Our neighbours have a millstone in their yard, and I noticed this morning that there was a tiny flower growing up out of it. It’s amazing what can grow where.

Our former neighbour Murray Todd died at age 32 last week.

When we moved into this house in 2000, Murray was 11 years old, a fresh-faced, friendly kid who always said hello.

Murray had a hard life, punctuated by loss, addictions, and involvement with the justice system. It’s not always easy to love people so overtaken, but they’re the ones we need to love the most.

You will be missed, neighbour.

I extended my haircut cadence to 110 days this time around, and took the opportunity to up my fashion game, with the arrival of a new Fisherman Sweater in a decidedly-more-autumnal-than-usual shade for me.

Facebook, which I have rejoined, at least for the moment, for reasons of widower-support, has been aggressively marketing apparel at me for weeks now–I imagine as a result of an otherwise imperceptible hover over a kaftan or printer’s smock at some point–and, I am somewhat ashamed to say, I fell victim. To my credit, the sweater is made in Canada from recycled materials, so while the messenger was evil, the sweater is not.

The happiness is genuine and pure.

From the Counterculture issue of Volume magazine, from a piece by C-Lab about hacking:

As a form of countercultural resistance, hacking makes no claims to ideological coherence. Hacking is inherently impure, working as it does in the gaps within structures. It takes advantage of the piecemeal nature of the most seemingly-unified organizations, thereby complicating the easy polarities of engagement and refusal. It does not work to establish a coherent agreement based on an existing logic, nor does it simply negate and replace an order. Instead, it temporarily inhabits a network just long enough to discover and implement new possibilities. By problematizing the notion of engagement, hacking can be seen as both destructive and constructive, both revolutionary (creating interruptions by inserting new designs into technological systems) and evolutionary (driving the development of the system forward).

At its core, this is a restatement of what I more simply laid out as my mission:

To create small moments where people can see things they’ve never seen before.

The birds were alive and musical as I was pottering around with my bicycle in the back yard yesterday.

Elizabeth Bishop did exactly what one is supposed to do with an unexpected windfall:

Upon receiving a substantial ($2,500) traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, Bishop set off to circumnavigate South America by boat. Arriving in Santos, Brazil in November of that year, Bishop expected to stay two weeks but stayed 15 years.

See also her obligatory Island connections.

Karine Polwart’s lovely new album Still As Your Sleeping features a daring cover of Talk to Me of Mendocino. Daring because the Kate & Anna original is one of the greatest folk songs ever.

I warn you: listening to either the original or the cover may result in listening to both in rotation for hours and hours.

Phoebe Bridgers has recorded Bo Burnham’s That Funny Feeling with all proceeds going to support Texas Abortion Funds:

Chip in for Texas Abortion Funds

SB 8 bans abortion as early as 6 weeks and put a minimum of a $10,000 bounty on anyone that helps someone obtain an abortion in Texas.

This law specifically targets abortion funds, which help Texans pay for their procedure and get logistical help like a ride to the clinic.

Now more than ever, abortion funds need your support. Chip in to ensure Texans can get abortion care.

Laurie Brown ruminates on the return of the music in this week’s Pondercast.

It made me cry.

Today’s a crying day. In a crying week. In a crying month. So many signposts. 

Twenty-one years ago I sat holding Catherine’s hand in the operating room at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, as Oliver emerged from inside her, a gelatinous silent blob of struggling life.

Twenty-one months ago, and a thousand feet east, I sat holding Catherine’s hand as she breathed her last breath. 

The original tears, the tears forged in those dying moments, were stinging tears, the tears of loss, sadness, change, disbelief. I had no distance from those tears: they were inside me and on top of me; I breathed them in and I breathed them out. There was nothing else.

Grief, I have learned, cannot be understood, predicted, anticipated, only lived. But there does seem to be a faint Darwinian logic to it, inasmuch as it metes itself out in evolving waves: waves I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend then, are the waves that wash over me now.

So my tears today are less tears of loss, and more tears of emergence.

And that’s why Laurie Brown made me cry today:

There is an upside to music dropping out of your life, and that’s having it return.

Little by little the music is returning; that inspires a mixture of wonder and challenge. 

I’m so so so fucking angry at Catherine for dying.

I’m so so so fucking thankful for the years we had together, for the daughter we raised.

I’m so so so fucking overwhelmed by the chrysalis I find myself in.

I’m so so so fucking happy to be alive.

The waves of those things overlap and resonate and coexist.

And make me cry.

A few weeks ago, driving back home from Freetown, after a wonderful hour riding Tye the horse, I felt a kind of elation that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I luxuriated in it, and feared it would quickly disappear, and then luxuriated in it some more. The weeks since, I’ve been able to evoke that memory as a Polaris, a reminder that happiness is possible, that all stories don’t end with the hero dying, and that if I follow my instincts I can find my way through this.

Tonight we will celebrate Oliver, who begat Olivia. Oliver who emerged from that gelatinous silent blob of struggling life into remarkable, confident Olivia. There is Catherine in her–so much Catherine. And there is so much of me in her. And, more and more, there is her in her, a new thing entirely. I love her so profoundly. And that too makes me cry.

As the music returns, finding my way to being excited about what comes next is one of the gifts it brings.

That is terrifying, exciting, daunting, hopeful. If I focus too much, I can get lost, washed over.

But if I soften my gaze, I can see it.

I can hold it in my hand long enough to have faith in it. To find my way forward.

To light.

 George Monbiot in The Guardian:

Everywhere, governments seek to ramp up the economic load, talking of “unleashing our potential” and “supercharging our economy”. Boris Johnson insists that “a global recovery from the pandemic must be rooted in green growth”. But there is no such thing as green growth. Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.