-Untitled, Rae Klein
hello from indonesia! happy friday!
I’ve been on hold. I prefer to hold in silence.
My phone’s felt so heavy. has yours??
i think it’s always a good idea to let a project simmer for a sec while engaging in a one-way debate about why one does things like write on the internet.
Call it fermentation.
It’s being talked about a lot right now, this ~creating more and consuming less~. but then, by creating more (like writing a substack), I’m necessarily adding to the online consumption diet of others. and that’s… confusing.
or clarifying, depending on the angle.
But alas, I love field notes.
and i love writing as a way of tipping my brain sideways and seeing what spills out.
the road to hell, my friend… the road to hell.
I. A quote from a book
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek came recommended to me by a really smart farmer&friend back in my vermonter days.
(I gave a pass at more poetic ways to frame his brute intellect but sometimes “really smart” does the job better than I could.)
Annie Dillard writes about the natural world and minute occurrences with such precision and abstraction. this can be a drag or joy depending.
“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. So many things have been shown so to me on these banks, so much light has illumined me by reflection here where the water comes down, that I can hardly believe that this grace never flags, that the pouring from ever-renewable sources is endless, impartial, and free.”
― Annie Dillard
We get to renew every minute, second, moment if we want to. it’s true, thank god.
When we fall off, which I do again and again and again, we can offer ourselves grace that never flags. We can pour from sources endless, impartial, and free.
II. A message
Father Noam with a little reminder.
no notessss….
III. A passage
A friend shared this one with me & I loved it.
I’m always down to talk mycelial networks btw.
Wait also remember when everyone was all Paul Stamets / Michael Pollan / googoogahgah mushrooms are gonna save the world??? and now we’re just left with a bunch of CPG functional mushroom companies… hmm just saying. I thought we were gonna do bigger things with these discoveries than chaga brain boost me.
From Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake:
“You can think of your life like this. The growing tip is the present moment—your lived experience of now—which gnaws into the future as it advances. The history of your life is the rest of the hypha, the blue lines that you’ve left in a tangled trail behind you. A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The ‘you’ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the ‘you’ of today. Nature is an event that never stops.”
To think we’re all just squishy little networks leaving blue trails in the dirt. takes the pressure off.
IV. A routine
I’ve been getting up every day and immediately folding in two and hanging over my feet. Hang there for a couple minutes and let all the blood fill your brain.
i felt a strong pull to include this today.
i can’t testify what it does or doesn’t do.
ok, we did it.
we’re so back // it’s so over.
i’ve missed you.
🎐 Lida 🎐
Annie Dillard!
she’s back!! 🫶🏻