In “The Real-Life Poetry of Gardening,” Tess Taylor writes:
Gardeners, are, by their nature, people who believe in regeneration. They understand that the broken world we inherit can also be amended, with compost, worms, and steady tending. They have seen that the tended earth, in turn, offers up radical abundance—not only of food, but of insects, birds, rhizomes, and soil.
The garden surprises us in unexpected ways. Oregano winters over. Wild miner’s lettuce springs back. A volunteer pumpkin luxuriates near the compost bin. Suddenly met with abundance, we beg people to come help harvest our plums. We befriend a plot of earth, and it befriends us in return. By some powerful force, this friendship brings us into a fuller, more just communion with the human and nonhuman at once.
This is the kind of writing I want to do, both in terms of the prose and the gentleness that the prose conveys. Something to make you hear the wind chime as you look at the sunlight streaming in through the window.
Blake Watson writes about a power outage that reveals how dependent we all are on power, from running our websites to powering wheelchairs and other assistive technologies for those who depend on them for everyday use:
I’m a web developer by trade. I make websites. Websites are just computer files. If the world was suddenly without power, websites would more or less cease to exist. The things that I have spent the majority of my adult life learning how to build would be nonexistent and meaningless. All the skills I’ve developed in programming and digital graphic design would become useless.
“The fragile nature of my life’s work“
When the power is on, I’m worth a competitive web developer’s salary, despite only being able to move a few fingers. When the power is off, there is nothing productive I can offer the world on my own.
Many people have this problem. Not just me. What does it mean that the livelihoods of so many people rely on an intangible world of our creation?
My work as a writer is dependent on power too–I keep thinking about how intangible it is. Sometimes I get too paranoid and imagine printing out everything I’ve ever published into a book so that if all the servers are lost and the internet is lost, at least I will have my work still readable. It won’t reach as many people, but at least it will still exist. Our society’s dependence on all things digital and online is also what makes me turn to things I can do offline, from cooking to reading physical books and taking a walk. Things I can do away from the screen–we use them for much more than is necessary, I think. (Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone, but I’m not making blanket statements here. For the generally privileged person whose day-to-day life doesn’t depend on power and the internet, there’s a lot of potential for reducing our dependence on these things.)
A few weeks ago I discovered “the 72 micro-seasons calendar” used in Japan, which, conceptually, is so much better than the Gregorian calendar, but which, given how the modern world lives and the consequences of climate change, won’t really be usable for most of us. I’m writing this on 26th December, which is when “Self-heal sprouts.” From tomorrow, the deer will shed their antlers.
In an essay for Real Life, Crystal Chokshi writes about how “predictive text reduces writing to a science.” Excerpts:
Apps like these aim to bring our text in line with an algorithmic norm. They define “good” writing as efficient writing; and according to their marketing campaigns, writing can be efficient because its hallmarks are pattern and repetition.
“Recommended Writing” by Crystal Chokshi, Real Life
This is why I never could get into copywriting and content writng when I first began freelance writing earlier this year. Not only is it the kind of writing that’s perfect for generating through AI, it’s also not what I love to read or write. I’m not scared too much about the existence of art (though I am worried about the existence of artists) mainly because a lot of what makes art great and human and worth engaging with/reading over and over is its humanness, its unpredictability. My favorite essays and stories don’t follow a formula. They’re not templates that can be substituted with other characters and places and experiences and still work. Every piece of writing is unique because it is unformulaic, because if you give two people the same outline, the end results they produce will look very different. In fact, if you tell the same person to write about a topic at different points in a time–from a day apart to a decade apart–what they write will be different both times as well, even if that difference is minor. AI cannot replicate that. And so I have hope that the kind of writing I love will continue to exist, and that the kind of writing I do will continue to have readers too. As Chokshi writes: “What if we abandoned the commonness imperative, embracing the infinite range of contexts and relationships an online interaction might indicate, or establish? What if we quit designing as though self-optimization and speed were the only goals worth pursuing?”
And for a break in your programme: some hyper-local crow news.
Tom’s message makes me realize that rewilding attention is an active practice. One must not only pursue those tiny signals but share them as well, whether that means writing about them on your blog or by word of mouth. The only way the tiny signal can keep on resonating throughout the web is if we keep passing it on.
“Rewilding Your Attention” by CJ Eller
Ratika Deshpande 