This weekend’s Skoolie project was getting a mount and power setup for an old cellular enabled iPad that we had sitting in a gear closet. Won’t need the cellular (will pair with my phone for data) but the gps let’s maps work so it will be a good enough solution for nav.
I must be playing the long game with this blog. I switched over to AWS hosting to force me to see a bill for it each month. It’s not a lot, but it’s soemthing to make me honest about whether its worth it or not more than once a year. Bills have come and been paid month after month for more than a year with obviously very little posting. Not sure that will change a lot in this next year, but one place I am sure I won’t be doing much posting anymore is Facebook. As of today I suspended my account.
In the 4,920 days that I had an active account I did make regular use of it. Most of that time it was a convinience or even a pleasure. I started to have doubts 3-4 years ago. Seeing what happened last week in Washington and realizing that a good majority of those people ended up where there were because of Facebook is the last little push I need. Not that I feel particularly susceptible to ending up in the same place (but who does really?), but rather it’s something I can do to feel some modicum of control. I just can’t support a platform that does that to it’s users and then turns around and destroys its competition as a scapegoat.
I am not setting up accounts anywhere else instead. I am just going to sit it out for a while and see how “base reality” suits me. I wrote this post mainly as a marker for when the experiment ended and also in the small hopes that it might encourage one other person to free themselves.
Added 165 days to the clock today. Been considering it for a bit and I think it makes sense to tack on a bit more time to move on at a natural transition. Makes the math a bit easier although I won’t get to brag that “I retired in my 40s” ;-).
I picked up 6-7 books (and a couple pounds of coffee) from my favorite local bookstore in the height of quarantine to help support them while everything was closed. Three of them were for me: Hillbilly Elegy, Appalacian Reckoning (notes on those two coming later) and The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry. I have (and love) several books of Berry’s poetry but the first of his prose I have read. I will admit to identifying with his work in a way that I don’t with other authors or poets, simply becaise we are both from Kentucky.
I recall having heard the book mentioned in a podcast or something else I had read…but honestly I am not sure what I thought it was about. When I bought it, I didn’t know it was contained his reflections on race, written orginally in 1968 with an extensive afterword added in the eighties.
I haven’t looked into other critical reviews of this book, so I don’t know where it fits amongst other more recent books on race issues, nor what may be considered a problem in his views. That being said, I did find it a compelling read, with a few spots of trouble. Its rather short, but packs in a lot of ideas. I’ll only touch on a few of them here.
Berry starts with an extensive telling of his own personal story and two of the black people that were most important to him growing up, Nick and Aunt Georgie. I got the sense reading this part that he was both trying to establish some credibility, but more so to establish some context for his analysis and reccomendations that come later. One theme that appears over and over is that whites have also been hurt by our racism (hence the title of the book I believe). I don’t think Berry is in any way trying to minimize the greater hurt that blacks have and continue to experiences as a resut of racism, but rather to give a reason to white’s to change other than “white guilt”. Berry builds a really compelling case for diversity, not built on platitudes or virtue signaling, but rather on his own experience of seeing the world through Nick’s eyes:
This much is clear to me: insofar as I am capable of feeling such pleasures as I believe Nick felt, I am strong; insofar as I am dependent on pleasures on the pleasures made available by my salary and the things I own, I am weak. I feel much more secure in those pleasures for which I am dependent on the world, as Nick was for most of his, than in those for which I am dependent on the government or on a power company or on the manufacturers of appliances.
This is where I felt a bit of unease, concerned that Berry might be heading into some sort of “magical negro” territory or more generally romanticising the poor. But my read of Berry through the book as a whole is that this is not that. Berry recognizes that he is better off having had shared, deep experiences with Nick. Those experiences have made him better than he would otherwise be by letting him see things from another perspective. I do wonder what Nick might say if asked whether he was better off for his relationship with a young Wendell Berry?
A second theme which stood out to me is Berry’s idea that any solution to racism will start with the individual:
I beleive that the experience of all honest men stands, like these books, against the political fantasy that deep human problems can be satifactorily solved by legislation. On the contrary, it is likely that the best and least oppresive laws come as a result or the reflection of honest solutions that men have already made in their own lives. The widespread assumption that men can be set free or dignified or improved by monkeying with some mere aspect of their lives – politics, or economics or technology – promises no solution, but only an unlimited growth of the public apparatus.
This really got my recovering anarcho-libertarian jucies flowing ;-). From what I can tell, the idea of systemic racism has only recently entered the public conciousness, so I don’t think Berry had anything to say on that idea. If it he had known about it however, I am guessing from the above that he might see some of the proposed solutions to systemic racism at best as partial remedies. This is not to say that systemtic racism isn’t a thing. Rather it is to say that if we want to actually make progress in reducing racism, we have to address both what is in our hearts as well as how we build our institutions.
The afterword outlines four specific problems that Berry sees in actually making progress to resolve racism (with 20 more years of life experience to inform him). He offers no solutions, rather he hopes to highlight how complicated the problems are so that we aren’t fooled into thinking there are easy solutions.
Since my last post, I have been trying to do more than just read and think and write. I did march this past Sunday in downtown Cincinnati. I was motivated by a combination of wanting to see for myself what was going on in these marches and of wanting to do something / anything (more than read and think and write). I am happy to have done it. I felt safe the entire time. I didn’t agree with everything I heard or read, but I got a better (albeit small) sense of what animated those that I marched with. I also attended a Crittenden city council meeting. That was less of a life experience, but was still worth doing, simply to see the wheels of government working at the most local and personal of levels.
Reading the Hidden Wound has made me realize that I lack any deep shared experiences or ongoing relationships with anyone of color. I don’t feel guilty, but rather less than I could be. I feel blind to an entire way of seeing and experiencing the world. My instinct to take action kicks in, but I know I need to be careful here – the chance for a mis step seems extremely high. I am OK with making a mistake, but not with unintentionally hurting someone. Suggestions are sincerely welcome.
I broke quarantine last week by taking a walk in the woods with my daughter and 7 trusted friends. We spent 4 days / 3 nights walking along the Sheltowee Trace in the south of Kentucky, mostly at social distance. There are many things that I love about long distance backpacking. One of them is that I am often out of cell range so have no choice but to be completely offline.
As I emerged from the woods on Thursday and started to reconnect, I learned about George Floyd’s murder and the resulting protests (and looting and rioting…all different things). Welcome back to reality. I wanted to restock, turn around and head back into the woods.
For the last few days I felt myself falling back into the same pattern as I followed in March, when Covid first entered my reality. I was on twitter and reddit for hours a day. Trying to both get a handle on what was happening…and (shamefully) somehow enjoying the images and videos of protests, police retaliation and looting. Not enjoying it becasue I like what I saw, but because of some detached, self important sense that I was “living through history”. WTF is wrong with me?
Last night, as I weeded our garden, I listened to the President address the nation. I didn’t have high expectations, but the staged photo opp after the press conference took me by suprise…and got me really angry. I am a cradle Episcopalean. St. John’s, place of the staged photo opp, is an Episcopal church. I unexplanably found myself getting extremely worked up that the symbols / location of my faith was being used as a backdrop to make some ridiculous political point (Side note: I am not really sure what the point was. While he might have been playing to his evagelical base…but surely he knows that they are no fans of Episcopaleans with our pro-gay stance?).
Upon further reflection something else, even more disturbing occured to me: George Floyd was murdered by someone charged with protecting him and while that bothered me, it wasn’t the same intesnsty of feeling as I had about where a picture was taken. Why do I feel more strongly about the symbols of my faith than the basic right to exist of every human being? WTF is wrong with me?
Some of my reaction can be reasoned away because the photo opp was relevant to me – it gave me a place to stand in opposition. But that’s not enough. I am white. I have never been subject to any sort of harrasment or ill treatment from anyone in a position of legal authority. So at the surface it is easy for me to find no place to stand to oppose where I feel anything in common with George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and many others before and since. Where do I get off protesting something I have never experienced? Something that I (not anyone else) can know the whole truth of?
Bu that’s bullshit. I was missing our shared hummanity. Before being white or black or brown or purple; before being Episcopalean or Catholic or Jewish or Pastafarian, we are all human. We are all perfectly imperfect humans with hopes, dreams, ideas, experiences and relationships. That is my place to stand. So stand there I will.
And now a final realization that came to me while I was writing this post. Writing is not doing something. Or at least not doing enough. This blog has always been a way for me to organize my thoughts, with the (sometimes imagined) reader acting as a force directing me to be as clear and coherent as possible. So writing this post has served to help me get my thoughts in order, but thoughts without action are pissing into the wind. Far too often, I write something here (or worse post something on social media and feel like I did something. WTF is wrong with me?
I am ashamed of my initial insticnt to slink back into the woods and wish it would all go away, or at least all go away for me. If everyone like me, who thinks we can and should do better does that, where do we end up? No place good. At the same time, I am trying to have compassion for myself because it is really hard to know what’s true, to know what’s really going on. I really enjoy certainty. Knowing, for sure, that what I am doing is right and my motivations are well ordered and intentioned. What would it feel like to not have to know?
This deadly combination of feeling like I didn’t have a place to stand in opposition and not being sure of the “right” thing to do has been paralyzing. But no more. I can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Here’s my plan:
This plan of action isn’t perfect. It might not do much of anything. I am sure there is still some ego in there. Some privelage that I am neither sensative too nor understand. But I can’t just think and write anymore. I just can’t let perfect be the enemy of good, especially when there is so much that could be better.
Yes, I read a book about a pandemic during a pandemic. How unoriginal. I heard about Station Eleven on a podcast (forget which one) and it seemed interest and different enough to give it a try. I was looking for some fiction so decided to give it a try. I bought it as an Apple Book (enjoying that platform more and more for my ebook reading) and read it over the course of a few weeks.
Overall it was a good read. Easy to read and the characters were interesting. Mandel uses timeline jumps to great effect, filling the reader in on key background elements from the past immediately before they become relevant to the “main” timeline.
I would say this is a rather hopeful / cheery apocalyptic novel, if there is such a thing. But then again, my baseline comparison is The Road. Not many books more grim than that. Like most good fiction of the genre the story is really about how people relate to each other, in this case using a disease that wipes out 98% of the planet in what seems to be a few weeks, as a backdrop to explore how memory works, why we do/don’t get along with others and the importance of community / tribe.
Since finishing it, I discovered a more recent book from the same author, that uses some of the same characters, but is not a sequel or prequel. Rather she characterized it as an alternate timeline. Reminds me of using the same RPG character in different campaigns. Will have to add Glass Hotel to my list for the next time I am looking for some fiction.
This blogging thing is finally paying some dividends. Today comes a bit of perspective. Almost exactly 10 years ago today I was “trapped” in Europe due to an ash cloud that made it unsafe to fly. Reading the post I wrote after I got home brings back a flood of memories. At the time I could sense that it was something I would always remember. I was gald to have John along with me to share the experience. But most of all was the overwhelming desire I had to get back home, specifically to celebrate my birthday.
Let’s think about this for a bit. There I was, at first in Frankfort then in Barcelona, on a company expense account with a free pass to spend whatever was needed. The streets in Barcelona were full night and day with both locals Brits that had taken the one flight back from the US to somewhere in Europe that was still operating. There was plenty to eat and drink. We stayed in a 5 star hotel our first night in Barcelona and then moved to something more affordable…right on the Ramblas! The weather was perfect and John and I even had a local guide from our business that was more than happy to show us around. Yet, every few hours I was calling in to Delta and getting on their website to get home as soon as I could. WTF was wrong with me?!?
Flash forward 10 years and here I am at home on my birthday. I got exactly what I wanted so desperately 10 years ago. Yet I had been dreading today a bit. Not because of the number I’ll hang around my neck for the next year, but rather because I am stuck at home like everyone else. My pre-COVID plans for this weekend were as follows:
10 years ago I was in an amazing place and desperately wanted to be somewhere else. Today my 37 year old self gave my 47 year old self a present: the ability to see that although I would prefer to be somewhere other than home, it is in fact an amazing place if I would just settle in and enjoy it.
What started as some good posting momentum at the start of the year has slowed slightly. Pandemics will do that I suppose. I would like to say that I have been journaling a lot, but that would be a lie. At the start of things I spent far too much screen time on twitter and reddit. Not sure whether I was trying to actually determine whether this was the actual end of the world or simply basking in the doomer glory of it all. Probably a mixture of both. Fortunately I was able to break out of that cycle, a testament to how quickly the thrilling (even the thrilling for the wrong reasons) can become commonplace, and was able to get back to reading.
I am changing my approach to these posts since I was noticing some resistance to completing them. Rather than a “review” which connotes something of value that I add on top, I am framing these as simply notes – a marker of the books I have read and a few of the impressions I am leaving with.
I first heard of the poet David Whyte on a Sam Harris podcast that I listened to on the way in to work. That should place it in time well enough. I really liked the way he described reality as the frontier that exists between the “self” and the “world” and so I ordered his most recent prose book from my favorite local bookshop and picked it up a few weeks later. Another placement for when I started on this.
The three marriages is not about serial divorce nor polygamy, but rather the relationship one has with one’s spouse, with one’s work and with one’s self. Right off the bat Whyte points out that most people’s first experience of marriage is the one that they interrupt, specifically first children. The images we carry from our childhood of our parents’ marriage stay with us and inform how we see the three marriages throughout our lives.
As a poet, he makes many references to the poetry of others as well as ahis own. In first talking about the marriage to the self, he cites The Prelude by Wordsworth, with whom he shares a particular affinity, calling out the line:
I made no vows, but vows / Were made for me
The Prelude, Wordsworth
to make the point that life comes to find us as much as we go out to find it, but that can only happen if we are awake and aware to the world around us, stopping for even just a minute to pay attention to something besides our selves. He expands on this point is his own work Everything is Waiting for You
To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
Everything is Waiting for You, Whyte
He draws this conclusion about the work we have to do, as well as what is not up to us, in finding a “great work”:
To glimpse our vocation, we must learn how to be sought out and found by a work as much as we strive to identify it ourselves. We must make ourself findable by being seen; to do that we must hazard ourselves and make ourselves available to the world we want to enter.
The Three Marriages, Whyte
This passage struck me since it speaks directly to something I have more and more trouble with as I get older: trying something new and f*(&ing it up. This is an echo of Whyte’s idea from the podcast of reality being a frontier, a conversation, between the self and the world. As I look for great work, as much as I need to learn new skills and new ways of being, I need to put myself in (potentially unfamiliar or uncomfortable) situations even more to let a great work find me.
Whyte touches on the role that worry plays in self discovery, specifically the thing that we I do to battle with worry: make to do lists:
Millenia of worrying under night skies have brought human beings to the point where the complexities of our contemporary societies have almost reached a breaking point. In many ways, our to-do lists have become the postmodern equivalent of the priest’s rosary, the lama’s sutra or the old prayer book – keeping a larger, avalanching reality at bay. Above all, the to-do list keeps the evil of not-doing at bay, a list that many of us like to chant and cycle through religiously as we make our way to work through the commute.
The Three Marriages, Whyte
I totally saw myself in this. When I used to actually drive into the office, “chanting” my to do list was a regular pastime. One of the hidden blessings of CQ (COVID-19 Quarantine) has been my lack of focus on my to do list. There hasn’t been as much to do, and what was on there hasn’t seemed as important. I still check it, check things off and add things now and again, but it is not with the same religious ferocity as “before”. I have not quite arrived at comfort with the “evil of not-doing”, but I can feel myself getting closer. A few more weeks of quarantine and I think I might “arrive” somewhere (which probably means I am fooling myself).
In a chapter on the marriage with work, Whyte takes on the paradox of what seems to be vs. what is about the life of a writer:
From the outside, especially to those that long for a more artistic life, a writer looks to be involved in what looks like an unscheduled imaginative adventure, but what she needs above all else is structure and a goodly amount of space within that structure. It takes a good settled sense of what we are about, first to think that we deserve the time and the to arrange our days so that what we want comes about.
The Three Marriages, Whyte
When I am being honest I know that I am still looking for that settled sense of what I am about and that my to do list is the armor that I put up to avoid not-doing long enough to find it. The hardest part seems to be the feeling that after all this time I should already know what I am about. The sense that I knew once and it either wasn’t real, has left me, or that simply the frontier between my “self” and the “world” has shifted (I like that explanation most of all).
The Three Marriages is gently disturbing. White uses language to point to things that language can’t describe directly. While that is the gift of poetry, the long form of the Three Marriages helped me, who is “poetry-challenged”, to see some things I had been missing and realize some things I already knew.
Since there seems to be plenty of expert opinion out there on what happened, what is happening and what will happen with COVID-19, I am going to attempt to limit myself to my own experience. What I am thinking about, going through and doing as I live through this once in a lifetime experience.
I am having trouble keeping track of what’s changing. I think it was only last Monday that Kentucky and Ohio closed all of their restaurants. While that may be chronologically true, my sense of the amount of time that passed since then makes it seem a month ago or so. My experience of time passing is directly tied to how much of what goes on I have experienced before. None of this has happened to me before, so it seems to pass much more slowly, with more packed in to each day.
I am noticing that the thin veneer has started to wear off at work. Some of the things that were important a few weeks ago don’t seem so now. I notice this in my own ability to pay attention and in the focus, energy and effort that others are bringing to the endless zoom meetings that we are having. I have decided to view this as a good thing – this can be a chance to “burn off” some of the project chaff and focus on what really matters.
I am thankful for the technology that I have access too. I can’t imagine going through this 20 or even 10 years ago. It’s true that I wouldn’t be so agitated/distracted/consumed by media, but I also wouldn’t be able to maintain some sense of normal through virtual happy hours, meeting up with the folks from my gym for a workout from home, and something to watch that the whole family can get into.
I am also thankful for the wake up this has provided me and those around me. While it’s uncomfortable to think about, which is why we don’t, the fact is that living is inherently a risky adventure. Every time I used to leave the house in my car, dine out, or get on a plane, it might be the last time I do that. Those are all risks I’ve accepted and so don’t think about too much, which helps my psyche, but doesn’t really force me to live in the moment with any urgency. This is all a great reminder that now is really all I have so I best make the best of it.
I am thinking about William Bridges transitions model. I have read a lot about “the new normal”, but I think that is misleading. What I am experiencing now is not sustainable, so by definition it can’t last = be the new normal. What I think we are in now is the luminal stage between an old normal and a new normal. I have experienced the grief and pain of letting go. Not going out to eat on Friday’s with the family. Cancelled plays, symphonies and summer music festivals. Putting another trip to Europe on indefinite hold. Now I am in between. A place where I know that the old is gone, but that the new hasn’t quite taken shape. Bridges points out that there is great power and opportunity in this in between space. It’s a time for questioning old assumptions and trying on new ways of being. It’s a time for patience and not rushing to the new normal. If I take my time and sit comfortably with “not knowing” I can use this time to explore many options for what a new normal could look like before settling into one that I prefer. I am slowly settling in to not having to know.
