2023-3-4

The last time I put out one of these newsletters was in October 2020...! I've been feeling the itch to share the things I've been doing and thinking again. My older newsletters are undergoing image rot; I need to find a better place to host photos.

Here you go: lichens, settled work, a cartomancy reading, links, and funny words.

two words

hole milk
web dowser
ambien music
deviled legs
hog standard
coal slaw
predatory mending

lichens


settled work

The experience of settled work is a prerequisite for peace of mind in old age. Yet our society undermines this experience by making a rift between working life and retirement, and between workplace and home...

First of all, what do we mean by "settled work"? It is the work which unites all the threads of a person's life into one activity: the activity becomes a complete and wholehearted extension of the person behind it. It is a kind of work that one cannot come to overnight; but only by gradual development. And it is a kind of work that is so thoroughly a part of one's way of life that it most naturally occurs within or very near the home: when it is free to develop, the workplace and the home gradually fuse and become one thing...

The problem is that very many people never achieve the experience of settled work. This is essentially because a person, during his working life, has neither the time nor the space to develop it. In today's marketplace most people are forced to adapt their work to the rules of the office, the factory, or the institution. And generally this work is all-consuming - when the weekends come people do not have the energy to start a new, demanding kind of work. Even in the self-governing workshops and offices, where working procedures are created ad hoc by the workers as they go, the work itself is generally geared to the demands of the marketplace. It does not allow time for the slow growth of "settled work" - which comes from within and may not always carry its weight in the marketplace...

The crisis of old age, life integrity versus despair and cynicism, can only be solved by a person engaged in some form of settled work... People who have the opportunity to develop such work and to relate it in some appropriate way to the world about them, will find their way to a successful resolution of this crisis as they grow old; others will sink into despair.

— A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977), Christopher Alexander et al.

He hadn't got used to being free yet. . . Well, he would like now to get up and look out of that window and see if his garden was really there. His garden! He thought with a secret feeling, half pity and half shame, of those yellowed old seed catalogues which had come, varnished and brilliant and new, year after year, so long ago, which he'd looked at so hard and so long in the evenings, and put away to get yellow and sallow like his face. . . and his hopes. It must be almost time to 'make garden', he thought. . . He would have just time to get himself settled in his house. . . he felt an absurd young flush come up under his grizzled beard at this phrase. . . 'his house', his own house, with bookshelves, and a garden. How he loved it all already! . . He sat there in the comfortable old arm-chair at rest as never before. He thought, 'This is the way I'm going to feel right along, every day, all the time,' and closed his eyes.

— The Brimming Cup, Dorothy Canfield (1919)

something old, something feared,
something borrowed, something weird


idioms

the rolling stone gets the grease
a squeaky wheel gathers no moss
a watched stone gathers no moss
a rolling pot never boils

#Squarch

(square + march)