Generally one weekend right around this time of year you will be bound to find us gourding.

Today’s Burkemanian quote is from ‘modern-day spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti’, who partway during a lecture leaned forward and said ‘almost conspiratorially, “Do you want to know what my secret is?… You see, I don’t mind what happens.”‘

Today I tore out the tomato jungle and went gourd-shopping with my life partner and smelled the autumn leaves.

“Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again & again & again…” burkeman

“In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry you make it double; don’t worry, be happy.” earworm

Maybe instead of counting their blessings, people should count their problems.

a) Maybe counting your problems will get you used to the fact that ye problems, ye will always have with ye

b) Maybe counting your problems day after day and noticing how you nevertheless continue to exist and function would be therapeutic

Problems! I got ’em! Count ’em and weep!

Tonight I have a goat who is very sick indeed. Not even the one who broke her horn.

“This quest to justify your existence in the eyes of some outside authority can continue long into adulthood… [until] it finally dawns on us, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life.”

‘I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees… I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves…

We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another. And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.

And I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with….’

Richard Powers in an interview with Ezra Klein.

“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.