good atlas

A bunch of scraps from my Obsidian app.

1.

Technology is the answer, but what was the question?

Our online existence is more about consumption and productivity than it is about possibility.

There was a chat feature that used to sit at the top of my Xanga blog. It allowed anyone to say anything. And it was alive with conversation. People took the time to read my blog posts and said something there too. We walked around virtual rooms in Habbo. We build worlds using hypertext on an infinite canvas, leaving messages and easter eggs for one another. We convened on many different websites for many different things, some more short-lived than others. We spent time exploring.

Today, we convene? on Instagram.

I use mainly two programs online now. Instagram on my mobile. ChatGPT and emails on my desktop.

Even the idea of rabbit holing in Wikipedia feels like warming up a rusty muscle. The act of clicking through hyperlinks feels dated, and rather unnatural than it is to infinite scroll your way through time.

We just took it without question. And now it’s a reality I thought I wanted but actually didn’t.

There is much to marvel about the once unimaginable, fictive reality of artificial intelligence. But to see how we use it today, my sense of awe is constantly marred by a fowl aftertaste of having used it time and again to “refine my emails”. I don’t write anymore. I write prompts, then edit after, with a shallow but perceptible grief of having lost the emdash to a bot.

2.

What do we owe each other?

Was a question N asked in her ongoing attempts to understand how, in her own words “people do relationships”. You come into a connection, a relationship with one person and it tethers you to mutual exchanges of giving, taking, then, oftentimes, expecting, obliging. What is too much and what is too little? How do you navigate this reciprocity in the midst of love, convention, growing up, life?

We were in The Soft House. A softly lit room, where we enter first through a kitchen, sliding a steel door, painted black, that opens up into a living room. Large enough to fit 20 people. Large because there wasn’t any sofa, but instead a long wooden table parked to the side of the room, and the other side, a mirror as long as I am against a wall, anchoring the entire room against a dark green wall like the one in my house, a coffee machine, more lights and posters and random paraphernalia, like a sea drum, a few caps here and there.

There on the floor, N tells me about why she’s asking this question. I think it’s a great question, and mostly we say that because we don’t quite know the answer to it too.

—

When I read that question, I immediately think of a post I wrote: [[The grace that is carried forward]]

I am the sum of all the people, kindnesses, tenderness of everyone who have come before me, who I had the incredible chance to meet, even if for awhile. I receive them fully, lovingly, and I am changed, expanded in that experience. And in small but felt ways, the light is carried forward. [[You give the love you wish for to yourself]] – and a ripple of kindnesses radiate outward this way.

Steph, one of the participants in our group, who has such a calm and articulate way of talking, softly earnestly but surely, shares Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Serviceberry: The Economy of Abundance. She says, in her own distillation of the article, that we have been so subject and accustomed to the construct of scarcity as an underlying principle that governs our daily lives – think of the way our capitalist world demands that resources become commodity and they have greater value through scarcity. We become hoarders, we accumulate, we compete. But when we shift the framework of scarcity to an economy of abundance, drawn from Kimmerer’s observation about the the abundance of serviceberries and how they flourish an entire ecosystem through their abundance, relationships and ways of living can be re-framed to notions of sharing, gifting, and gratitude, rather than that of transactions, owing, or owning.

When you recognise the abundance of what the world offers, and what you have, your imperative, naturally so, would be to give it away. In doing so, you recognise that we have in ourselves a lifetime of collective reserves, none the same as the other, and recognising this difference, perhaps, that it is this difference in abundances that keeps a relationship going, a community going.

Why yearn only for one of the same thing or more of what you already have, when you can have a myriad other beautiful offerings from different people in your lives, perhaps all drawn, at least toward a common language of gifting and gratitude?

Sophie and Amal adds: Perhaps how we can say it is, not what we owe one another but what we can offer to one another. I like the word offer, because there is a sense of sacredness to it.

I love that.

3.

Single

Observations about being single at 34:

1. You are not answerable to anybody!
2. You can eat anything you want.
3. You can sleep anytime you want.
4. Your interactions and encounter with people is filled with possibility (not of relationship), but of blooming.
5. You get to take up the entirety of a couch.