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deploy.sh

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 #!/usr/bin/env bash
 nvm use 14
 npm run build
-rsync -avzh "ssh -i /home/.ssh/do_rsa2" /drive/computer/docs/canalswans.info/canalswans-gatsby/public/ root@147.182.177.135:/srv/canalswans.commoninternet.net/
+rsync -avzh -e "ssh -i /Users/notplants/.ssh/do_rsa2" /Volumes/mdrive/computer/docs/canalswans.info/canalswans-gatsby/public/ root@147.182.177.135:/srv/canalswans.commoninternet.net/

run.md

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+nvm use 14
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 # then go to localhost:8000

src/pages/about.js

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       <div className="aboutLinksWrapper">
         <table className="aboutLinks">
             <a className="hlink" href="/rss.xml" style={{'margin-right': '20px'}}>rss</a>
-            <SLink className="hlink" to='http://tinyletter.com/notplants/'>newsletter</SLink>
+            <SLink className="hlink" to='https://gaia.chat/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/canalswans'>newsletter</SLink>
             <SLink className="hlink" to='https://sunbeam.city/@notplants' style={{'margin-left': '20px'}}>fediverse</SLink>
         </table>
       </div>

static/content/blog/a-meditation-on-bored-apes/a-meditation-on-bored-apes.md

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+---
+path: "/posts/a-meditation-on-boerd-apes"
+date: "2022-01-09T23:19:51.246Z"
+title: "A Meditation On Bored Apes"
+author: "1085 words"
+type: "blog"
+image: ""
+description: "on nfts and making clothes from trash"
+note: "Max Fowler"
+---
+Two days ago I talked with an old friend, who told me they are buying an NFT, which is a somewhat satirical spin-off of Bored Apes Yacht Club. I didn't know what BAYC was at the time, and they explained it. The next day, I logged on to instagram, and saw ryder ripps make a post about how BAYC images contained racist and esoteric nazi symbolism. I logged off, feeling like I had just quickly learned a number of things that I wished I knew nothing about.
+
+An hour later, while reading a book, I felt a strange curiosity to learn more about BAYC. I decided if I felt curious maybe there was something more to learn, and I logged on my phone and searched BAYC. I saw that Eminem had purchased an ape. I learned that Steve Aoki had purchased a different similar thing called alienfrens. I learned that grimes had sold NFT of their artwork for 6 million dollars. I scrolled grimes twitter for a period, and felt empathy towards their humanness, despite the hate they receive. I looked at a picture grimes had posted of elon musk on the cover of time magazine as person of the year, praising him for cutting his own hair. I thought of the chapter I had just read from "the will to change: men, masculinity and love" by bell hooks.
+
+I spent more time looking at a couple of the apes. One who had a sideways adidas logo on their shirt. I was reminded of fashion kids I had met in new york 5 years ago who also made a lot of clothing with inverted logos, drank all the time, and were photographers. there was a recklessness that I connected with them, that I appreciated, even if there were also issues. I logged off and went to sleep.
+
+In the morning, I was thinking about the apes again. I was at first irritated that I was thinking about them, but then I thought about "On Becoming A Person" by Carl Rogers and "Clarity & Connection" by Yung Pueblo, both books I had had been reading, which both in different ways beautifully express that there is no part of yourself or emotion that you need to be ashamed or afraid of, it doesn't help. Thinking about this, I was pleased to find a sense of inner peace returning, and gently holding whatever this sensation I was experiencing was, without needing to know or decide whether it was "good" or even what it was.
+
+I had the feeling, NFT are fashion. What I was experiencing was the energy of fashion. You could write a thousand books about fashion and desire. Fashion is not one thing, it can be many things, with many emotions. Like money, greed, lust, peace, and wisdom, strangely, fashion is part of the human experience. Fashion is sometimes pointless, but also can be beautiful in its pointlesness. It can be corporate or home-made, hyped or natural. Its adornment. Humans have been adorning their bodies for a long time, in various ways. I thought more about the apes.
+
+I wouldn't rule out ryder ripps theory, but seeing the apes as simianization didn't seem totally compelling to me, since all the characters were apes, not just some of them.
+
+An alternative theory, is that apes are "what we evolved from". They represent the essential humanness, before the invention of "the human" and a release from all the codes of civilization that reduce and constrain us, a return to our equalizing animal nature. If you bought an ape card for 200 dollars when it first came out, and then made 2 million from selling it later, this in some ways feels like the most absurd and also "pure" way to make a fortune. Separate from any ideals of meritocracy, or achievement, just absurdity, in that absurdity is freedom, the possibility of a return to pleasure, to sensation to the death of the ego and liberation. Combine this symbolism with the future-like symbolism of "the nft", the possibility of novelty, of the new. Flickering in between dumb and elegant is a fertile ground for fashion. I imagined buying an NFT that was previously owned by eminem, which had crashed in value, and giving it to a future partner as a gift. Alternatively, I imagined giving them flowers I had grown, or making some type of ornate object made from trash, which felt similarly beautiful. I could probably write a long time about this going in between reasonable interpretations and spiraling into manic nonsense.
+
+Again I return to the feeling that the primary energy here, is the energy of fashion.
+
+Sitting with this energy, without needing it to be any different than it is, I feel peace with it. Some of the crazed tension of the three letter acronym dissipates. I imagine a set of invisible creatures navigating in the shadows between the symbolic archetypes, meeting each other here and there to hold hands, share love, and plant seeds in between burning buildings. Character creation is pretty timeless, before and after crypto, reminds me of playing dungeons and dragons as a kid.
+
+I think of [Leftover Sewing](https://www.instagram.com/leftoversewing/), making clothes from trash, as well as a patch that [Zon](https://sunbeam.city/web/accounts/87676) gave me that says "Trash Future", and the creatures I've known and loved, meeting and sharing spells in the shadows.
+
+Oren told me that the energy of NFT is similar to the energy of gambling. The possibility that one might get a big cash out, whatever unknowable chance that is, is a sort of fantasy that can fuel engagement. I also can feel this, as well as the feeling that this type of fleeting fantasy, while intriguing, is probably not the best thing to orient around if one has a goal of a slow durational organic, even glacial, growth. As I know some of my readers have been thinking about whether to mint an NFT or not, for various reasons, with various feelings of conflict, I hope not to create any additional pressure and to send unconditional support.
+
+Thinking about all this, had the feeling that it was nice to do phenomenological analysis like this, that doesn’t presuppose it has one opinion before it starts, or that it even needs one. Clearly this topic brings up multiple emotions. I’m channeling some of the curiosity I felt about this into a desire to make more clothes out of trash, more adornments, more patches, more gifts for friends.
+
+I also don't claim to be an expert on this topic at all, just sharing some feelings.
+
+With love,<br/>
+M

static/content/blog/degrading-fabric-degrading-networks/degrading-fabric-degrading-networks.md

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+---
+path: "/posts/degrading-fabric-degrading-networks"
+date: "2021-10-22T23:19:51.246Z"
+title: "Degrading Fabric, Degrading Networks"
+author: "1955 words"
+type: "blog"
+style: "poem"
+image: ""
+description: "notes on degrading"
+note: "Max Fowler"
+---
+
+__Degrading Fabric__
+
+While looking at one of my favorite shirts, <br/> 
+its fabric no longer the same texture as it once was,<br/>
+I wondered if there might be some type of way to wash it,<br/>
+that would return it to its previous form.<br/>
+
+But then I thought about all the shirts, pants and bags,<br/>
+which I have patched, and then re-patched,<br/>
+and how it seems eventually fabric disintegrates.<br/>
+
+There have been some good patches,<br/>
+that greatly extended the lifetime,<br/>
+but there is no binary of broken and fixed states.<br/>
+
+One time, while travelling,<br/>
+I borrowed a needle from a friend to patch a new hole in the shin of my pants.<br/>
+After sewing the patch, somewhat in a rush,<br/>
+I noticed I had unintentionally sewed a folded part of the fabric that I wasn't intending to.<br/>
+To try to remedy the situation, I cut the thread there,<br/>
+which freed the folded fabric, but then the thread there was without a knot.<br/>
+I asked my friend who I borrowed the needle from,<br/>
+what they would do in this situation,<br/>
+if there was some way to re-tie the cut pieces,<br/>
+or restore the integrity of the thread.<br/>
+
+They told me they would just sew another piece of thread along the broken area,<br/>
+or just leave it, as it was fine for now,<br/>
+and its always degrading anyway.<br/>
+
+<br/>
+*******
+<br/>
+
+Three years ago I purchased a second-hand blender on kleinanzeigen, which had a working motor, but made a horrible noise when you used it, because a part of the connector between the blade and the motor had degraded. I tried to fix it, including eventually taking the blender to a repair cafe in Kreuzberg, where three older german men looked at my blender for sometime. After the inspection and a conversation, they concluded that the blender was not repairable, without finding a new specific piece that connects the motor to the blade. This part could not be purchased separately from the blender, as far as I could tell.
+
+Afterwards, I sometimes dreamed of finding a matching broken blender, which had the piece I needed, but had a broken motor, and I would combine the two blenders, each perfectly complementing each other, to become whole.
+
+I held onto the blender, for another year, thinking that one day I might find its match.
+
+Then I was moving out of my apartment, and deciding what to take with me.
+
+I decided enough was enough, I had no more space in my boxes, and I took the blender outside and put it in the trash.
+
+Later, as I was leaving the apartment, I thought of the blender, and felt a pang of regret.
+
+I went back into the trash, removed the blender from the trash, and left it in the apartment, with the plan to come back for it at somepoint.
+
+A few weeks later I came back, and my friend who was now living there had put the blender on a shelf,
+with confetti and a red stuffed heart made of fabric inside of it. A small art installation. They didn't know the history of the blender, they just saw it there, and its been like that since then.
+
+<br/>
+*******
+<br/>
+
+This past summer, while staying in Vermont, it was my first time living somewhere where I was composting directly outside, into a fenced-in compost area in the woods by the house. I felt like I was feeding the microbes in the woods directly. I imagined them enjoying each scrap. It felt insane and wasteful to put any piece of biomatter into the trash, even the smallest leaf, and not into the compost where the hungry microbes could eat it. I then became briefly paranoid and wondered if I might be creating a cesspool ecological micro-niche for invasive fungi and pathogens in the compost bin which would then kill the whole forest (via the unusual environmental selective pressures from the assortment of non-local foods being composted), but after talking with the sane consult of a friend, I felt this was a possible but extremely improbable outcome.
+
+<br/>
+*******
+<br/>
+
+Three years ago, while working on Pin Daddy, a robotic machine to child-block your smartphone, which required ordering electronic parts from the internet to build, I felt dissonance while ordering the parts.
+
+At the same time I was getting involved in sari-sari, a group oriented around dancing and cooking. I felt that I could dance and cook for a thousand years without getting bored. Every scrap used in the process could be composted.
+
+I deleted some sentences here that seemed moralizing and unnecessary. Waste, cleanliness, clean and dirty, topics that can quickly veer into puritanism.
+
+When I realized that fabric was always already degrading, it felt different in my hands. Writing a conclusive statement here on the many-sided emotions of ephemerality feels beyond the scope of this newsletter, and is perhaps best contemplated in silence, while looking at a leaf, holding a gogurt, or looking into a friend's eyes. The next section looks at ephemerality in regards to data, computation and networks.
+
+<br/>
+******************************************
+<br/>
+
+__Degrading Networks__
+
+The [arweave.org](http://arweave.org) website, boldly begins:
+
+"Store data, permanently.
+
+Arweave enables you to store documents and applications forever."
+
+If we needed a case-study on the relationship between religion, technology, permanence and ephemerality, this might be a good place to start.
+
+Later on, down the page, is the next statement, that we might wonder if its stated with the same level of integrity as the first statement:
+
+"Arweave is community owned and operated."
+
+As well as [the claim by Mirror](https://dev.mirror.xyz/valptw8S9eZ1cvzX-JCGga2N_W2hXyurSYbOlNFj4OQ), a blogging platform built on top of arweave,
+that "Identity and data is owned by users - This means your account is owned by you"
+
+As I started to look into this, it brought up some questions.
+
+Short sidenote: I know that I have a range of readers, some who work in crypto, some who avoid computers. Maybe I would preface this by saying, that I don't actually work in crypto. I've been interested in decentralized technology for a while, but there's lot of decentralized technology which doesn't rely on the blockchain (the technology often called crypto), which for the most part also receives less attention than crypto, in my opinion, because there are many fewer ways to get rich with it. So my work and interests are kind of crypto adjacent, but mostly around the periphery, with some interest, but also significant skepticism towards many crypto projects, many of which I think are riding a sort of crypto bubble and you can't take their public communications at face value. Specifically I've been working on a project in the scuttlebutt ecosystem, which uses cryptography in the protocol, but does not use a blockchain. Apologies to crypto folks for overly simplifying this, but in my eyes, a blockchain is a consensus.
+
+A relevant quote [from Bob Haugen on the fediverse](https://social.coop/@bhaugen/107116634631890137):
+<br/>
+
+> The scuttlebutts consider blockchains to be "P2P versions of centralized systems":
+https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/stories/design-challenge-avoid-centralization-and-singletons
+>
+> To participate in an Ethereum-based system, you must use the same blockchain. A cloned blockchain is stored in every full node, but each clone is the same.
+> 
+> Vs in the fediverse, many nodes use different software and are not clones but can still federate.
+
+<br/>
+
+A lot my interest in scuttlebutt, the fediverse, and anarchist practices in general, orbits around the possibility that for a lot of things you don't really need a consensus. Further, the possibility that interdependence and consensus are often confused for each other, and the ways in which its possible to coexist and even collaborate and even love each other, with varying degrees of consensus. Consensus is a beautiful tool, but its not the only one.
+
+Now back to the question of ephemeral, permanent and degrading networks. Comparing arweave, scuttlebutt, the fediverse and the old web.
+
+Thinking beyond the obviously false claim that data on Arweave is permanent,
+
+What happens when a cryptocurrency becomes unpopular, and people stop mining it? When nodes and validators stop running? What does this process of degradation look like and how is it experienced?
+
+On the HTTP web, we have link rot, when links point to pages that no longer exist. And we can even end up with these sort of partial pages, like this image of a website I made in highschool for the music I made, a website which was archived by the way back machine, and which is saved their partially, but all of the links to the images and music files no longer exist, on the internet or anywhere.
+
+![remnant](img/remnant.png)
+
+
+I'm curious to learn more about this in the context of blockchains, consensus, and projects like Arweave. I am not crypto-informed enough to know yet or share an opinion, other than that I know that "permanent" is not the correct answer.
+
+One thing I find noteworthy about Scuttlebutt, is the way that it continues to function at many levels of degradation. If some parts of the network go down, whatever parts that are still running can continue to run. Even if in the end, there were just two computers, on a local network, still running scuttlebutt software, they could continue to communicate using the scuttlebutt protocol, regardless of what is happening on the rest of the network. This property also has useful qualities, such as low-energy consumption, and usage in rural areas, disaster zones and off-grid communities
+
+The next question is whether arweave is truly community operated, who this "community" is, and what it means to them to own your own data.
+
+On their website I see that they have their own content moderation system (so its not completely anything goes).
+
+They state "If you would like a piece of content found on an arweave.net gateway to be removed, please contact us and you will receive a response shortly."
+
+In [their yellow paper](https://www.arweave.org/technology#papers), in the portion on content moderation, I see:
+
+"During the forking process, those
+nodes whose content policies have rejected the transaction ‘race’ against
+those who have accepted the transaction to produce the next block. Once
+such a block is produced, nodes on the other fork initiate a fork recovery pro-
+cess to download the block with its transactions, verify them, then drop the
+offending transactions from temporary memory. In this way, the network is
+able to maintain consensus while allowing nodes to take part in a stochastic
+voting process, expressing whether or not they wish specific content to be
+added to the blockweave. Therefore, nodes that wish to reject said content
+are not required to store that content on their non-volatile storage media."
+
+I can't yet fully understand this sentence, so I will need to ask someone about it.
+
+The model on Scuttlebutt and the Fediverse is "free speech and free listening", which means you are enabled to say what you want, but also no one has to listen to you or replicate your data. Last winter, I wrote another post, titled ["The Anthropology Of Blocking"](https://canalswans.commoninternet.net/posts/anthropology-of-blocking) where I look at this in more detail.
+
+This newsletter is left as an open question, that I would like to understand how arweave compares to the scuttlebutt and fediverse models, and to what degree its content moderation policy requires consensus, or if archipelago-style interconnection without singular consensus is possible.
+
+Degrading, <br/>
+M
+
+
+PS. an invitation:
+
+I am now part of a collective that is collectively administering a solarpunk fediverse instance called http://sunbeam.city. We had a vote, and after some discussion and an amendment, the collective reached a consensus to allow users to invite new people, until we reach 200 monthly active users, and then we will turn off invitations again.
+
+To everyone following this newsletter, I would be excited if you joined our instance. Just send me a message if you would be interested to have an account with yourhandle@sunbeam.city and I will send you an invite.
+
+Its pretty much just like twitter, with desktop and mobile clients. I'm still more interested in scuttlebutt than the fediverse in the long-term, but I think the fediverse is more usable right now, and it feels good to me to invest energy, at the network level, into something which is at least part of the exploration of moving towards something more just and nourishing than the status quo.
+
+![sunbeam](img/sunbeamcity3.png)

static/content/blog/misinformation/misinformation.md

@@ -0,0 +1,92 @@
+---
+path: "/posts/misinformation"
+date: "2021-11-21T23:19:51.246Z"
+title: "Misinformation"
+author: "1225 words"
+type: "blog"
+image: ""
+description: "misinformation rabbit holes"
+note: "Max Fowler"
+---
+
+In March of 2021, the Center For Countering Digital Hate released [a report](https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen) titled “The Disinformation Dozen” which stated that 12 people, referred to as the disinformation dozen, are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. This report was cited by all sorts of news outlets over the past months, as well as by Biden. A google search of '"disinformation dozen" CCDH' yields 23,300 results.<br/>
+<br/>
+On August 18th of 2021, Facebook released <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/taking-action-against-vaccine-misinformation-superspreaders/">a report</a> titled "How We’re Taking Action Against Vaccine Misinformation Superspreaders”, in which they reported that this widely cited figure by the CCDH was from a non-representative sample, and "there isn't any evidence to support this claim”.<br/>
+<br/>
+That the major talking point about "stopping misinformation" was based on a piece of misinformation, which cannot be independently verified due to the opaque nature of Facebook’s platform, seems very telling of the moment to me.<br/>
+<br/>
+In an information landscape of clickbait, profit-motivated news outlets, black-box social media platforms and regulatory capture, nuanced truths are hard to come by.<br/>
+<br/>
+The 73% talking point, is a convenient (false) bullet point to suggest that misinformation is a simple phenomenon, and something which could be excised in a binary way with sufficient motivation. The reality is more complicated.<br/>
+<br/>
+Here are images of some dish towels which my sister bought me for my birthday:<br/>
+
+![yes-no](img/yes-no.png)
+
+
+
+On August 21st of 2021, a friend told me,
+“Indigenous people make up 5% of the world's population, and are stewards of 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity.”<br/>
+
+The next day, I decided to look up where this came from, before sharing it, and it sent me down a long research rabbit hole, of not quite finding where the 80% figure came from.<br/>
+
+Don’t get me wrong, the sentiment behind the quote seems true to me — I found lots of research supporting that indigenous peoples have been and continue to be stewards of amazing amounts amounts of biodiversity, such as [this paper](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190731102157.htm), from the University of British Columbia from 2019, showing that the indigenous-managed lands they looked at had even greater biodiversity than "protected lands".<br/>
+<br/>
+I also see the 80% figure often quoted, but I haven't been able to pinpoint where the 80% figure *originally* comes from.<br/>
+<br/>
+With this case, I also still think its possible I might be missing something. So I’m sharing this anecdote as an interesting case of tracking down where information comes from, as well in case any one reading this is interested to also go down the rabbit hole to help explain its origin.<br/>
+<br/>
+If you want to help me figure this out, here is a summary of where I got to in the rabbit hole:<br/>
+<br/>
+1. National Geographic article from November 2018: <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-indigenous-land-stewardship-protect-biodiversity-">https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-indigenous-land-stewardship-protect-biodiversity-</a><br/>
+has the subtitle "Comprising less than 5% of the world's population, indigenous people protect 80% of global biodiversity. Their role is under discussion by world leaders this week."<br/>
+<br/>
+In the article, if you look at where it says this, there is a broken link. I looked up the broken link in the wayback machine internet archive, and found it goes to a report from Sobrevilla, 2008 [2]<br/>
+<br/>
+2. If you look at <a href="https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/995271468177530126/pdf/443000WP0BOX321onservation01PUBLIC1.pdf">Sobrevilla, 2008</a>, The World Bank, The Role of Indigenous Peoples in Biodiversity Conservation, The Natural but Often Forgotten Partners, and you look at where it states this 80% fact, it cites WRI 2005:<br/>
+
+<br/>
+"Many areas inhabited by Indigenous Peoples coincide with some of the world’s remaining major concentrations of biodiversity. Traditional indigenous territories encompass up to 22 percent of the world’s land surface and they coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity (WRI 2005)"<br/>
+<br/>
+If you look at the bibliography of the report, you find, WRI 2005 is:<br/> 
+World Resources Institute (WRI) in collaboration with United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme, and World Bank. 2005. Securing Property and Resource Rights through Tenure Reform, pp.83–87 in World Resources Report 2005: The Wealth of the Poor – Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty. Washington, D.C.: WRI.<br/>
+<br/>
+3. If you look into that report (WRI 2005), <a href="https://www.wri.org/research/world-resources-2005-wealth-poor">https://www.wri.org/research/world-resources-2005-wealth-poor</a><br/>
+<br/>
+It’s not clear to me, where it says,<br/>
+“Indigenous people live in lands that coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity"<br/>
+<br/>
+The phrase “80 percent” appears six times, not in connection with this quote.<br/>
+<br/>
+Could Sobrevilla be making an original intepretation of [3] without explaining it, or mis-citing [3] or am I missing something?<br/>
+<br/>
+When I texted my family signal group chat about this, my Mom responded that she had also by chance just seen this same quote in print, in a book she was reading titled “All We Can Save”.<br/>
+<br/>
+<br/>
+
+___________________________________
+
+
+<br/>
+
+
+This past week, marked the beginning of mandatory “2G” regulations in Berlin, where unvaccinated people are no longer able to go to restaurants or cultural events with a negative corona test. I have a lot of unvaccinated friends and I’m still processing what it means to live somewhere where this is happening.<br/>
+<br/>
+Over time, I have changing feelings over how I can meaningfully respond to this, but I have a recurring feeling that the idea that the unvaccinated are the reason we still have to deal with covid, is more scapegoat logic that needs someone to blame than grounded in reality (vaccinated people still spread covid), and that the ability for people to decide what medications are right for them is not actually a rejection of interdependence, but interdependence expressed through a form that conflicts with years of conditioning that we need corporations, police and one-size-fits-all regulations for safety.<br/>
+<br/>
+Health is complicated, but outsourcing it to bureaucratic systems is not the only response to that. What exactly the nuanced truth is, and where to look to find it, doesn’t feel to me like something I can say with certainty right now. Whatever the truth is, creating a society where large segments of people are legally excluded from indoor spaces, and where everyone needs a smart phone and a QR code to go to a cultural event, doesn’t seem like the way to me.<br/>
+<br/>
+Rather than write at length about this, here is an essay by Charles Eisenstein on this topic. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I resonate with the sentiment, of missing the forest for the trees: <a href="https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/beyond-industrial-medicine">Beyond Industrial Medicine</a>.<br/>
+<br/>
+
+> Most critics of glyphosate are not motivated by the desire to replace it with another herbicide. Rather, glyphosate is a focal point for a critique of the entire system of industrial agriculture. If we had a system of small-scale, organic, regenerative, ecological, diversified, local agriculture, glyphosate would not be much of an issue, because it would hardly be necessary. As I amply document in my Climate book, this form of agriculture can outperform industrial agriculture in terms of yield per unit of land (although it requires more labor—more gardeners, more small farmers). So do we need to keep glyphosate or not? If we take the current system of agriculture for granted, then maybe yes. The conversation we need to be having is about the system itself. If we ignore that, then the glyphosate debate is a distraction. One might still oppose it on technical grounds, but the most powerful critique is not of the chemical itself, but of the system that requires it. The good folks at Monsanto probably take the system for granted, and cannot understand how their diligent efforts to make it work a little better are so misunderstood by environmentalists who cast them as villains.
+    
+<br/>
+
+___________________________________
+
+<br/>
+<br/>
+Thanks for going down the rabbit hole with me - I hope some of this might be interesting or add some nuance to these topics. With love,<br/>
+<br/>
+M

static/content/blog/snow-on-the-lake/snow-on-the-lake.md

@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+path: "/posts/snow-on-the-lake"
+date: "2021-12-21T23:19:51.246Z"
+title: "Solstice 2021"
+author: "661 words"
+type: "blog"
+image: ""
+description: "chain email on compassion"
+note: "Max Fowler"
+---
+
+Sitting in vermont, friend just left, with sun shining on my face, <br/>
+wanting to share a video that moved me, because I felt that it might also move someone else.<br/>
+
+Identified a feeling of responsibility,<br/>
+that in the sharing, I should try to do in such a way,<br/>
+that I wouldn’t let the sand fall through my fingers.<br/>
+
+I’m reminded of a performance by my friend Franz, that involved a ritual, where a handful of sand was passed around between many people. While the sand was passing around, he said something like try not to drop the sand, but some will fall, it can’t be helped.<br/>
+
+I remember the feeling of receiving the sand and passing it to the next person,<br/>
+trying to be mindful, and some sand fell, but some sand made it.<br/>
+
+A series of different actions, at different timescales, has left me feeling at the moment,<br/>
+like sometimes things do the opposite of what they intend.<br/>
+
+Imagined a state of the union in my internal council declaring an extra Yom Kippur effective immediately due to recent events.<br/>
+
+Laughed, imagining if this email was written on a holiday card,<br/>
+with a picture of reindeer on the front.<br/>
+
+I realized that the feeling I have about sharing the video is actually a pretty common feeling I experience when trying to talk about the divine, or express something intimate.<br/>
+
+A concern that by trying to say anything about that which cannot be named, it will muck it up.<br/>
+My most intimate moments sometimes look like sentences trailing off half-way as hearing the words come out they seem only partial.<br/>
+
+I think of the introduction that [Xavier Dagba](https://www.instagram.com/xavier.dagba/), gave for their podcast, which seems like a helpful introduction for many things,<br/>
+
+“Your truth versus my truth. Who has the ultimate truth. Here is what my experience has been: there are perspective that serve me so well at a certain point in time in my journey. They help me navigate a dark night of the soul. They help me drag myself out of a dark place. They help me cope as much as I needed to cope. And when I was ready to dive in deeper, that perspective needed to shift. And I needed to embody a different perspective. And in my experience, the transformation-journey, is really about in a given now-moment, embracing the perspective that resonates the most with you, and really working through that new paradigm, really working through that new perspective. Using that perspective to evolve as much as you can with that, and then when it stops serving you, embodying or embracing a new perspective that resonates better with you. So what we're going to be sharing here is only perspectives. So the invitation I have for you is, "embrace it if it works for you". Embrace it if you feel like there is resonance with your own soul when you ponder that perspective. Embrace it if this is something that allows you to feel inner peace. If it allows you to feel even more compassion for yourself, and maybe even more compassion for others around you. Embrace it if it works. And if doesn't resonate with you, then dismiss it. You're going to hear me share perspectives that worked for me at some point in time, and perspectives that I had to let go of. The invitation I have for you is: listen to your own resonance.... because I deeply believe that truth has billions of lenses, and every time a human being shares their perspective, they are offering a lense of the bigger truth.”<br/>
+
+I imagined this email as somewhere in between a poem, a sermon, a chain email, and a stream of conscious, which seems appropriate to how I feel today.<br/>
+
+Here is [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XinVOpdcbVc) I originally wanted to share, and here is [the podcast](https://pca.st/mnf3ag59) from Xavier, about compassion and embracing new beginnings. Maybe someone else will find them helpful too.<br/>
+
+Happy solstice,<br/>
+with love,<br/>
+M<br/>
+
+
+
+