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.
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...
What the equinox actually teaches us about balance
Standing at the Threshold Liana S Poised at the Edge of Spring What does it actually feel like to stand at a turning point? Not metaphorically, but physically — that suspended instant when something tips from one state into another, and everything is held, briefly, in perfect tension? The spring equinox offers exactly this. For one astronomical moment, day and night achieve genuine equality before the long lean toward summer begins. Around this celestial hinge, the natural world performs its...
What a dying man's letters teach us about paying attention
Learning to See Again martí freixas The Quiet Wisdom of John Ames “Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows, and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do have quite enough rain.” There is a question running quietly...
The fridge that taught me enough
Enough Discovering Abundance Through Simplicity When my fridge sprang a leak in late November, it warped our kitchen floor and who knows what else beneath it. We enlisted our house insurance to repair what was needed, and two weeks of blowers and dehumidifiers dragged the process through December. And then Christmas arrived, as it does, indifferent to the chaos. Nothing could be done about the missing floor or the gaping space where my fridge was supposed to live until January. Over eight...
The Ethics of Attention
Just Perception Meg The sun sparkles on the snow drifts in my backyard. The whiteness is very nearly blinding, almost causing me to close my eyes to what I see. There is a particular quality to February light that refuses this dishonesty of not seeing. Stand outside on a February afternoon and notice how the low sun creates no flattering shadows, no kind obscurities. Everything receives the same stark illumination. The architecture of bare trees becomes visible in ways summer's abundance...
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.