Labor Day Linkages

...in which others are doing inspiring things (and I am taking a short break)

Good morning friends, I hope all are well! We’ve got a broody thunderstormy morning unfolding here in my home valley. Last week, it frosted two nights in a row, and we had to cover everything in our garden. The weather and Labor Day and life are in a shared choreography, making it abundantly clear that summer is ending.

Two roads diverged in a windscatter of yellow petals…

I love fall, but transitions are hard.

In honor of Labor Day—and respecting my tired body, which is worn out from this flash-in-a-pan summer—I’m taking a miniature summer break from the podcast for this waxing moon. You can look forward to a gracious and deeply felt episode with dancer Chisao Hata at the full moon.

In the meantime, for today—in alignment with a recent commitment to spend more time uplifting the many thinkers and doers who inspire me daily—I thought I’d share a short list of media, books, and reads that have been knocking my socks off lately.

Substack Reads:

• Ellie Robins
  ’ post “This Moment Needs Your Deep Weirdness and Your Intellectual Rigor” captures a history and a vibe of the consciousness zeitgeist that Jason Graham and I explore in Kinward 08. Bring on the yetis.

• I’m so excited to check out

  Sophie Strand
  ’s new book The Body is a Doorway, and this outtake, “The Body is an Ecodelic,” is such a potent reminder that the doorways of perception (and connection) are always already inside us. Lauren Macdonald and I briefly gush over Sophie’s novel The Madonna Secret in Kinward 05. (That novel is ecodelic to the core and I highly recommend it.)

• I’m digging into

  Alpha Lo
  ’s series on Bioprecipitation with relish. Bacteria make rain? Oh yes. And so do spores, and so do plants as they transpire. If I get back into conservation work one of these days, it will certainly be on-the-ground small-water-cycle work—like the process based restoration I discuss with Kevin Swift on Kinward 04. I’ve learned so much about how water behaves, and what water wants, from practitioners like Kevin and thinkers like Alpha Lo. And I have a hunch that what water wants is about as close as we get to what life wants.

Water definitely wants this. Artwork: “Call of the River” by Autumn Skye

Other podcasts:

• There’s a money ecosystem developing on the margins of high tech that I am very curious about and don’t claim to have fully wrapped my head around. We might loosely umbrella it under “Regenerative Finance.” It’s informed by biomimicry, complexity science, and psychedelics. Very smart people are defining “life-ennobling economics” (← e.g. Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs); attempting “animist investing” (← e.g. Alexa Firmenich with Ground Effect Studio); and designing frameworks to vest natural systems with agency inside of financial markets (← e.g. Austin Wade Smith with Regen Foundation). If you have no idea what I’m talking about, well, my brain is also very stretched by these notions. Follow these links, dig in, and maybe we can figure it out together.

• Timothy Morton, the eco-philosopher author of Hyperobjects—a mind-bending reach around the vastness of climate change—has recently become a born-again Christian and released a new book called Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. His conversation about the book (and etc) with

  Michael Garfield
  on the Future Fossils Podcast had me alternately scratching my head and shouting YES this is it. If you, like me, sometimes crave a nerdy freefall through the hex we’re living in, this interview might illuminate some new terrain.

  🔥🌎💒 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking Blasphemy

Books:

• The fantasy novel I’m working on takes as a given that life IS magic, and if we are doing magic, we’re doing what life already wants to do. With this in mind, I’ve been returning to some magical realist texts that have inspired me over the last several years. Magical realism is the genre that most closely resembles what’s actually happening right now, IMO. Alice Walker’s classic epic The Temple of My Familiar is like Allende for the African diaspora—a vast, musical, speculative tour of how we got here that prefigures afrofuturism. Hawaiian author

  Kawai Strong Washburn
  ’s more recent (2020) novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors trusts that that the gods are waking up in us—though it’s safe to say it’s not all downhill from there.

My yoga bolster bookshelf

• Ed Yong’s Pulitzer Prizewinning book An Immense World, exploring other beings’ sensorial encounters with their environments, will open your pores and flicker your whiskers. My therapist recommended it to me…

• I’ve been trawling sci-fi sage Jeff Vandermeer’s book recommendations as I eagerly awake the fourth installment in his Southern Reach series, Absolution, which won’t quite come out in time for my birthday, darnit. Of the books on his list, my favorite so far has been Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron: an intimate, vivid tour of a wild world remade by crisis. Mythic in theme but very intimate in scope, this book made me wonder whether the canvas I’m working on for my own book is too big. Maybe!

That’s it for today, friends. I hope some of these linkages expand your web of meaning a bit. As this moon grows, may you be well.