Endurance Philosophy

 The other week I was in Acadia National Park. I had done some hiking in the morning, up to the summit of Cadillac Mountain via the South Ridge summit trail. I had come off the mountain, and was driving around in search of a place to stop and have lunch.  There is a one-way loop road that circumscribes the park. Once in this loop there is a gate, where you are required to pay or show a pass to enter. I had a pass, but the line at the gate was all I needed to turn off at this point. I turned left, and immediately in front of me was a lookout over the inlet, across which one could see Schoodic point, which was where my wife was taking a nature journaling conference. I decided it was a nice spot to eat and pulled up. I backed the car into the spot, popped the trunk, and made lunch.  I don't need much when I'm exploring on my own. I enjoy good food and all, but if I'm not trying to impress anyone, I can get by with some basics.  I had stocked up on provisions the night b...

 The 2020-2021 school year ended this past week. It was a year filled with unknowns, emotions, frustration, and long stretches of Zoom induced boredom followed by moments of "why isn't it doing that?" (Like while attempting to get your fourth device to connect to the wifi so you can write with the magic stylus and it worked just a minute ago but now 23 high school sophomores are watching you struggle hard.) The highs were high, and the lows were low. It was very easy this year for students to avert my educatorial gaze by simply hitting "stop video", and yet I made some profound connections with students this year that I might not have if we didn't have a pandemic. There are several thoughts I have in regards to the past 10 months, and here are some of them.  First, I can't help but face the fact that I'm underwhelmed. We got to the end of the year, this crazy year, and it sort of just ended. It left me thinking, "Is that all there is?" The ...

 In which, some comments are made on the recent weather; the nature of the problem is considered; a digression occurs; what it means to be normal is examined; an analogy is made; and questions are asked, and answered. It was hot outside last week. Really hot. Here in Maine, it felt like it did when I lived in Florida. It was so hot you might have thought about how unusual it is for the weather to be this warm this early in the season. You might have then thought; I know that my experience is small and anecdotal. It can't be used as proof of huge phenomena. Right? Right. So you tell yourself. It stands to reason, your brain argues with itself, that while it might be hot - so hot that it endangers other living things around you - this is weather. And as was beat into by some teacher somewhere along the line (and me, in previous posts ) weather is not climate.  At this point we can acknowledge that we have a problem. Not the climate crisis, although that is a problem. No, our pr...

It can't be that hard...  I love burritos. They are almost as perfect as food gets. They can be eaten for breakfast. They contain all the food you need for a meal, wrapped inside a warm, soft, chewy tortilla blanket. Convenient and portable. A few weeks ago, as I was taking the tortillas out of their plastic bag, I thought to myself, "why can't I make these from scratch? It can't be that hard." It wasn't that hard. It did require a bit of explaining when my partner walked into the kitchen, which along with myself was lying beneath a dusting of flour. Now, after some practice, I love making tortillas. I can make choices about what goes into them. I have more control over what I'm consuming. Not total control, but more control. It was a Pandora's Box of sorts. Since then, I've started making bread, and cinnamon rolls, and pasta sauce, and noodles. I began to think about what can be made that we mindlessly consume. And once the pandora's box is op...

 I work in a school, teaching math. When I was a student, I did not enjoy math class. I felt as though there was a "right" way to do the problems, and I certainly did not know that right way. This, in turn, made me feel like an idiot. My assumption was that all of my peers very clearly knew the right way, and the only reason I did not was because I was less good, or worse, than they were.  All of us that are alive believe together in a myriad of collective myths. Most of these are benign, or necessary to avoid total anarchy. We believe in the myth that you must stop your car at a stop sign. We believe in the myth that you need to use money, another myth, to buy food at the grocery store. It's arguable that those myths are necessary in order for society or civilization to exist. Otherwise, we'd live in a chaotic wasteland.  The existence of a good-bad dichotomy is another myth that most of us believe in. It was first posited by Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra), an...

 It's January 24th, 2021. We are in Portland, Maine. There is no snow on the ground.*  I am a lover of winter, a "winter person". I love bitterly cold mornings, looking out a window at a frozen landscape. I love going outside in the cold, bundled up, experiencing the crunch of snow underfoot. I love to ski, cross-country, where the whoosh of the ski sliding over the snow is an undertone for rhythmic pinch of the poles biting the surface.  There is quite like going out the day after a snow storm. The world has changed into something alien. Somehow, it's comforting, like being under a blanket. The trees and mountains are transformed.  The Mother changes. From green to white. Then to brown, and green again.  Picture this: It's 7:30 in the morning. You're sipping steaming coffee looking at the gold-kissed snow covered trees glistening in the morning sun. This takes 15 minutes. You pour yourself another cup of coffee and then lose track of it seven times while rumm...