Notices by JNL (jnl@hcommons.social)

@selzero

Will delete if you prefer- this may or may not fit here- but this gives me a weird groundedness in gratefulness. Because 'today' still has a lot of great stuff and so much beauty. Maybe less than ten years ago. But maybe more than ten years from now. So then I feel a call to really savor these moments- to let the joy be at least as spacious as the lament.

What is our collective inheritance, right now, is still ours.

@CptSuperlative

And if your goal is preserving your democracy and the rule of law, you are going to have to regulate capital, particularly in influence around elections and in media ownership, or very little else matters

The fever pitch of the Canadian holier than thou might not serve what you think it does.

Feel free to just block me if this is you. Definitely strongly considering it in the reverse.

Happy to hold a mirror to your entitled complacency, your entangled co-opting, your casual racism, your committed consumptions, but you absolutely cannot handle it and have been told, as the 'good child,' that you deserve not to have to

You are not separate from this ecosystem. You are not a non-participant, not a non-beneficiary, even your inaction is active

And what came for us is coming for you too, again, again, again, even now, even now

'but that ISN'T FAIR; we didn't ASK FOR THIS; we have CHOSEN SOMETHING ELSE'

has it occurred to you

ever

even for one second

that many of us could say similarly

'but you DESERVE for this to happen to YOU; we have WATCHED and you are not LIKE US and you have BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELVES, and we feel very good to have been RIGHT about the things that have so ANNOYED US and also it is good to WATCH THE MIGHTY FALL'

you are wrong about what deserve means

and you will still be wrong when the desserts, as they will be called, come your way

you will not deserve it

you deserve what sacred life deserves, what loving community deserves, what connection and hope deserve

but I do hope you remember what you thought

My two wolves are 'omg stop being gullible idiots' and 'it is not any individual person's fault that they believe even spectacularly dumb and damaging things when interlocking systems function to encourage development of those beliefs'

'Some people even now are undecided; we found two right here' is NOT intended to convey information, but FUTILITY, and the despair is directed at YOU.

Feel free to respond accordingly; hope that helps.

My colleagues: We study modes of tree and plant distribution that will help with climate change impacts, partner with Indigenous communities to tell important stories about plastic in the Arctic, and model how green space in urban settings helps air quality for everyone 🍃 ✨

Me: I study falling down buildings, abandoned infrastructure, arcane ritual structures, and the collective good that we are all about to lose 😭

People need to feel like they belong, to feel hope, to have a story for why things are the way they are, and to have ways to use their bodies in the world. US society has not been good at offering constructive packages of this set of things; the options are pretty much warfare and fundamentalist religious community.

This conversation from Sunday with Shawna Ambrose, who grew up military and then chose it herself, gets at this in pretty compelling ways. If you have an hour and are looking for something to listen to in the background, this combined set of experiences (the music and story for all ages were also soooo good) might make your week feel a bit more grounded, joyful, and purposeful. Full disclosure, Shawna's a good friend of mine, and we were there on Sunday. 💗

https://foothillsuu.churchcenter.com/episodes/496733?media_intent=video

Has such a protest sign ever before existed, across all of human history

#EventuallyTheyCamefortheAccountants

This is outrageously egregious.

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/long-covid-is-now-the-number-one

I keep walking to the window, staring at the pond, and wanting to be out there ... but without, you know, doing the work of getting dressed, dragging a kayak and gear, actually maybe (probably!) getting wet

I want the reward without all the work and risk and discomfort of committing to the bit

I have also decided that mine are centrist Dems- they yield to the slightest pressure and become wholly incapable of doing the job for which they were installed

THEY ARE INCAPABLE OF MEANINGFUL RESISTANCE

I am ready to put “collapsible dishwasher spikes” on the list of “seems like an awesome idea but is actually bad"

Starting to understand that ‘struggling to breathe due to wood smoke in the winter and also wood smoke in the summer’ is just going to be the status chosen for all of us with asthma in this era

We are a quarter of the way through the 21st century and I have paleolithic village problems

I'm watching students wrestle with defining what 'urban' means, and also thinking about what 'urbanists' think they mean, and in particular, the city-exceptionalism that sometimes happens.

I have colleagues who began ministry when I did but chose to go into large churches rather than medium sized or small ones, who are continually like "in the LARGE CHURCH CONTEXT" and then describe a staffing or programming situation that in a lot of ways is ANY program-sized church. They assume their experience is specific and exceptional because they are continually told that it is, but in a lot of cases a church institution and its problems are similar and translatable. (There are limits to this argument, but not so many as large church-serving ministers would imagine.)

Similarly, people say things about "urban places" that often actually are true of anywhere we haven't gutted, displaced, disinvested in and wholly abandoned.

Thriving TOWNS have a lot of the benefits that people call "urban."

I speak here of gutting, but it will probably be more legible to most people to also acknowledge GATING, which produces a different sort of half-realized place, one that may have tons of investment but no connection or context.

Through my own choice, I don't deal much with those kinds of place-in-a-box--I am more a scholar of the rural and the towns that thrive, or don't, in these non-city contexts, and which we've been told for generations that everyone who wants opportunities and relevance and a future must leave

(This work is through the dirt on my own shoes; I am a displaced child of Wyoming and eternally pissed about the ways that an entire generation of us were pushed to leave by forces that cared nothing for the future of the place.)

"But you can't bike in a town, or between them"

Ok but what if you could.

Like, why can't you?

Because bikes don't work that way?

Because towns don't work that way?

Or because we just didn't build in a way that imagined and allowed it?