“To describe attention as a ‘resource’ is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives… Attention… just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.” Burkeman

“Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?”

“Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful.” Oliver Burkeman quoting “environmentalist and spiritual writer Charles Eisenstein.”

Winter hay in the barn, ready to be hoisted into the loft this weekend.

Two nights ago. The sun goes down on outdoor dining season.

Today Xopher started going back to the office after 1.5 years of pandemic WFH. It was a little lonely here, but I could play the radio whenever and as loud as I wanted, I could do odd things without being looked askance at, and I was kind of disappointed when he came home early.

That was it for Modest Vacation 2021. Join us next year for, we hope, more exciting adventures.

Now back to book reviews and overthinking and self-absorption, with fewer twilit scenery shots.

Day 6 was the Schoodic peninsula. The day, and our easy little hike, started rather rainy but cleared up entirely. I have lots of pictures of crashing waves. But to pick just one photo for the day, I have to pick this one; an evening walk we did out our motel back door, to the park carriage roads and up to Witch’s Hole Pond. I really just have a thing for evening light.

Nasturtii?

Another photo taken on our mohair-dropping road trip Saturday.

Buy GMS mohair yarn. The goat you knit may be my own.

So contemplate for a moment the non-existence of god. Contemplate a materialist worldview, “above us only sky.” Everything you perceive with your senses – that’s all there is.

What has been gelling for me lately during silent non-verbal moments of contemplation is: Tom + Vera = Me. That’s all there is.

It’s not that putting the nail in the coffin of the Mystery answers the nature/nurture question for me so much as it renders it moot. How much does our environment shape our personality? Well, what is a “personality”? Contemplate for a moment the possibility that there’s no such thing. There’s just a bunch of stuff people do.

If “this” (squeezes bit of skin between fingers) is all there is, then I know now precisely “who I am.”

And incidentally, behind the scenes during all of this drama and contemplation have silently stood two people: John & Barbara. And it occurs to me how none of this has the slightest bit to do with them. It seems unfortunate that we do not have separate words for “the woman who gave birth to you” and “the guy who fertilized her ovum” vs. “the female primarily involved in raising you” & “the male primary involved in raising you.” They are just mother and father, at best modified as “biological” mother & father and “adoptive” mother & father. But they are so entirely different.