Chuck McKeever

It makes me feel holy, chosen. This sight no less special than a shooting star. These sounds no less wondrous than the tumbling of a river.

“Anyone who has ever loved so desperately as to be choked by the prospect of being parted in death can surely relate. To love anyone or anything so deeply is to want to give every moment possible to them. But working people’s days (and by extension their lives, for what are our lives if not the sum of our days) are not their own. It is this singular tragedy that animates the best songs on Weathervanes, both in recognition and in negation: in concluding that what makes life worth living at all are those moments when we can give ourselves over to whatever we choose.”

Wrote this week about the lessons we can learn from ancient burial mounds on the Eurasian steppe. Will try to start sharing my writing over here again more regularly, especially with Twitter becoming more of an unusable cesspool by the day.

“That we deserve better, that we desperately need a rapid reordering of our society and its productive enterprises so that we might stave off dragging the entire global ecosystem to hell with us, is no secret. But what is harder to remember is that outside of this exploitative, competitive nightmare that we have been taught is the only true manner of being, we have always been good at taking care of each other. We’ve even been good at taking care of the planet, whether we meant to or not. Whether we could plan something so beautiful as our burial mounds becoming ecological oases or not.”

hthrrloooo:

I bought this book, Day Hikes of the Smokies, a few years ago at either a thrift store or a used bookstore, I can’t remember which, and it’s full of useful and practical information about the length and difficulty and landmarks of various trails, but there are also passages in it that read like poetry.

there’d be worse ways to go, I think

Jason Isbell: Running with Our Eyes Closed (2023)

Mervyn Peak, Gormenghast

In love with the whole glittering world this morning

“The solstice is no more, and unmistakably no less, than another beat in the pulse of time. All life partakes of that pulse, and even the ancients who performed the rites knew and revered the rhythms. There was an almost sacred order to the seasons, an order still unchanged and unchanging. Man lived by the rhythms, and he knew it.

And no matter in what language we disguise them, man still lives by the rhythms. A solstice, and another Winter. Change within the eternal constant. And there lies the great assurance for man, whose pulse, whose breath, whose very life is of a rhythm beyond his understanding.“

- Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons