Clay and Wattles

My life feels a bit like an unweeded garden these days. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. This has been a pretty exhausting month. After winning the election, I’ve had to juggle my previous (heavy) work commitments against my new duties – it’s been harder than I expected. I’ve been sick on and off, too, with flu and tonsil infections. When I haven’t been teaching, working, or volunteering somewhere (essentially every day and nearly every evening), I’ve been too sick or dead tired to keep up this blog.

But…there will be dragonflies again next year. And as Hamlet would say, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

When you mention that in some ways people lived better a hundred years ago, the nearly automatic response is that they died at fifty. True enough – and I’ve never heard anyone seriously suggest giving up antibiotics and anesthesia and clean water. But perhaps we could, if we listened more carefully to the information of the natural world, come to terms with dying and spare ourselves the last anguished months hooked to machines.

-Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

What convenience or comfort does the average American life lack? If you could pick three conditions on earth to change in the next fifty years, would you want “advances” – Picturephones, virtual reality, computer shopping – or would you want more quiet, more community, cleaner air?

-Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information

Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, etc.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden