- The tragic side of life is never far away. The least we can do is listen to the pain of others and speak in measured tones of one another’s small achievements of wit, grace, and insight.
- Who are the contemporary equivalents of farmer-kings and slave-holders?
- Pay attention to attention itself. It is helpful to fixate on neither the big picture nor the individual, but to look at what could mediate in-between.
Besides our day jobs, if we have them, we have a whole other job these days, doing free labor for Google, Facebook, and others. The culture industries at least let us relax while they did the job of entertaining us. What I call the vulture industries of social media outsource that to us as well.
Ecology, like God, does not exist and is probably impossible. Yet it remains in the background. But there might be more than one ecology. Our visions of it extend from our actual labors and practices. It looks different depending on what you attend to.
If one wants a takeaway, a too long; didn’t read: Attend to the in-between spaces. Avoid the binaries. Observe the connections. And act on them.