Mend The World Within Your Reach
Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
On the longest evenings, something quietly rises
The Slow Art of Emergence On these long June evenings, the light refuses to leave. Here, it lingers past nine, gilding the tops of the trees long after supper. And then, something lifts out of the grass. One small spark, and another, and soon a whole forest of them, rising and falling in the dark like the embers of a fire. The fireflies have arrived. They have, in fact, been here all along. For most of two years, these insects have lived as larvae in the soil and leaf litter, hunting in the...
What Aristotle Knew About Belonging
Start With Feeling Tomás Robertson Aristotle told us to build relationships on pathos (empathy) and ethos (shared beliefs and values) before we can effectively get down to logos (the numbers) There is a particular kind of conversation we have all experienced — the one that feels like being handed a spreadsheet when what we needed was a hand. Someone presents us with evidence, statistics, a carefully reasoned argument, and yet we come away feeling oddly colder than before we sat down together....
The heroism hiding in ordinary life
Ordinary Magic A Character Study from Ursula K. Le Guin's Tehanu Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series presents an interesting reflection as the characters, as we read through the first books to the last, move from wonder, magic and power to, in the final book, the task of getting on with things. It is not magic that heals or mends in the end; it is the care and attention of ordinary people. There's a moment in Tehanu, the last book of the series, when a dying old mage asks Tenar — a woman who...
Why staying put might be the most radical thing you do today
The Art of Sitting Still Long Chung There is a particular kind of courage required to simply sit down and stay there. Not the sitting we do in offices, slumped over keyboards under fluorescent light, scrolling through things that will not matter tomorrow. Not the passive, slightly guilty sitting that fills the gaps between obligations. Something older and more deliberate than that. The kind of sitting that involves placing yourself in a specific spot, at a specific time, and opening your...
The light that stays after the lightning
Five Things Maslow Knew at the End That He Hadn't Known at the Beginning Lucut Razvan Over coffee and a view, my friend and I contemplated whether a purpose was necessary, particularly as striving becomes less desirable with age. These thoughts reminded me of the works of Scott Barry Kauffman, David Brooks, and Abraham Maslow, with his unfinished theory about living on “the plateau.” These experts believe that there is a particular kind of hollowness that arrives uninvited at the striving...
An invitation you'll need to set the alarm for
The Chance to Overhear There is a sound that begins each spring morning across this country, between four and five o'clock, that almost no one hears. It builds in waves. First, the American robin, repeating its short phrases as if rehearsing. Then the hermit thrush, with its fluted, echoing phrases that seem to arrive from somewhere just beyond the trees. Then the song sparrow's bright, looping melody, and the winter wren's astonishing torrent of notes from a body the size of a thumb. By the...
What paying close attention requires of us
The Honest Repair What Shai Teaches Us About Mending A Character Study from Brandon Sanderson's The Emperor's Soul I picked this book up at the library after I saw Brandon Sanderson recommend it as a place to start if you are a reader who doesn't read a lot of fantasy. What I discovered was a world where mending was an art form. There is a scene near the heart of Brandon Sanderson's novella The Emperor's Soul in which the protagonist, a young woman named Shai, sits alone in a locked room and...
One small act, one ordinary man, and one question
The Man Who Kept Looking Liana S Bill Furlong as a Study in Moral Attention There is a moment near the end of Claire Keegan's luminous novella Small Things Like These when Bill Furlong, coal merchant and father of five, has just done the thing he could not not do. He has taken the girl from the coal shed. He has acted. And now, walking through the streets of New Ross on a December morning with the weight and the relief of that action still settling in him, he finds himself met by a question —...
Spring has never promised you anything
The Unreliable Season Do I need a sweater? Where are my rain boots? Can I make room in my closet for my spring coats? Should I put the shovels away? When will spring actually get here? There is a particular kind of foolishness that overtakes otherwise sensible people in early April. I pack away the heavy coats. I make plans involving outdoor seating. I buy tomato seedlings far too soon, carrying them home like small hostages to optimism, then spend the next fortnight shuttling them in and out...
Learning from the wisdom of ancestors
Found Wisdom for These Times Thomas Elliott "Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed." — Rebecca Solnit The morning sun eases through my window as it breaks through the trees, casting long shadows across the book on my lap. Outside, the pine tree waves. I am researching Gene Stratton-Porter, who, on a similar morning in August 1900, first ventured deep into Indiana's...
Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.