Links

Farewell to the Scroll, Grateful for the Light

Posted on by Jimmy

With my goal of prefiguring some changes in this new year of 2025, a few weeks ago I removed Instagram from my phone. It’s been a long time coming; I found myself glued to the screen for a few reasons: keeping up with the unbearable horrors in Gaza, maintaining the vaguest awareness of what some friends who I’m not in regular contact are up to, and using it to escape the Now.

Attention and the present moment have finally been hoisted up onto my altar of divinity. And because I have very little self-control, I needed to actually remove the shiny button that gets me there. I haven’t deleted my account yet; it’s enough to use the browser to check messages once every few days.

I’ll maybe get around to writing about that a little more. Today I thought I’d share the accounts of two people that resonated with last year:

Aleah Black (@gendersauce)

In their words:

What is asked of us in this age?
What is the next phase of our evolution?

We created language and evolved into storytellers.
We created tools and evolved into builders.
We created baskets and evolved into caretakers.

The global stream of information is not going away.
We now live with more information that ever before.

And what shall we do?
What shall we do when met with the suffering of all the Earth?

Rise. Rise to meet it.
The work of our age is to develop a global empathy that we cannot yet imagine.

Hanna Williams (@organic.abundance)

From Instagram about two weeks ago:

There is a part of you that existed before you were born
and that same part will continue to exist after you die.

This immortal part of you is Awareness –
the eternal aspect of your being that flows undisturbed through each lifetime.

Birth and death are like gazing into a mirror.

Before you look into the mirror, you’re aware of yourself.
When you look, your awareness sees your reflection.
And when you move away from the mirror, your reflection disappears.

But you — the one who is aware – existed before the mirror, and you still exist once you turn away.

The only thing that ever changes is the reflection found in the mirror.

I constantly brood over the how and how much of information/news. Naturally curious and usually procrastinating something, “gathering information” is the excuse. Excising this passivity of scrolling will be good for me. But if you’re still there, I recommend these two; for some, there’s still room to connect and share.

The Most Comfortable Conditions

Posted on by Jimmy

The Uninhabitable Earth author David Wallace-Wells interviewed ecologist and author Dave Goulson last month for his new book Silent Earth in New York Magazine. This part has been rattling around in my head for the last month:

I think it’s entirely plausible that we are now living in the most comfortable conditions that people will see for a very long time.

You know, you could say we’ve kind of lucked out — being born in the Western world in the late 20th century. It may well turn out to be that we had the best lives. Life before us was definitely harder, and life after us might well be a lot harder too. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. This is what’s so frustrating — we can fix all of this stuff, more or less, if we really try. And then everyone can have a decent life. But we have to take it seriously and actually be prepared to make some sacrifices and act, which, at the moment, we’re not doing.

Along with the recent release of the IPCC report and Simpsons memes on social media reminding us this summer (the hottest on record) will be the one of the coldest for the rest of our lives, my climate doomerism/optimism has been fluctuating wildly lately.

O BNG, Always with Galicia

Posted on by Jimmy

Galician Nationalist Bloc leader and national spokesperson Ana Pontón re-affirmed that her party is the only alternative to the People’s Party austerity and the centralism of the Spanish state apparatus in Madrid in La Voz de Galicia today:

The goal of politics is to improve people’s lives and it would be absurd to give up the tools that allow us to move toward that goal. So we advocate the ability to decide on our resources, we advocate putting our wealth at the service of the social majority, or we advocate having the key to our money to manage it based on the country’s priorities. It is called, I insist, real self-government.

Galicia is a nation, and we aspire to be the Galician citizens who have in their hands the decisions about their future before a Spanish state with a low-quality democracy, with a monarchy tinged with corruption, where economic lobbies rule through revolving doors and with a judicial process that is illegally perpetuated. A state in which the defense of the right to self-determination is paid with imprisonment, while corruption remains unpunished and the macho, racist, xenophobic and anti-Galician extreme right advances whitewashed by the right, with which it agrees and governs.

BNG (pronounced be-ne-gá) carries the ideological torch of Castelao and Galicianism into the 21st century.

Hopefully the party’s vanguard and all Galicians (even the conservative older ones) will realize the stakes of allowing Feijóo free reign in parliament to turn the nation into a giant wind farm and once again elect BNG to lead and oppose the centralism of Madrid.

How to Make Ortiga Fertilizer

Posted on by Jimmy

Patricia gets a lot of ideas for cool permaculture projects from El Guardian de la Tierra, a YouTube channel created by Lander, a resident of Mallorca and self-professed adicto al permacultura.

A few weeks ago, while I continued to plane and sand boards for the tool shed, she went over to the one of the abandoned yards where she saw a mass of ortiga, stinging nettle, to start preparing some homemade plant fertilizer.

The whole process takes about one-two weeks. Filtering the blanched nettle is a bit unpleasant for the smell, but now we have ten liters of concentrate, which is diluted and used on plants for fertilizer, insect repellent, and fungicide.

Deanna from Homestead and Chill wrote up her process:

Fresh stinging nettle leaves are loaded with high concentrations of vitamins A, C, D, E, F, K, P, and vitamin B-complexes, as well as large amounts of minerals including calcium, selenium, zinc, iron, magnesium and more. As a leafy green, stinging nettle is also high in nitrogen, chlorophyll, and plant polyphenols – all of which bolster plant health and stimulate growth. Plant polyphenols in particular are potent antioxidants, fight cancer, and boost the immune system.

While plants may not get arthritis or cancer in the same way humans do, plants do have an immune system – and can get sick! Therefore, the same compounds that make nettle awesome for human health provide many of the same benefits to plants. For example, plants treated with stinging nettle fertilizer are less susceptible to certain diseases due to nettles’ anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties. Plants with a strong immune system are also less negatively impacted by pests or stress, such as drought, heat, or other unfavorable conditions.

The concentrate should be good for about sixth months.

It Looks Like Apartheid Because It Is Apartheid

Posted on by Jimmy

B’Tselem executive director Hagai El-Ad on Democracy Now and in The Washington Post:

It’s not proportional. It’s not temporary. It’s not legal. It’s not equal. And it’s not complicated: Believe your eyes. Follow your conscience. The reason that it looks like apartheid is simply because it is apartheid.

The bittersweet feeling of the West finally realizing we are dealing with, and financially backing, a settler-colonialist apartheid regime but at a tremendous cost of more and more Palestinian lives (and yes, a much smaller number of Israeli lives) makes me ache.