Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
Lately, I've been musing on the debate between those who claim that human nature is inherently selfish and those who say that we are oriented to cooperation and care. I am beginning to think that this is artificial, that the drive to name our nature is, in fact, an urge to excuse our actions. It… Continue reading The Wednesday Word: 18 August 2021
Central Vermont is under a heat advisory today. There is also smoke from fires on the opposite side of the continent, though rains are periodically washing it out of the sky. Thus sometimes we don’t have the air quality advisory to go with the heat, though last night I could see no Perseid meteors through… Continue reading Dying Normal
I began reading Mark Bittman’s Animal, Vegetable, Junk this week. This might be another formative book. It is trending in that direction. Bittman is tackling our recently soured relationship to food. I can say from experience that this is a daunting writing project, one that I approach obliquely in most of my writing. So I… Continue reading The Wednesday Word: 11 August 2021
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, Baram repeatedly claims “We need a new religion”. This is a trending assertion. Maybe it’s something in the overly hot air, but this idea that we need something else to guide us in day to day life, something maybe to reign in the excess, but something definitely… Continue reading Musing on “We Need a New Religion”
It is nearly Lughnasadh, fair season. This is the time of year when we gather together to celebrate and share and boast about our handicrafts. The Irish have a such a deep passion for these crafty clan gatherings, they put a deity in charge. Lugh was the primary god of the Tribe. These days, he… Continue reading Lugh’s Blessing
I used to think that all the effrontery I found in the pages of philosophy was just fall-out from the Ass-Holocene. That most of the snobs who wrote this stuff never had to clean their laundry, disdained such menial labor, despised all those who did it. That they were just some of the more obnoxious… Continue reading The Problem of Philosophy
It's been a rough few days. I am very happy to report that my nearly 80-year-old father is now bionic. On Friday night, he was admitted to the hospital with a heart rate that was below 50bpm and was dipping into the 20s. Tuesday, they put in a pacemaker. He is coherent again and a… Continue reading The Wednesday Word: 21 July 2021
In the past couple weeks I’ve encountered two new books from people who should know better claiming that our big brains and social systems are rooted in hunting. This is the bad penny of origin stories — Man the Hunter. It is time someone bites down on this one and shows once and for all… Continue reading Further Exegesis of A Man
Because there isn’t an in between in this age of extremes, Vermont has gone from drought to deluge in one week. The heat has broken. Instead, there is a clammy chill that settles in the joints and swells doors well past sticky — there is much kicking involved in leaving the house. I can’t hang… Continue reading The Wednesday Word: 14 July 2021
Philosophers and mystics throughout time have been showing us that everything is connected, that humans are part of that everything, that unity is fundamental — and sacred. This tradition is more prevalent and prominent in the East and in most Indigenous cultures, but in the West we have our cosmologists and pantheists, even within the… Continue reading On the Existence of A Man
By My Solitary Hearth 