Thinking With

In the world of quarantine and lockdown, where everyone seems to be frantic, I am not busy. Instead, I drift, ghostly.

I reread a few days ago a quotation that I had saved from Thom Van Dooren’s book Flight Ways:

In this time of extinctions, perhaps we might best understand caring for others as a task of gardening in the ruins–that is, a practice of care that aims to nourish and sustain species and their living participants in far-from-ideal conditions, where the most desirable options simply are not available. This is undeniably a difficult space to inhabit, one without the luxury of any perfect solutions or easy fixes.

Some other things that have been on my mind in the last few months.

Walt Whitman on public mourning

Jerry Saltz ostensibly on eating during lockdown, but also on living with purpose

Agnes Denes on the future of humanity

Aleksandar Hemon on catastrophe

Richard Skelton on landscape and loss and liminal states

Alicia Kennedy on love as socio-ecological praxis, here, but also all of her newsletters