A Week’s Notes, Feb W08 020240218-24

Books 📚

Kate Rigby’s Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction 🔗 - ? MiroslavVolf & Ryan MacAnally-Linz The Home of God

Notes & Quotes 💬

For Lent and/or new habit-making . . .

Rumi wrote: What nine months of attention does for an embryo forty early mornings will do for your gradually growing wholeness.

The weight of illness is not to be ignored, but nor is it to be borne solely by the person whose body is ailing. St Francis of Assisi spoke of Sister Illness as a family member, a visitor to be entertained. When a sibling comes to stay, it affects the whole family. Via Theos

Poetry 💘

• ‘The impeded stream is the one that sings' from Wendell Berry’s “The Real Work”

• Email sign off for the week . . . 油こほりともし火細き寝覚哉 abura koori tomoshibi hosoki nezame kana

Awake at night, the lamp low, the oil freezing.

~ Tr. Robert Hass

• This one was very potent for me in light of things happening to people I know and love . . . and in relation to the Rigby book I’m reading for Lent subtitled ‘In An Era of Extinction’: Maria Popova’s Endling. Not knowing the last time we get to do a thing where looking forward, we might experience dread and/or panic; but looking back, it is, perhaps, a mercy.

• Sitting beside the stream in the small park near home on a Wednesday afternoon, taking a short break and listening to the prayers for the day, I was struck by the phrase ‘the sign of Jonah’. Later, I found myself deeply affected by the story of the whale who had wandered off course into Osaka Bay and died. It was not a blue whale, but this poem by Molly Fuller found me and drove the story deeper.

🐋Callibrations

A blue whale’s heart rate is calculated at 37 beats

per minute. Measurement is described as intense,

involving extensive coordination. Descent

into the ocean and the pressure a human body

is subjected to is an additional atmosphere, twice

as much as human lungs are used to. A man holds

his breath for eleven minutes. Depths complicate,

compress and shrink the air-containing spaces

in body and brain. Oxygen starvation feels like

euphoria, like experiencing something miraculous.

It takes two seconds to pump the 220 liters of blood

a blue whale circulates with every heartbeat. There

cannot possibly be a larger animal, the heart cannot

grow fast enough for a greater creature to survive.

A woman holds her breath for nine minutes.

The sensation of rising. Water, water, sunlight,

air. A pulse in the ears. The astonishing

violence as breath fills her lungs, her heart.

Questions & Open Tabs 🔖

🤔

• The Dopamine Cartel … on ways to consider (not) spending one’s wild and precious life.

• In the wake of a recent conference about literature and the anthropocene, I wonder about this: are dystopias in fiction helpful or harmful to the imagining of better futures? Perhaps this podcast will give some pointers? How to set our imagination free to build the tech futures we want (Add to 🦤 list.)

• This article in the NYT ‘What is a species?’ caught my attention. It’s a bit breathless and urgent in tone (environmental communication often is!) Nevertheless, it reminded me how language, and naming, in particular, is so interesting as a potential point of intervention. This was a nice connection to the Mark Vernon podcast mentioned in No.7 - Calyx.

• Oh! This is a fine, fine Lenten read - Against Human Flourishing I am pondering it.

[The] condition of persons, which we all share—ground down, on the way to emptiness, approaching nothing—repairs as well as damages us . . . Is speaking of our flourishing the best way to elucidate what we are and how we move in the world and what it is that we move toward? I doubt it.

Noticing Something New 🎁

🆕 & lovely phrase … “stumbling bambis” which refers to new ideas, projects. We are not and do not have to pretend to be Athenas that pop out of their father’s heads fully formed, armoured and off to conquer the world!