Another fluffy news release about home interiors. I move to delete it—but the backstory catches me. An interior designer who had to tear apart her own home because her toddler was struggling to breathe? She wound up a certified expert in home wellness because of all she learned. And…
Snow fell with the confidence of something that knew it would be felt. Streets emptied. Sound dulled. The city became a held breath between east and west, a place where movement slowed because it had to. There was nothing especially dramatic about this at first. Just cold. Just accumulation.
We live in a sensory desert in which rooms are deodorized, soundproofed, and painted in neutral colors. But “sensehacking" can transform experience.
More than ten thousand species are now critically endangered. Humans have clear-cut forests, paved grassland, overharvested, overfished, and overhunted. Much of the existing ground is being strangled by honeysuckle, kudzu, vetch, cheatgrass, and various exotics. Can we get a second chance?
While Edward McPherson does not fully explain his original intent, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View ends up being a work of mixed creative nonfiction modes (personal essay, immersion, travel, speculative CNF), reportage, and warning, all built on the motif of gaining elevation to see beyond our everyday ken—an ambition that comes at a price.
Wind itself can drive you crazy. Sometimes there is a hysteria to it, a shrill tirade that goes on for days, relentless, unappeasable. Sometimes it is angry, as though Zeus sucked in his breath to roar at us. Invisible and unpredictable, wind can stroke us with a lover’s tenderness in the morning and topple our home that afternoon.
How do we get a home biome? By breathing the petrichor, I suppose, breaking out from poison ivy year after year, tasting the dirt and water on our lips, scraping our skin on scrambles, getting local minerals and bacteria in our bloodstream, leaving our sweat on the rocks. Maybe the cells we leave, and what we take with us, give us quantum pairing with these places.
Do we want to bring our loved ones back?
And our choice of words reveals us.
Reverence, serenity, and compassion, courtesy of a mushroom? Well, what would be wrong with that? Humans are a broken species. Negative emotions wired into us for survival have run amok in times we call civilized, and now we hunt, or at least hurt, one another. It would be lovely to think we could all meditate our way to wholeness. But why not speed the process?