reading list
This is a collection of writings that shaped the way I think.
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things."
My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
by Laurel Schwulst, for The Creative Independant and Are.na"Instead of a cloud, let’s use a metaphor that makes the web’s individual, cooperative nodes more visible. This way, we can remember the responsibility we each have in building a better web. The web is a flock of birds or a sea of punctuation marks, each tending or forgetting about their web garden or puddle home with a river of knowledge nearby."
Life is Short
by Paul Graham"When I ask myself what I’ve found life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is “bullshit.” I realize that answer is somewhat tautological. It’s almost the definition of bullshit that it’s the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does have a distinctive character. There’s something fake about it. It’s the junk food of experience."
how to avoid half-heartedness
by Ava"My answer is that if you tolerate too much half-heartedness, it’s probably because you’re half-hearted."
The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late
by Matthew Fray"If I had to distill the problems in failed relationships down to one idea, it would be our colossal failure to make the invisible visible, our failure to invest time and effort into developing awareness of what we otherwise might not notice in the busyness of daily life."
Becoming a Magician
by Anonymous"Not only is any sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic; any sufficiently advanced technologist seems like a magician. In order to write the new version of this life description, I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical."
Every site needs a Links Page / Why linking matters
by Melonking"Links are the lifeblood of the web, and linking to other sites is a declaration of independence. Its a declaration that says, “I am the infrastructure of the web, I am not content, nor am I a product, I am a human and a participant in this great work of humanity we call the Internet”."
All the Tenderness of Attention
by Sharon Neema for Are.na"The root of the word 'attention' is the Latin ad tendere which means 'to stretch towards.' Tendere, or 'stretch,' comes from a Proto-Indo-European root 'ten-' with the same meaning, 'to stretch.' Many other words share this root, but amongst them is of course the word 'tender.'
This old kinship that exists between these two words, between attention and tenderness, is one that I have come back to over and over again. "
The Third Thing
by Donald Hall"What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment."
