Posted on

Your screen or your life

Clams dug up from a local mudflat


An essential quality of technology, from the spear to Skype, is action at a distance. Technology enables us to have an effect on people and things far away. In general, the more advanced the technology, the further away it is able to impose an effect. 

Doug Hill, author of Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology



Our lives cost the lives of others. That’s always been true, and will be so long as we breathe.

Technology allows us to forget this.
Technology encourages us to forget this.

Experts spew on about a global community, but their hands never touch the blood and feces of the life around them. They barely touch their own.

You want every child “connected”? So do I.
It’s what’s at the other end of the connection that matters.

I have killed other living things, deliberately, but not slowly.
I have slaughtered animals with stones, with knives, with awareness.

We pretend the machines bring us knowledge.
We confound information with awareness.

I wish we spent as much time teaching a child how to use a knife as we do a Chromebook.

I could live without my computer a lot easier than living without my knife.
Modified from a few years ago.

Posted on

January lettuce


January lettuce, from the garden.

Yesterday marked the last day of the darkest 6 weeks of the year.

The cold snap wounded the rosemary bush, but enough of the lettuce hung on in the cold frames to share with friends tonight. Winter around here is hard on all of us, but the light is returning to put the pieces back together again.

Halfway between the solstice and Imbolc,
back into November light. 
And we’re still here.

Posted on

Chuck

Patch from my Dad’s squadron.

Chuck was the first adult I called by his first name. I was five.The next adult I called by his first name did not happen until I was an adult myself.

Chuck was a United States Marine Corps helicopter pilot, and a friend of my Dad, a Unites States Marine fighter jet pilot. Both flew off carriers.

Chuck went to Nam; my Dad did not. My Dad did not go because he had an emotionally disturbed son who did not talk, so he stayed stateside. (Turns out that emotionally disturbed son was more deaf than disturbed, and eventually learned to talk well enough to become a doctor.)

Chuck got shot down. He came back home. He had a scarred face, and looking back now I do not know if it was from shrapnel or acne.

My Dad left the Marines in the mid sixties. Chuck stayed in. I was not terribly sophisticated about politics when I was six years old, but I wondered why Chuck stayed in the Marines. I even asked him when my Dad wasn’t listening. (Don’t think my Dad would have tolerated that, and I didn’t much like getting hit.)

Chuck gave my brother and me a toy aircraft carrier that released depth charges. It’s how I learned about depth charges.

My Dad would tell us that Chuck was the worst chopper pilot ever. It was a joke. But Chuck went to Nam anyway.

The last time I saw Chuck told me why he went back–he was haunted by the soldiers he left behind. And the war, which I was told was “bad,” got real complicated for this 6 year old.

Chuck tried to save one too many soldiers, and he got shot down again. And killed. I imagine the ones he went to save were killed that day, too.

And so it goes…..