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The cicadas are singing their love songs

The Barry Manilows of insects are loud this year as Brood X emerges in my neck of the woods. We live in an ideal area for them, with loads of established landscaping that hasn’t been touched in far more than the 17 years they’ve been under ground.

Near the street, they’re quieter, but the backyard is an astounding susurrus of song. I find it rather pleasant, far more low key than the cicadas we hear most summers, that produce that grating high-pitched cacophony. Their shells are everywhere, too, a strange detritus of chitin clinging from every plant and tree trunk in sight.

We’ve been calling them “the aliens”.

I’ve declared email bankruptcy again and cleared out my inbox of wonderful newsletters I haven’t had time to read. I did the same with my RSS reader (The Old Reader, which works like the beloved defunkt Google Reader of old) and I feel digitally lighter.

I do still love newsletters. They’ve more or less replaced social media for me and are basically what personal blogs used to be. It’s part of why I still try to occasionally get this one out the door to you all.

As a larger effort in my digital spring cleaning, I’ve become smitten with and am in the very slow process of replacing my four or so various digital notebooks with this one repository, backed up to Github so I even have versioning.

Hello friends!

I probably don't need to explain why it's been - looks at calendar - so damn long since I wrote one of these, right? Anyway, I'm writing one now because of "The Princess Bride" and balance, both of which have been repeating themes for me in the last week.

I decided I would much rather keep this newsletter going in a loose format than give up on it altogether. So, there will still be links and quotes and updates on what I'm doing, but I also might hold forth on things on my mind.

So, why has "The Princess Bride" brought me back, you may be wondering. Well, it's because I had to share a link to the very fancy home movie version of the film. It seemed to follow me around, showing up in blog posts and my youtube recommendations and mentions on my work Slack until I finally relented and checked it out.

When we are overwhelmed it is a moment when we need our own love, kindness and compassion the most. — Matt Kahn

Finding peace amidst the noise and haste

Last week I finally surfaced after a three week bought with the dread virus and a secondary infection that was worse than the virus itself. I came back to myself to a world that seems, in some ways, like it was created by David Lynch.

Stop acting small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion. - Rumi

February was a lot

There is a lot going on in the world right now, but you’ve read enough about it elsewhere. I’ve nothing to add to any of the conversations, so for now, I look backward at how the last month went as I’m already hip-deep in the new one.

The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible. – Alan Rickman

Forgive me a bit of self-indulgence

"Happy new year 1 and all. Resolution? More unequivocal days, that is WORK days and PLAY days, not guilty play days and distracted work days." - Dave McKean

Time is a construct, but it still counts

The quote at the start of this newsletter is what I come back to year after year. I don't do resolutions, I set aspirational goals for my year. There are things I very much want to accomplish every year, though I know life will get in the way and I'll have a vast array of experiences I wouldn't have if I followed my plan to the letter.

"I pledge to use books as doors to other minds, old and young, girl and boy, man and animal. I pledge to use books to open windows to a thousand different worlds and to the thousand different faces of my own world. I pledge to use books to make my universe spread much wider than the world I live in every day. I pledge to treat my books like friends, visiting them all from time to time and keeping them close." - Cornelia Funke

Annual review review

It's that time again. The calendar is about to flip over and a new year is getting ready to start. Sure, it's just an arbitrary attempt to organize that ephemeral thing called Time, but in our human experiences, it's helpful to mark such things as a way of measuring ourselves. Sometimes we measure against our own expectations and sometimes against others. Myself, I try to look at such a time as an opportunity to understand where I'm at and where I want to go.

You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago. - Alan Watts

Input / Output

I used to write a little something in these newsletters. I'm going to get back to that, starting now. It was part of why I started doing it in the first place. No one reads independent blogs anymore (don't get me started on Medium), but inboxes seem to be places folks are okay with having people stop in and drop a few links and bit of personal perspective on them, so here I am.