I want to pick up where I left off last week before I move on. A few weeks back, when I sketched out the future trajectory of this writing project, I wrote that I saw Odell and Robin Wall Kimmerer as connected to each other with respect to the power of attention. Elaborating that connection is going to take some time, as the insights in Kimmerer are somewhat diffuse, and I didn’t take particularly good notes as I was reading it. Nevertheless, I think it is important, so I will certainly be taking my time to process Kimmerer’s insights. And of course, it should be noted that Odell explicitly refers to Kimmerer as an inspiration, so I’m confident that teasing this connection out will be fruitful. And I will certainly be coming back to Odell more than just today—I had forgotten how important How to Do Nothing was for me actually, and I think it will be well worth revisiting to summarize chapter by chapter so that I always have the material on hand.
Read moreWhy Flow and Creativity Matter: the arts of attention and saving ourselves from political-ecological collapse
As of today, I have typed up 36 of my 50 pages of notes that I accumulated beginning about a year ago. My goal for this year was to catch up to all the reading, thinking, and exploration that I had done related to playing the Feelings Collector. As it stands, I am on track to just about make it across the finish line, if I can stay disciplined and write every week. As it also happens, this week represents a threshold of sorts, where I have now arrived at a subheading in my notes that I have called “connections between the teachers and big take-aways.” Not a very snappy title, but it’s what I’ve got, and, for better or for worse, it captures the essence of what remains to do for this part of my project this year.
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