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| -rw-r--r-- | lttr/lttr-02.txt | 39 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | published/2020-12-23_solstice-strange-land.txt (renamed from solstice-strange-town.txt) | 0 |
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diff --git a/lttr/lttr-02.txt b/lttr/lttr-02.txt index 4401068..b0c8dd6 100644 --- a/lttr/lttr-02.txt +++ b/lttr/lttr-02.txt @@ -1,32 +1,39 @@ Greetings Friends! -In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at luxagraf.net. <https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/> +In case you've forgotten, you signed up for this mailing list at [luxagraf.net](https://luxagraf.net/newsletter/friends/) and you can unsubscribe just as easily, no hard feelings, there's a link at the bottom of this email. ---- +Well 2021 has arrived. We're well beyond the future dates I used to idly try to imagine during boring high school classes. It's a strange feeling. We are further into the future than past me was able to conceive of -- where the hell does that put us? -I've been slowly catching up, this letter has two new posts to tell you about: +I don't know. What I do know is that hunting season is over. Deer season anyway. That deer season ends around January 1st is one of those factoids that I have always vaguely known, but never had a reason to care about. Now I do. -<https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/07/seven> -<https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/07/summertime-rolls> +Most of the land surrounding our current home, the land I call the 100 acre wood, because, well, it's roughly 100 acres, isn't technically part of the property we live on. We live on three acres *surrounded* by those 100 acres of woods. Those 100 acres are leased to a hunting club, so we can't really do much exploring during deer season. But that's over now and we've been getting out there on the dry days, which has been nice. -I also wrote a thing about waffles for WIRED that proved way more popular than either I or anyone at WIRED thought it would. It turns out we are not the only ones who love a good waffle. Did you know you can make hash browns in a waffle iron? When your bus' oven is broken, you get creative: +About a half mile back behind the house there's a creek bed, never more than ten feet wide, but it's enough for the kids to get their feet wet and explore. I haven't tried yet, but I'm hopeful that my cellular hotspot will have some signal out there so I can work creekside when it warms up. I need a good portable desk. -<https://luxagraf.net/essays/waffle-world> +Not really though. Really I don't need anything. I need less things. It's the time of year when I find myself taking stock of things and seeing what I can streamline, simplify, and do without. It's my form of a new year's resolution I think. Or perhaps some seasonally wayward attempt at early spring cleaning. Whatever the case this time of year is when I go through my life and think, what can I get rid of? What can I do without? What can I improve on? What is no longer necessary? -To go with the waffle piece my editors at WIRED asked me if I had a "what's it like to live in a vintage motorhome" sort of thing (WIRED calls it vanlife, close enough I guess). I did actually write a thing like that a long, long time ago but I never published it. So I dusted it off, re-wrote it a bit and put it up. I'm still not entirely satisfied with it, but I had to put it up. Deadlines are a great publishing motivator. If you have thoughts I'd love to hear them: +It's a fun thought process. I always change things up. Sometimes silly things, like the number of spoons in the drawer. Too many damnit. Out spoons, out. Other times I realize a don't need some tool I've previously considered indispensable. Some other tool I hardly pay attention to will turn out to do the job even better and I didn't realize it because I'd stopped thinking about the problem when I found the first solution. -<https://luxagraf.net/1969-dodge-travco-motorhome> +The problems is those first solutions are often ugly hacks, temporary patch jobs, but then you forget to go back and redo them. Or I do anyway. It's good to go back and check your old work, make sure there aren't any hack jobs left around. -That piece generated a few comments on the site and in emails with people looking for advice about full time travel and whatnot. That's something I've never really done with luxagraf, it's always been a journal, really more for family and friend than anyone else. With lots of strangers suddenly stopping by and wanting help, asking questions I thought maybe I should add a section with some guides and how tos and reviews. So I'm in the process of doing that in my spare time and will likely have something to share next week. +I don't do this annual taking stock to change my life, it's more of a cleaning out. It's a chance to pull off the rutted road for a few days and see what all is going on down there in the grooves. This is especially true when I get past the silly stuff like too many spoons in the drawer and start looking at my thought patterns. -Stay tuned. +Any pattern of thought soon becomes transparent. That's part of what the pattern is for, and for many things that's good. I don't want to think *what should I do?* every morning. I want to make a cup of coffee and relax for a bit, like I always do. Still, I am sometimes alarmed to find patterns I didn't know I had when I step back and detach, and really *look* at myself. -Also, clearly some of you shared this letter with friends because sign ups went nuts after the last letter. There's almost three times as many of you reading this one as the previous one so thank you very much for that, I appreciate it. +David Foster Wallace has a parable that I think is relevant: -One final note, if you have something to say and you don't want to put it on the site, you can reply to this email directly and only I will see it. +> There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” -Alrighty then, until next time +Wallace's whole text is [worth a read](http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html) if you're not familiar (it was a commencement speech originally), but the salient point is, to quote Wallace's own explication: "the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about." --s +I think "realities" is too vague. I don't know exactly what Wallace had in mind, but for me "realities" are the patterns of thought that govern my day. + +These patterns are hardest to see because they are the things that provide the framework in which we live. They're the things we decided way back when we couldn't even conceive of 2021 as a now that would eventually be *now*. They're the things we figured out so long ago we can't even recall exactly what we figured out. Still, they're there in the background informing everything we do. They're the water in which we live. + +When you see the water around you, you see yourself differently. Sometimes that means you find a few spoons you don't need. Other times it might mean something more. -You can unsubscribe from this newsletter whenever you like, just reply with the word "unsubscribe" and you'll be removed, no hard feelings, no questions asked. +So every year, around this time, I take a pen, a scrap of paper, and go for a walk. Woods are ideal for this, there's such a tangle of growth and life all around you that somehow the tangle of your own thoughts becomes less intimidating. From the tangle patterns emerge, pathways of thought through the trees. Somewhere in there I try to figure out what it is I am doing, where I am going, where I want to be going, and which patterns are going to close the gap between those two things. With any luck I find my way home before dark. + +Until next month. + +-s diff --git a/solstice-strange-town.txt b/published/2020-12-23_solstice-strange-land.txt index 9a7938d..9a7938d 100644 --- a/solstice-strange-town.txt +++ b/published/2020-12-23_solstice-strange-land.txt |