Boundary

Wilderness and Food

[stevebunge]

As I have indicated a while back, Susan and I have been working with a small team to found a non-profit that is an outgrowth of the clinic and whose mission is to cultivate connection through shared experiences and to build programming and a place where people can reconnect with each other and heal in community. (We are targeting helpers in our communities who are on the front lines of caring for all of us.) We will have programming at Susan's clinic in St Paul and will build a retreat center on an amazing piece of land about an hour from the Twin Cities.

In just over a week, we are having a founding gathering. The idea is to invite the folks from our networks and bring them together to hear our story and, hopefully, raise some money for this work.

We will have music from my friend John who is well known around these parts. We will have some food and wine. And we will have a short program to ground everyone and connect to the mission.

I'm super proud of the work we've been doing. It has been slow progress and we've made mistakes along the way. It will feel better when our small group digging so deep into our own pockets to keep things going.

But, as founders, Susan and I will each be speaking and we are struggling, for different reasons.

Susan has a really hard time with public speaking. She is so relational one-on-one and is the visionary for this project (she tries to reject that role) but speaking in front of a crowd really activates some of the core of her trauma and it's hard for her to even organize her thoughts around what to say. In her head, she knows she wants to speak but it's been hard. Our friend who is on this journey with us, an amazing non-profit fundraiser, is very tenderly helping her tell her story because there is such power in it: about how disconnected we are from ourselves and each other, about how much grief we are all carrying and how that grief is best processed with others, and about how processing grief and belonging is connected to hope. The goal is to get everyone to connect their hearts to this work.

I also get nervous speaking publicly. And I get pretty emotional. But I need to hear Susan's story in order to understand how to connect my words to it and tell a story about Susan's vision and how much that has moved all of us who have been working for the last many months. Also, I need to ask for money which makes me a little terrified.

We've got a week to settle into all of this. It will be a great event. But it may be a little rocky getting there.

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Sartorial Alert: Every dipshit that showed up to back Ken P is wearing a cowboy hat and pants that are too long. And they all stand with their hands at their belt buckles.

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This is a few years old but I was just made aware of this duo. Really amazing fusion with serious jazz chops. Love their look and their close quarters setup where they face each other.

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The Facts of Life

Written by Pádraig Ó Tuama

That you were born and you will die.

That you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not.

That you will lie if only to yourself.

That you will get tired.

That you will learn most from the situations you did not choose.

That there will be some things that move you more than you can say.

That you will live that you must be loved.

That you will avoid questions most urgently in need of your attention.

That you began as the fusion of a sperm and an egg of two people who once were strangers and may well still be.

That life isn’t fair. That life is sometimes good and sometimes even better than good.

That life is often not so good.

That life is real and if you can survive it, well, survive it well with love and art and meaning given where meaning’s scarce.

That you will learn to live with regret. That you will learn to live with respect.

That the structures that constrict you may not be permanently constricting.

That you will probably be okay.

That you must accept change before you die but you will die anyway.

So you might as well live and you might as well love. You might as well love. You might as well love.

from OnBeing

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I heard Rick Derringer's Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo cover on satellite radio this morning. And I immediately thought that the only person I "know" who might have an anecdote related to that song is @lifesgrandparade.

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There is a narrow planter box along two sides of the patio that is above the garage. GLP and I rebuilt half of it last fall because it was falling apart. We haven't had great success with veggies in the boxes so this year we decided to plant a bunch of zinnias.

All of the tallest ones were started from seed in the spring. The lower bushier ones we got at the garden center around Mothers' Day.

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What do we call complaining about people who complain?

"Social media"?

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Why Your Dog Sleeps Next to You (It's Not What You Think)

It’s not about warmth or a soft pillow. The real reason your dog sleeps pressed against you goes back tens of thousands of years, to a promi

This isn't a surprise to me but it was a feel good read in a dark world.

All of my dogs since Heike (mid-20s) have slept in bed with me: Heike, Hilde, Happy, Buddy, Hobbes, Yoko, and Fiia. Some of them starting out in bed and moving to the floor.

Thinking about Heike...she would start out the night in the bed and move to a dog bed on the floor after an hour or so. Most nights I wake up at around 3am and then fall back asleep (sometimes after ruminating for a bit). Whenever I would wake at 3am and open my eyes to check the time, Heike was nearly always standing at the side of the bed very still and she was looking at me. I would pat her head and she would very quietly walk back over to her dog bed and lay down to go back to sleep.

[stevebunge]

I'm not a regular instagram user just because it wasn't something I was very interested in rather than from some sort of moral argument.

I don't use facebook.

I use WhatsApp a little bit for specific groups of people where that is the only communication platform.

But whenever Meta/Zuckerberg behaves in a shitty way it is a reminder that participation in those platforms funds that bad behavior. It's why Zuckerberg has a compound and a plane and enough cash to donate to the authoritarian administration to grease the skids for their continued bad behavior.

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Bde Maka Ska last night at about 7:30pm. The smoke was still settling over us. We are on the west side of the plume and we seem to be getting sort of waves from horrible to not so bad but it all smells like burning wood.

Probably not the best night to sail on my friend Eric's boat but it didn't look so bad when we left for the lake.

The mood seems to match with the slow rolling political / governmental apocalypse that is unfolding.

[stevebunge]

I didn't see the game yesterday but just looked at a 2min highlights video and it seemed like they were really stretching to find bright spots for the French side.

[stevebunge]

The Mutation of the Hero's Myth

Examining the techno-libertarian heroism that's unravelling our world

Our world was built by and for The Hero’s myth. That myth is a myth of initiation through trials, death, descent and ultimate victory. It’s the myth of a lone man, cast out from normalcy and tasked to prove himself. But colonialism has populated its wilds. Modernity has neutered the lineages and life-ways that once held its initiatory core intact. Hollywood and Marvel put the hero on a dopamine treadmill. And, late stage capitalism gutted his moral heart. There’s is a particular version of the hero’s journey being told at civilizational scale — through the escapades of tech billionaires and political elites and the ideologies of those who believe that intelligence confers the right to power. It’s a Hero’s Journey that sounds and tastes like the well worn monomyth. It moves through the same sequence of wound and calling, descent and return, ordeal and apotheosis that Joseph Campbell mapped in the myths of a hundred cultures. But something has happened to it on the way through the machine. It became the story of the techno-libertarian, the surveillance capitalist authoritarian, the power-drunk narcissist convinced he is the hero of his own story, regardless of who he tramples on the way to the top. The grammar is intact; the values have inverted.

This is very, very good.

[stevebunge]

Pesto from the herb pot in three acts.

Served the GF pasta/pesto with grilled lamb loin chops and a simple lettuce salad.

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Our wonderful next door neighbor, Julie, is gone for two weeks to be at her cabin with her daughter and son-in-law. It is also the height of raspberry ripening and she has quite a patch. She was having a neighbor friend pick for her and that person is out of town this weekend so I picked today and got about a pint of these beauties.

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Trying to keep up with our amazing first world culture!

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As you might imagine from the New Yorker, it's a really well written, informative article with a subtext about perimenopausal and menopausal women and the confusing and limited healthcare options they have.

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Trying to keep up with our amazing first world culture!

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Calling @trinilikesalt! How are you feeling about a Spain Belgium being even at half?