How to Do Nothing

As I disengaged the map of my attention from the destructive news cycle and rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing. At first this meant choosing certain things to look at; I also pored over guides and used the California Academy of Science’s app, iNaturalist, to identify species of plants I had walked right by my entire life. As a result, more and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. I began to notice animal communities, plant communities, animal-plant communities; mountain ranges, fault lines, watersheds. It was a familiar feeling of disorientation, realized in a different arena. Once again, I was met with the uncanny knowledge that these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality.

we could just relax and look up at the trees

Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they possess, but only lament what they cannot have

particularly concerned with the addictive features of everyday technology

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
–JOHN CAGE

Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they

I don’t think that one needs to be a mother to experience a maternal impulse.

surprising resourcefulness, empathy, and sometimes even humor that arise in dark circumstances.

Epicurus observed that people in modern society ran in circles, unaware of the source of their unhappiness:

I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality.