this place can no longer be any place.
I took this picture of an osprey flying around her nest near my school, and I’ve felt this connection to her and to the wildlife around me that I’ve never truly experienced before. When I was a firefighter, I felt this connection to the land that I mostly kept in my periphery. Like so many things in my life, it has stayed there while I focus on the trivialities that make modern life so mundane. Most everything I’ve ever experienced has stayed in my periphery, and what I want to do is to slow down and notice the things around me.
I went on Wikipedia and learned that ospreys are piscivores. Her nest is between the Ninepipes reservoir to the east and the Flathead River to the west, so she has food aplenty. I saw her chicks flying around the nest for a bit and then flying back, her gaze motherly and loving. I heard her sing as she flew around. She is no longer just “a bird” to me, but a mighty osprey.
What else is out there that I haven’t seen or paid attention to? How many different species of birds are within my radius? Of insects? Of living souls in general? We share this world with so many living beings, but how many of us ever truly connect with them?
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