- To our grandfather. He was the first to get an education from our village. He made it a point to uplift our family of farmers by exposing us to opportunities outside our village. What a difference having his mentorship a generation ahead made !! We all went to school because he convinced the family, that small scale farming can’t support the growing family, like it once used to. Buying more land, was not financially possible. Education was his solution out of low-income-barely-scarping-by-homesteading subsistence. His mortal life ended and the entire family is experiencing life differently since. He truly was the best of us. I broke my flight free 2021 pledge to attend the funeral in Baton Rouge. Grateful to my mother for giving me this family. She did the work and built the bridges. She continues to do the work everyday and I have a village to grow in. My grandma, his wife, lost her sister this week. Their son, my uncle, is in the hospital battling leukemia and lives in the state of least vaccinated. Amidst all this heart ache, my aunt is helping organize the Woman’s March on October 2nd. “The darker elements of our past are closer than they ought to be, and perennially in danger of catching up“. This is how one may channel grief, by uplifting everyone. Please make it to the march if you live in America. Or attend it virtually. ( And play this song in your homes.) Thank you !
- To boardgames played into the night. To big buckets of biryani that can be purchased in and around the Bay Area. To a certain XL sized cheap whiskey from Costco. To wool socks. To my neighbors and their dogs for the warm welcome. To all the books I could buy this month. To the previous residents of this house for leaving a full compost bin for us to garden with. To the banana plant that came back from the dead and had a baby. To the feeling of home I currently experience. To move around, was learning, excitement and lust. Staying is love.
- For having an uninterrupted water supply during drought. My childhood was filled with us on severe rationing and lot of mind space allocated to optimizing water. Anyone lower in the patriarchal heirarchy were at the front end of course. The men/in-laws/children would ask the mothers “why didn’t you fill the tank at 4 am before everyone else woke up?” We are monitoring our usage and using the gray water to grow food.
- “The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.” – thankful to Poet David Whyte for these words. (Philosopher-poets and poet-philosophers are my current topic of exploration.)
Reading :
We Need a Real Culture — Not this Garbage Fire of Superheroes, Influencers, and Pornification.
This list of CSA boxes for East Bay Area.
Gentle introduction to micro-economics.
Vogue on sustainability.
“Sustainability appears to have become an elitist, even imperialistic concept in which the interests of the global north define the conversation.”( These interests are both those of the present generation, whose right to purchase and discard clothing in volume the system seeks to preserve (by switching to ‘circularity’ and ‘more sustainable’ fibers), and the interests of future generations whose needs are to be secured at the sacrifice of producers whose fibers do not meet the global north’s unilaterally declared ‘sustainability’ standards.)
Reading, re-reading, sharing, rewriting.
Chef Imam’s philosophy on food. (His book Monk is the current rock star of my library. )
tiny thoughts :
“Spend your time with geniuses, sages and books. “
“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.”
“There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.”
Materialism :
To my first bookshelf ever.
Juliette Lemontey’s paintings.
Upstream, by Mary Oliver. What a book companion !