STEM Education Gets Probed Àla Marshall McLuhan & HEM Starts Stitching

​In an ever-changing, increasingly complex world, where enshitification keeps hitting the fan, where infrastructure keeps falling apart, where polarizing politics put people in disarray, where environmental empathy leads to feelings of despair, it’s more important than ever that the citizens of the world find ways to stitch back together the places where our relationships (with each other, with animals, with the land) have become frayed. People need to know how to navigate predicaments and make sense out of the seeming randomized chaos of modern life. These are the kinds of skill that life long learners develop when they apply themselves to HEM, that is Humanities, Ecology and Memory.

Most everyone knows about STEM at this point: science, technology, engineering, and math, including computer science. It could be said that an education curriculum and mindset too focused on these subjects has left little room for the adaptive powers of intuitive thinking that study of the humanities encompasses. Ecology, which also encompasses systems theory, shows how interconnected everything is, and gives us a greater appreciation for all the creatures in the web of life with who we share the world. Memory and its training are also key, because if we forget history, forget where we come from and the collective wisdom of the past, if we forget how to remember, it leads to the kind of dismemberment of experience so prevalent in the abandoned chopping malls of too-late corporatism.

This article has been written as just one tiny nudge to inspire the next generation of thinkers, makers and feelers with accessible screen free experiences for exploring the life of mind and world. It is just a brief run-down on the idea of HEM, how it contrasts with STEM, and why the HEM alternative might be something other people want to put some energy towards.

STEMMED IN ON ALL SIDES
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Back in the early 2000s after the Y2K fiasco and the dot com bubble collapse, educators still wanted to continue pushing a collective focus on what they then called SMET: science, math, engineering and technology. Perhaps SMET was too similar to the word “smeg” a catch all cuss word in Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s humorous scifi series Red Dwarf. In the world of Red Dwarf space ships powered by AI with low IQ drift across the universe in hopeless disarray and talking toasters form the only potential hope for Lister, the last human left alive. SMET is kind of smeg, so in its place, the forward thinking president at Winona State University had a functional brainwave and rearranged the letters into STEM.

By this point the idea of rote learning by memory was itself considered stupid. Aging teachers were looking at the world and thinking something along the lines, “shit is getting fucked up, we better teach the next generation to save our asses. And they better learn how to work together.” The idea seems to have been to teach the subjects they thought the citizens of tomorrow would need to come up with the solutions for humanity; so we would finally figure out the pathways to solving any number of problems, such as how to get clean limitless energy in a world powered by dirty, limited, fossil fuels. Problem is, they aren’t just problems, but predicaments, and predicaments don’t have straightforward literal solutions, but require lateral thinking.

Mitigating black swan events arising from our interconnected predicaments, then, requires different modes of interacting with the world. Since the industrial revolution, the pervasive influence of engineers has geared our collective systems to adapt to machines. It is doubtful however that mindset of engineering alone can retool the machine once again. Rather, our relationship to the machine, and the way of thinking it produces must itself be set aside, so different modes of thought and relation may be (re)activated.

There was another idea behind STEM that was part of its overall project. That was to get students to work together in cooperation. In the minds of educators, the breakthrough revelations of solitary visionaries were out, and the communal efforts of groups working together at a shared goal, with their endless meetings and committees, were in. Meetings and committees and collaboration were clearly the way to fix the future. Just putting that on the table for discussion, and possible ratification.

The STEM boosters also crafted their curricula around the idea that memorizing facts doesn’t prepare people for challenges, and that solitary study and immersion in a topic doesn’t produce the same kind of people pleasing people behavior that a focus on collaborative creativity inculcates. One of the key ideologies within the movement was the notion that “facts don’t matter; if there is nothing practical, you get out of them.”
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Facts about the web of life within the cosmos can produce wonder, yet wonder itself was not deemed an outcome worthy of practical effort. Remember, effort must always be practical. This is likely one of the reasons that dream interpretation and do-it-yourself psychotherapy were not part of the curricula of STEM.
As a throwaway bone, some educators proposed the idea of STEAM, with the A standing for Arts. For some reason in our technocratic society, STEAM never got any STEAM, and the only ones who really got into it were a subculture of people known as STEAM Punks. STEAM Punk still remains relevant to the inevitable shift to a lower resource base of living, but most STEAM still requires some kind of coal for combustive power, and much of it is still focused on the supremacy of the machine

​Over the past twenty odd years as STEM has been pushed inside of America’s collective educational systems, the continued effects of Scientism, Technocracy, (cultural) Engineering, and Mathology (arithmetic focused on cold calculation and numeric quantity over numeric quality) has led to some of the following outcomes in the U.S.A:

The Great Dopamine Drain: the ubiquitous use of various social media platforms among adolescents and their adults has rewired their brains, exploiting dopamine pathways for the addictive hit of getting “just one more like.” In person social skills have atrophied. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and issues with body image have all been amplified. Suicide rates have gone up, and loneliness is a national epidemic even while people are connecting endlessly over the always-on-internet.

Computer Aided Disintegration: Over-reliance on Computer Aided Design tools has created a generation of engineers and architects who lack the ability to draw with pen and pencil. The geometric proportions that give harmony to the world are all based on the human form. The geometric proportions of the hand get bypassed when the hand does not know how to draw a plan. Meanwhile the infrastructure in the USA remains in critical condition. Enforced obsolescence of older infrastructure systems (such as the network of copper wires that once powered the telephone and internet) has left some population segments in a lurch when they do not have enough funds to adopt the latest corporate pushed technology. Meanwhile the older systems slip into further disrepair. Brown outs and energy grid failures are one outcome when smart grid nodes are installed alongside energy systems that elsewhere have been left to languish. Instead of repairing old systems, enforced “upgrades” meet with incompatibility issues. Lack of support for those who wish to keep older systems working becomes non-existent at official levels. As cars have become ever more computerized, the ability to work on them without specialized computer equipment has likewise eroded, where it hasn’t been made illegal. This causes many citizens to be “left behind,” yet recuperates walking, public transportation and bicycle culture for those in the underclass.

Quantity over Quality (The Pathology of Mathology): Businesses operating within the competitive capitalist cultures of the past had at least some notion of creating quality products and services for their customers. Creators prided themselves on making something that would last for decades if not a lifetime and beyond. Globalization has reversed this trend, and now the capitalists is focused on quantity of the numbers in bank accounts and asset holding, number games and rackets. This is reflected in the consumer who in many places have become hoarders. The person with the most cheap plastic happy meal toys wins. At their own expense of course, and to the benefit of mathologist accountants and day traders.

Collective Dementia: The ability to recall, to memorize, to hold on to something over a long period of time by the power of the applied mind has likewise atrophied. The ability to google something has diminished the ability to spend long periods of time researching a topic of interest or just a subject that a person needs to know about. The effort required to go to a library or talk to someone who might know what needs to be known, has withered the ability to look things up in books or engage with people with developed skill sets and the knowledge that comes from being alive for a long time (i.e. old people, who now get shut up and carted off to old folk “homes”). Since people don’t talk on the phone as much either, they don’t need to know as many phone numbers and have them memorized. The smart phone allows them to forget more than they ever remembered. Personal memory of special moments in life are likewise uploaded to the cloud in the form of digital pictures. Instead of recalling happy memories in the imagination, memories are scrolled through, as long as bills are paid and access to the correct accounts is maintained. AI further accelerates the effect of this collective dementia by outsourcing thinking and creativity.

All this while the federal government has spent approximately $3.9 billion annually on STEM education programs as they did in 2021. As of 2025 the National Science Foundation alone had a total STEM budget of $1.17 billion dollars. It is one thing to teach about these subjects and make them available. It is quite another to put the full weight of educational institutional support behind them when there are other topics and subjects valuable to teach and inspire young minds.

The great raconteur and thinker Marshall McLuhan developed a fourfold way of looking at media and cultural artifacts to see how they what they enhance, obsolesce in the present, retrieve from the past, or reverse. If we look at STEM through this tetrad lens of McLuhan we find that:

STEM Enhances: After school programs where kids build and design “battle bots” and drones preparing them for future jobs in the military industrial complex designing battle bots and drones for the “theater” of war. STEM also enhances techno-narcissism, even as their competing drives accelerate neurosis caused by a digitally fragmented sense of self.

STEM Obsolesces: An individuated sense of self is hindered by STEM, because outcomes are placed in the hand of machines rather than the personal unconscious. Theater kids required to memorize their lines and pursue active imagination in the amalgamation of the arts are also made obsolete. In many cases they have been replaced altogether by the CGI of computer generated imagery, and voices synthesized by machines. Hand drawn blueprints, schematics, and other detailed plans are no longer required. The slide rule gets relegated to the dustbin (or to the STEAM Punks) along with calculations worked out on pen and paper. STEM attempts to obsolesce death, but does not succeed.

STEM Retrieves: Amateur radio and other old school hobbies, such as photography and film with film, when a few of the STEM kids trickle into the radiocentric fold to become STEAM Punks. As economic disparity gets enhanced, for tech lords on the high quantity of numerals in their bank accounts, it also retrieves feudalism in the form of the sovereign corporation-as-nation-station (sovcorp). The CEO is president and king with a bevy of microserfs to carry out his commands.

STEM Reverses: the other aspects of science that are focused on living systems. As ecology, biology and the life sciences get de-emphasized by engineering brain, they transform and mutate into biohacking, terraforming, blood doping, smart drugs, cryogenics and the desire to extend life beyond its natural span. STEM progress reverses gains in literacy and reading made by the educational system as vernacular video becomes a preferred means of communication and learning among youth.

With these thoughts in mind, it should be clear that the continual problems caused by technology, engineering, and the focus on certain types of science at the expense of others, are in many cases a liability more than an asset. The need for people with intuitive, lateral, and artistic grasp of the world around them is itself a practical way to work-around the many predicaments facing humanity in the decades ahead. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics may not know jack about HEM careers and jobs just now, but they will be “tomorrow’s jobs” because the negative spillover from industry, corporate group-think, and the collective dementia of cognitive detachment is going to continue to tear at the social and environmental fabric holding the world together.
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HEMMING IS PATCHWORK, HEMMING IS STITCHERY

​The great thing about HEM is that no government program is needed to get it up and running. No one needs the permission of anyone else to become a stitcher, to start making your own patchwork quilt exploring the humanities, exploring the terrain and terroir of your local ecology, to cultivate the habit of retention and memory. Permission and official programs may very well be counterproductive to getting any kind of useful work in this area done.

HEM, as I conceive it, is not anti-science. I wrote a book on the history of technology and music, after all. Such technology seems to be more useful when also put into the hands of artists, HEM just takes the emphasis out of the sciences that have put the focus on machines, and instead attempts to re-balance that tipped scale back towards the earth and her inhabitants. HEM re-emphasizes ecology in service to all of life. For that it requires the deliberate training and cultivation of memory. When the stories associated with a part of the land we live are not remembered and consciously transmitted to others who also live on the land, and will dwell with the land in the next generation, vital knowledge is lost. The emphasis on the humanities encourages lateral thinking and the development of individualized artistic intuition. It also gives the mind fodder on which to think, and material worthy of retaining in memory. Stocked with this useful supply of material, new streams of creativity open up to the prepared mind.

Predicaments don’t exist outside of our stories about them, our memories of their causes, and of the web of complex relationships that intermix between them. As such those who keep memory, who train their memory to hold onto stories, poems, and songs, who hold in their mind an aesthetic web of beauty, music and art will be liable to make strong connections and draw water from the common well of deep knowledge to share with their fellows.

If we look at HEM through McLuhan’s tetrad the following can be found:

HEM Enhances: appreciation of the arts, literature, history, including personal history and family history, along with local history. On the ecological side it enhances knowledge of the local flora and fauna, as well as stories of the same from local folklore. Place names often reflect the kind of plants and animals that lived their before they were desecrated into strip malls and suburbs (White Oak Community, for example, or Salamander Hill, etc.) Appreciation of such life is likewise enhanced. When life is appreciated instead of taken for granted and thought of as merely something else to consume, steps can be taken for its protection.

HEM Retrieves: The role of the bard, the storyteller, the griot, the local poet, song writer and epic rapper. It retrieves the mentat’s from Frank Herbert’s Dune and places them back in the trajectory of another possible future. In this possible future the Art of Memory (see Frances Yates) and other mnemonic disciplines are restored. It retrieves oral storytelling on the one hand, but also book learning and deep research in analog archives on the other. Systems theory as a part of ecology is also retrieved as we look at the net effects of small actions and the positive and negative feedback loops they create in the total environment. The cybernetics of Norbert Wiener is likewise retrieved. The humanities retrieve the seven liberal arts and also Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, her nine children.

HEM Obsolesces: Cloud memory storage and data centers. Recording everything on the phone via photo images and video of special events is sidelined in place of savoring the moment and later reminiscence through the power of mind and recall. Personal participation in the surveillance state of data collection is likewise negated as digital spy technology is less readily adopted.

HEM Reverses: globalization and corporate work mentalities. The focus returns to local and bioregional levels of production, participation and activity as the baseline. It also focuses on individual effort and encourages the proliferation of outsider art. It reverses the brain drain on communities, as it gives reasons for people to stick around their hometowns. Other environments and cities aren’t “better” by default. Creativity, culture and cooperatives instead become the norm. The rust belt and other parts of flyover America don’t get gutted by the best and brightest, but the best and brightest regenerate the homefront with their own efforts continuing to nourish the local environment. Perhaps most important, it reverses the decline in cognitive ability by restoring rote learning and the memorization of facts. While what is remembered can certainly be arbitrary, the fact that HEM practitioners are giving their memory muscles and mind a work out ensures that creativity and ability to use their mind will go beyond just recall and into true comprehension and intellectual wrestling in the world of ideas.

As hemmers and stitchers begin to work by reading the classics, studying the traditions of the world, listening to its great music, and looking at artwork and film, it will help stem the tide of slop propaganda (or propaganda slop as one feeds into the other) inundating the mind. As they explore their environment, get back in touch with family history and their personal history, will see the rich world of their own experience and all that it has to give outside of McCulture and the military-entertainment complex. The same with the wonders of the natural world in their corner of the world. Urban dwellers will also have much to love as they learn the history of their city, and also much to love in the form of nature: nature is not absent even when brutalist concrete and even when its pristine ecology has been spoiled by the smegma of sprawl, wonder and beauty are still ever present for those willing to let themselves be enchanted.
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What is held in the mind and memory can never be taken away. Data centers can be unplugged, destroyed, or go offline. What is stored in the cloud can disappear due to breaches or a change in a contract. The eternal memory of the soul withstands even the horrifying and sad vagaries of dementia and Alzheimer disease. When muscles atrophy and the body gives way to old age, the achievements of the mind cannot be stolen back by any corporation. They will never go offline because they are internal, imaginal, eternal.

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​The writings presented here will always be free and never paywalled, but there are a few ways you can support my work: pass on the essays on to others, share the links to other sites and telling your friends. You can take out a paid subscription to this subslack if you’d like to be a patron to the arts as represented here. I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You can buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers, if you want to show some support and keep my writing in circulation. Thank you to all my readers and supporters. Your generosity means the world and helps support my universalist bohemian art life! Thanks for keeping me caffeinated and wired.
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An Interview with an Amateur Naturalist + Easy Outdoor Learning Activities

​The purpose of this particular article is quite simple. It is to help readers get more pleasure out of the vast recreational opportunities available in your particular bioregion. I suppose it also has another purpose, to excite readers about all that awaits them outside, to encourage people to turn off the screen and head into the green. To be really honest, there really is a third purpose, and that it is to get people to take up the hobby of the amateur naturalist. As a way to spend leisure time it has a lot to offer, not only to individual happiness and fulfillment, but as a way of giving back to the community, through sharing knowledge, and to the earth, by applying what is learned.

I’ll be honest about something else too. Being a naturalist is not something I have any experience of beyond enjoying the outdoor activities of hiking, camping, and a bit of gardening. Naturalism is something I am interested in, however, and try to always think of writing as an opportunity to learn. “Write what you know”, the conventional wisdom goes. The conventional wisdom is also what got us into our current disconnected relationship with nature, so I think a case can be made for going with unconventional wisdom instead. Some time ago, the writing guru Steve Pressfield gave this liberating advice, “When we write only what we know, we limit ourselves to territory we’ve already covered. When we write what we don’t know, we launch ourselves into terra incognita. That’s where the good stuff is.”[1] I’ve tried to keep that advice in my back pocket, my instinct has often been to use writing projects as a way to explore unfamiliar subjects. Such is the case with the matter at hand.

Exploring is one of the things a naturalist does as well. Heads off into terra incognita, even if it is the terra incognita right near your home. Exploring is as much about expanding our sense of curiosity and getting back in touch with the sense of wonder nature reliably gives. Naturalism is a cheap thrill, because it doesn’t require much stuff beyond a willingness to open up our senses to what the world has to teach. This learning in turn helps sharpen our powers of observations. A few tools can help in the endeavor, but they can likely be sourced second-hand.
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Society as currently organized isn’t really doing much to change the way we relate to the ecological web, instead seeking to keep us glued to an electronic web. Having a richer understanding of the way the insects, plants, birds and beasts exist within a web of interrelationship and connection can help us to see the ways these creatures and beings are not separate from our own life. Seeing how we are embedded within the complex associations of an ecosystem might go a long way helping us begin to repair the many damaged relations and threads of connection within the web of life.
For this iteration of the column, I thought I’d something a little different and talk to someone who does know some things about being an amateur naturalist. He is my friend Erik Brueggemann, fellow public library employee and an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist. I asked Erik a few questions to see what insight I could glean from his experience.

INTERVIEW WITH ERIK BRUEGGEMANN, VOLUNTEER NATURALIST

JPM: You’ve always been an outdoorsy person since before I’ve known you, but what inspired you to become an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist (OCVN) in the first place?

EB: I went over 20 years where I went outside and liked being outside but I didn’t look at it or experience it, just enjoying hiking and going different places but not really knowing anything about where I was or what living things were there. And then I rediscovered Jewelweed. I can’t remember when I rediscovered Jewelweed but the first time as an adult when I reencountered it and had a seedpod explode - my childhood came flooding back. I started to remember all this stuff, this life, that I had forgotten. As a child of the 80’s and 90’s before screens became so important, it’s really all we had - go outside, read, or watch a Police Academy marathon on Star 64. All things I enjoy but there’s something to just spending time outside and not having anything else to do with an agenda or any meaning or making any grand statement besides preventing boredom. That’s where great life happens. I’m trying to get back to that as an adult.

JPM: The OCVN program required you to do forty hours of instruction and forty hours of volunteer work. How did that go for you and was there any particular part you enjoyed and any part you disliked?

EB: The only part I actively disliked were the exploitive or commodification of nature that I experienced during the class - this was not part of the class itself but something I started to pick up on. It completely turned me off from contributing to pay-to-play nature. You can get good nature without spending a dime. I get you want funds but bragging about commodifying every nature experience. It’s asinine. The class was also a very broad overview of everything. You don’t really learn much until you start volunteering. But, as you get out there and volunteer you realize that broad overview of everything really helps you understand more. The best part was just being out and getting excited about seeing a certain bird or plant or whatever and everyone around you showing the same excitement.

JPM: You’ve been at this for a number of years now. What kind of work have you done?

EB: Cleared invasive species, monitored streams, planted trees, planted flowers, made trails, remade trails, got completely disheartened when you start to recognize all the invasive species, gotten reenergized when you start to look past them and see what’s also there, I cut down the biggest multiflora rosa bush you’ve ever seen and then someone turning some of the wood into a pen for you as a surprise before the cuts from all those thorns on your forearms were even healed, led volunteer groups, monitored cover boards for Kirtland’s snakes, learned how to grow trees and flowers and then giving them away, and I helped turn a patch of neglected land in my neighborhood into a showcase for gardening with native plants. The best though is just being out there with other people and bullshitting about whatever and teaching each other cool stuff you’ve learned, not talking about experiences that aren’t replicable or “you had to be there” moments but about stuff you want others to be able to experience or notice. And then telling them where to go to see it or just showing it to them because it’s right there. But, this is why conservation works and why it matters - great nature should be easy to find and experience. The fact that conservation works so well should be recognized as this amazing thing. You can help. You should help.

JPM: What kind of programs would you like to do or see implemented around the city, (state, bioregion…)?
More local offerings and more recognition for how important conservation is. When I started, I spent more time getting to volunteer places than I spent volunteering. I decided that wasn’t working for me. I’ve committed to trying to do almost everything locally in my neighborhood. I can walk or ride a bike to volunteer. It’s better. There is so much good nature right outside your door that you don’t need to travel to get it, and you can help improve it. It is literally right outside your door. You don’t even need to open that door - just look out the window. We should encourage eliminating maintained turf that is unutilized for sport or recreational activities and replacing them with native plants that are contributing to bettering where we live. I’m all for turf as a landscape accent but using flower beds to accent turf? Flip it.

JPM: Keeping your certification requires an additional thirty hours of volunteer work and / or continuing education every year. What does that look like in practice?

EB: It’s pretty easy. The opportunities are out there in abundance, you just need to find what type of volunteering you enjoy. Try a bunch of places - if it doesn’t check all your boxes then try somewhere else. I’ve probably stopped volunteering at 75% of the places I tried because it wasn’t a good fit for me or whoever lead the events retired or switched jobs. In Cincinnati it’s been pretty easy to start volunteer groups at the parks closest to my house and just regularly hold events that are supported by our local Parks. People show up to help. At a certain point you might transition from just showing up to wanting more. Doing more is also possible when you’re out there regularly learning things and meeting people.

JPM: How has becoming a naturalist changed your relationship with nature?

EB: Good nature is everywhere. I think exploring everything close to you is often overlooked in pursuit of grand vistas or experiences. Look closer at what you got. Learn more about what you got. It’s worth it. You can help make it better. If you can’t get good nature by looking out a window - whose fault is that? It’s yours. I always try and get people to go with me when I need to drive somewhere for nature. The amount of good nature that is within 2 hours of Cincinnati is pretty phenomenal. I want to get more people to recognize it. To look closer to where you are. Travel less. Experience more. Help maintain it.

JPM: You’ve worked at book stores and at the public library for a long time and I know you like to read and collect books. What authors or books would you recommend for someone who wanted to become a naturalist?

EB: Whatever speaks to you. Novels are a great place to get great nature writing. Rereading some of the novels I read before I knew what the things mentioned look or act like is a completely different experience. I’ve gotten paid to recommend books for over 20 years - I can’t just generally recommend stuff. I need more info. I can give you a list of what I like and enjoy but you might hate it because we aren’t the same even if we’re both interested in the same. Kathleen Jamie and Jim Harrison come to mind. They couldn’t be more different but, as far as nature writing goes: you can’t do much better. Once you get out there and start to learn more, you’ll realize you’re very interested in this thing but not at all in that thing and then roll from there. A great place to start is just having an idea how interconnected everything is and/or how important certain living things are for other living things. The Nature of Oaks by Douglas Tallamy is a great intro on this topic. Any book about a specific place over time is also a good primer for this. If you start to read something and you don’t like it - stop. Find something else.

JPM: What would you say to someone who is interested in becoming a naturalist, but maybe lives in a state where they don’t have a program like this and they are starting off alone? Have any advice?

EB: Find a group close to you and get involved. Start something if you don’t have anything around you. Get involved with your Community Council. Talk to your Park boards. Think smaller. Lower your goals. Be patient. Be practical. Start in your yard. Just start doing stuff.

JPM: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

EB: Just go outside. Go for a walk. Expect nothing. I probably enjoyed my walk to work today more than someone did on their last trip to wherever. Take binoculars or don’t. Get a fishing license to start exploring all that happens under water. Just sit somewhere for hours and absorb what happens all around you because that’s the best thing you could be doing. Be interested in learning new things and trying new experiences. Have your mind blown in your backyard or around the corner. Don’t forage in urban areas where native species are less prolific. By all means experience nature by touching, smelling, and tasting but don’t take it home with you and make a meal if you didn’t grow it. Leave it for someone else to experience. Learn how to grow whatever you’re enamored with. Delete all your social media and stay off the internet unless you can’t - live through your own experiences not theirs. Share with the person standing next to you.
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JPM: Thanks for sharing your experiences with us, and your attitude of “just get started where you are,” it’s very much appreciated.

As Erik pointed out, becoming a naturalist might be as easy as staying off social media and stepping outside your door to go for a walk. Even just adding a little bit here and there to what you already know about the flora and fauna in your neighborhood can help you feel more connected to the vibrant intricacy of life happening all around us. In the spirit of “just start doing stuff” let’s look at four activities for getting out there and on with the show.

BIRDOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS

Bird is the word. Look to the air! Birdology is to biology what biology is to… oh, nevermind. Studying our feathered friends in the sky is a timeless pursuit. You can even do it in the dead of winter, looking out your window. No special equipment is required, but some might help. A few bird identification books. A pair of binoculars. That’s more than enough to get going. You might want a notebook if you get serious about this form of playfulness. Making notes and filling in the birds you’ve “collected” in your sightings along with other observations is as much of a thrill for the birder as is catching a distant DX station for the radio geek.

Once a bird book has been secured (check one out from the library or pick one up from a good independent or secondhand bookstore) choose a bird from its pages. One you haven’t seen before, but is one that would be in your area that time of year. With this bird picked out, make an effort to go out and find the bird. When you have tracked down the bird in the wild, even the urban wild, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment, and now your mind will know this creature and have a connection to it, and you won’t have to look for the book to know what it is you are seeing in front of you. Rinse and repeat.

Another way to go about this is to flip the above process, and go out and see what you might find, then identify the bird. With each new type and species of bird you see, you’ll be adding to your inner repository and grow the ability to check things out in the library of life. The same approach can be taken with trees, plants, insects...

Matching birdsong to the bird singing is another way to proceed in the fine art of birdology. Or you can learn about murmuration and the behavior of flocks. The more you learn the more you’ll want to know. For instance, did you know that flocking is a way for our feathered friends to conserve energy? Long flights along migratory routes require a lot of energy to be spent. Flying together increases their aerodynamics, reducing the amount of expenditure they each have to put into arriving at their destination.[2]

​ACCEPTING DINERGY

The energy flows involved with a bird species during migration are just one example of the way energy makes up a vital part of an ecology. As regular readers of mine will perhaps understand, we live in a world of limits. The disturbances and multiple crises ongoing around the world can be understood in one way as the result of people trying to ignore the limits of growth, the limits of extraction, the limits of how much energy can be used with giving energy back.

Yet limits are what give form to our bodies, and the shape of everything we seek to study in the natural world, whether it’s a hawk making a spiral in the sky or a mighty oak tree, gnarled and twisted. The architect and philosopher György Doczi showed this with elegance in his book The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, and Architecture. This illustrated book shows just how much form in art and nature is predicated on the limits and forces impinging on a natural feature or species. In his book he also introduced the concept of dinergy, a word he coined, to describe the relationship between energy and its limits. He arrived at the word by combining the Greek dia, which means across, through, and opposing, and energy. Opposition gives something to push against, a thrust block for their own evolution causing them to adapt in ways they wouldn’t have if not faced with particular limits.

Dinergy can itself be contrasted against synergy, which is about the cooperation between two or more people or forces. Synergy has caught on quite a bit more in our culture as a concept than dinergy has. Embracing limits and limitation isn’t popular in a society still caught under the spell of bigger being better, and expansion as the only form of growth. Despite its fringe status as a concept, dinergy is a useful one to have on hand in the mental toolkit. Studying how limits work in nature, can give us a greater appreciation for limits in our own life. Instead of thinking of limits as things that impinge upon our freedom, we can start to think of limits as powerful ways for shaping the way live into something more beautiful than it is now.

Limiting the area we explore and work in the quest to learn more about nature is one way to apply a useful limit. As Erik mentioned, looking to the grand vistas of faraway places often causes people to overlook what is right outside their doorstep, in their own watershed.
​
FLOWING WITH YOUR WATERSHED

If energy flows and limitations can shape a species, those flows certainly shape the environment and ecosystems of the world as carved out by the precipitous flow of H2O.

Learning about the watershed you live in, and how it supports a plethora of life is another to way to ease into getting a better sense of our immediate surroundings. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a watershed is “a land area that channels rainfall and snowmelt to creeks, streams, and rivers, and eventually to outflow points such as reservoirs, bays, and the ocean.”[3] If you live inland exploring your watershed could begin with visiting the rivers and lakes nearest you, tracing the tributaries from the large rivers to the little streams. There’s not much better than a wild swim or a paddle down a glinting stream or glistening lake in the summer months. If you happen to be near an ocean, it doesn’t get more primal than interacting with the ebb and flow of the tide and its ever-shifting waves, the salt wind in your hair.

As I mentioned in my last article on bioregions, a watershed seems to me a more interesting way to think about plots of land rather than the sighted lines and squared off bits used by surveyors for partitioning space. Another way to think about bioregions in terms of water, would be by looking at the major aquifers underneath our feet.

A fun way to get an idea of your watershed and its contours is to find a map of your area with its rivers, creeks, lakes, and put a piece of tracing paper over top of the map. Trace out only the areas of water on the map. Starting to see those lines as the primary demarcations of space, can shift your mental mapping of your home area away from streets, big box stores and coffee shops. Everything becomes more squiggly, curvy, less linear, boxed in to a square.
​
FUN WITH MINEAROLOGY

Go to any stream and your liable to find a plentitude of rocks. Or at least dirt and mud. Hanging out in the creeks, you might just study the stones as much as the crawdads swimming in a shallow pool, The stones themselves composed of minerals. Taken for granite so much of the time, understanding something about the mineral kingdom gives new appreciation for life and how shaped we are by these raw materials of life.
Minerals are like geological Legos. They build things up, but we need many kinds of them to make a structure. Eight different elements make up most of the minerals. These include aluminum, calcium, iron, magnesium, oxygen, potassium, silicon and sodium. In order to be considered a mineral these elements need to repeat in a regular pattern.
Knowing a thing or two about minerals can also help us with things like gardening. Erik had mentioned to me just how much “bedrock influences soil pH. It’s another reason why some plants won’t grow in certain areas besides sun and moisture. Hamilton County [Ohio] is alkaline because of all the limestone. Areas with sandstone are more acidic - rhododendrons and blueberries need acidic soil - we don’t have either of them occurring naturally in Hamilton even though they’re native to Ohio - head East Young Man.”

READING THE BOOK OF NATURE

I usually end these articles with the RE/SOURCES section that is at once bibliography and suggestive reading for further exploration on a topic. Instead of doing that this time, I’d like to go out and suggest that you hunt for your own books. As Erik noted, your particular inclinations in studying nature will draw you to what you like, more than I can direct you to what you will find inspiring. I have books on vultures, turtles, wolves, wildflowers, the arctic regions and an urban tree handbook stashed among the local hiking guides and other titles.

That said, I can’t help but make an observation and a suggestion when it comes to books about nature and science. Working in a library for my entire adult life thus far, one of my favorite things to do has been to wander the stacks. These are a place of wonder. There are stark differences between the books published for children between the 1950s and the 1980s, and those published between the 1990s and the 2020s. Comparing them is instructive. Perhaps the most striking thing about these differences is how much smarter those books seemed to expect the children to be, how much more they already expected them to understand about the world around them. I think it also points back to the time that Erik mentioned when it was routine for kids to go outside and be left to their own devices.

At the same time, it wasn’t as uncommon for kids to have hobbies that were a bit more involved than what is on the market today. When I think of some of the noxious things I mixed up with my chemistry sets, it’s perhaps not hard to wonder why, in this land of lawsuits and litigation, those kind of kits and instructional books aren’t as widespread as they once were. Kids used to really experiment with things back then, and I’m not just talking about playing doctor. I’m talking electricity, chemicals, biology.

I’ve found those older books just as useful for learning about a topic such as botany as an adult, as I have some of the most current creative nonfiction. They make great primers and would also be useful sharing with any children in your life. See if you can hunt any of these down at the library or pick up on the cheap second hand to add to your own collection.

​The best book to read is outside. So after you’ve taken in the stories presented by our intrepid editor get outside and let the play of light on water, the sound of the wind in the trees, the sight of birds in the sky, and the crossing of mammals in the field, whisper their own stories.

​[1] https://stevenpressfield.com/2010/06/writing-wednesdays-6-write-what-you-dont-kow/
[2] https://www.hummingbirdsplus.org/nature-blog-network/flocking-behavior-provides-energy-conservation-during-migration/
[3] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/watershed.html

.:. .:. .:.

​This article originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of New Maps.

(Video and music above made from a Donna Tartt interview with Charlie Rose by Matt Pope. )
~.:.~
“Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening.”-Pauline Oliveros
~.:.~

Two people sitting, talking at a table. Telling stories. Listening to each other. It seems so common, but also uncommon. When was the last time you went over to an aunt’s house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire?

To really listen to a tales such as these, a person needs to be silent, and when silent, listen. To be silent we need to slow down. What else is as cheap and free as entering into silence so we can listen?

Silence has a way of clearing the head. How can we hear our own inner voice, the voices of our sisters and brothers, the voices of the animals and trees, the voices of the rivers, the voices that come in on a warm and gentle wind, if we don’t stop the frenetic pace of production long enough to hear what they have to say?
Slowing down gives us the pause that revives.

Talking is only one side of the equation in speaking truth to power. To hear the power of truth, we need to first shut our mouths and open our ears. To cut through life’s noise we have to turn off the volume of the worlds chatter and mental chatter and go into deep listening. From that silence the voice of our own intuition might just be one of the things we hear awaken.

Lucky for us the composer Pauline Oliveros left a roadmap for re-tuning our ears to inner and outer voices. We can use it to slow down and enter those silences that are pregnant with sound.

FROM THE DEPTHS OF SILENCE, INTUITION

The title for this chapter comes from experimental sound artist, composer and ritualist Pauline Oliveros. A Tejana native of Houston, Texas, born in 1932, she was already playing music in kindergarten, the beginning of a lifelong fascination with sound and listening. She listened to everything, all the time. When she was nine, she started to play the accordion which was to be her lifelong instrument of choice though she became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist. She also became a maverick explorer of tape music, electronic sounds, and the creator of her own specialized delay systems.

Pauline was the definition of a deep listener. To her, the entire world of sound was rich with latent musicality. Reflecting on listening as a kid she said, “I used to enjoy my grandfather tuning his crystal radio. I liked the sounds of tuning the radio much more than the program. My father had a shortwave radio, which also I enjoyed the sounds of the shortwave tuning as well. Those were sounds that I liked.”

As she continued to excel at music in school, and with the encouragement of her pianist mother, she added violin, piano, tuba and French horn to the list of things she could play. At age sixteen, feeling the call of her vocation, she resolved to become a composer, and in time went to college in California. There she supported herself in part by giving accordion lessons. It was at San Francisco State College where she met the poet and composer Ramon Sender, the burgeoning minimalist master magician Terry Riley, and the devotee to avantgarde musical expression, Loren Rush.

With Riley and Rush she formed the very first free improvisation group outside of jazz music in the modern west. Riley had been commissioned to make a piece of music for a film score, but he hadn’t written anything, so he recruited Rush and Oliveros and took them over to the studios at KPFA to use their trusty Ampex tape recorder. They sat down with their instruments and no score. They improvised and caught the results on tape. Riley was on piano, Oliveros on French horn, and Rush on koto and percussion. They improvised several five-minute takes, and in the process realized how much fun they had playing unscored music together. When they listened to the playback together, they all realized they wanted to continue playing improvised music together. It’s an experience many kids who formed bands in the decades afterwards replicated: playing crazy ad hoc music, recording it to tape, and listening back with astonishment to the results. There is an entire world of seldom heard basement tapes containing such untold treasures.

Oliveros spent the remaining years of the 1950s steeped in Beat era circles of strangeness, making friends with a variety of iconoclastic composers, artists, and poets. Sender became one of her improvising partners, and the practice of improvisation became a key to the development of her work. For her twenty-first birthday, her mom had gifted her with a tape recorder, an expensive gift in 1953. The medium of tape created another avenue for creative composition and was another part of her greater destiny.

The legendary electronic synthesist Morton Subotnick was one of the strange ones who was called to the cultural scene in SF and he started swimming in the same circles as Oliveros. Soon he struck up friendship with Oliveros and Sender. They were all interested in electronics and what could be done with tape. With a hefty helping of the DIY spirit and some elbow grease, they cobbled together the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962 that functioned as a non-profit recording studio and performance space for experimental arts. (The full story of the SFTMC and how it evolved into the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College is a fascinating story in itself, and is something I’ve covered in a series of articles you can find in my archives.)

Over the next decade Oliveros continued to compose, to write, to listen, to meditate and to collaborate. By 1971 she had performed and published her piece, Sonic Meditations. Oliveros was a lesbian and part of the feminist movement, and the piece came about from working intensely with a group of female-identified artistically focused spiritual explorers. From this sapphic locus of creative energy, the teachable practice of Deep Listening was born. Sonic Meditations was published in 1974, but the basic practices were further modified, tinkered with, adapted and extended over the next decades until her passing along with her growing body of work that included compositions, recordings and performances.

Oliveros explained Deep Listening as:

“a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is…

The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception.

We open in order to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.
Deep Listening is a birthright for all humans.”

One of the many close collaborators with Oliveros was her life partner Ione, herself an accomplished playwright, poet, writer and explorer of sound. They worked on the practice of Deep Listening by developing further sonic meditations, incorporating bodywork, and interactive performance. On a personal level the work included paying attention to “the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams.” Ione brought dreamwork into practice as a core element. Our dreams are something are something to be heard and attended to. The effect of the work creates heightened aesthetic appreciation music and environmental sounds but doesn’t stop there. Deep Listening shoots its roots deep into the internal world of the imaginal realm. Through its deliberate cultivation it can help create a field of awareness where personal and community growth occur through “experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness.”

This practice opens a door to the growth of our intutive capacities. Such intuition is necessary not only for those who wish to improvise music in a group setting, but also to storytellers and writers looking to bridge scenes and sections of work, and for anyone who wants to lie there life as a creative work of art.

To get to that one of the first steps is slowing down, get comfortable with silence, as the master John Cage taught us. Cage also taught about response ability. In his essay “Experimental Music” he wrote that,

“Hearing sounds which are just sound immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature. Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder? otters along a stream a sense of mirth? night in the woods a sense of fear? Do not rain falling and mists rising up suggest the love binding heaven and earth? Is not decaying flesh loathsome? Does not the death of someone we love bring sorrow? And is there a greater hero than the least plant that grows? These responses to nature are mine and will not necessarily correspond with another’s. Emotion takes place in the person who has it. And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is what is meant by response ability.”

The ability to listen deeply is also the ability to pay attention. In that attention we develop our response ability. Rather than react, having actually heard, a person can decide whether to remain in stillness or move into action.

Listening, then, is also tied to slowing down. To minding the gap between an impulse and whether or not it is worth following.

Listening becomes a creative act and a necessary rebellion in a time of deindustrialization. It creates a space for discernment amidst cognitive dissonance and conflicting narratives. Listening allows us to choose our own adventure within the available options, showing us new options as we grow the ability to pay attention for longer intervals of time, to hear what other people are really saying and doing, and await the response from our own inner voice. In difficult times listening will give us the ability to improvise with what life is calling to our attention.

Since Oliveros passed away in 2016, Deep Listening continues to be taught at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The work is also continued on another dream level and spiritual level by the Ministry of Maat, a group dedicated to “Spiritual, Educational and Holistic support for women and the full spectrum of cultural and gender identities” started by Ione.​

​SLOW AND LOW THAT IS THE TEMPO
​
When I listen to music deeply, I slow down. I decelerate to the hiss of cassettes. I rewind the vinyl to hear it crackle and pop. I pop in a CD that might glitch and skip because of an imperfect surface scratch. When I slow down, I also think of how precious music used to be, before the era of recording. Then it can only be experienced live. Every performance was unique, never to be repeated. I thinking of the time and effort spent in learning an instrument, the time spent in composing a song or symphony. These heavy time investments continued with the dawn of recorded music. Artists and bands spend incredible amounts of time in the studio perfecting an album. Yet the glut of available recordings, especially when accelerated to streaming platforms, have made the experience more disposable. People don’t pour over the liner notes with the same obsession as music fans of previous generations did. On Spotify, there are no liner notes.

Art can help teach us how to be present with our attention. Present to looking at a painting for longer than five or ten minutes. Reading a book more than one time. Listening to an album multiple times, and then come back to again and again, with new experiences to hear what else is inside.

Patience in creativity is a factor here too. I was inspired to write about the slow and steady route of creation in part from reviewing the album Electric Voyeur by Big Blood. They spent ten years making that album. It would have felt dismissive to write a review of the album if I’d only listened to it once or twice. It was good to have some time with the album before I wrote my review, considering the time they invested into creating the masterpiece. On this album, they not only played all the music, they also built all the electronic instruments that were used to play the music. Hours and hours and hours, days, weeks, months, years were spent going between the soldering bench and the home studio. Yet the result can be listened to in under two hours. Artwork can be consumed with such brevity, but the time it takes to create art is long. The personal life experience required to make art is also something that cannot be rushed. No one gets to be an elder without the harsh personal experiences that have a weathered a person and given them the necessary gravitas to make lasting work. Such experiences run in parallel with time devoted to learning a craft.

Donna Tartt is a writer who listens deeply to herself and takes her time writing a book. Somewhere in an interview Tartt mentioned that it took her about ten years to write a book. Her breakthrough masterwork The Secret History came out in 1992. Her next novel, The Little Friend came out in 2002. Goldfinch was published in 2013. While I can admire the work ethic and prolific pens of people like Stephen King and other one-book-a-year writers, I cannot argue with the deep saturation and grain of language to be found in Donna Tartt’s novels. The prose is exquisite. True master craftsmanship. That takes time. I’d love to read another novel of hers. It has been over ten years since the Goldfinch came out. I hope she is still working, and if so, I imagine it will be worth the wait. The secret processes of the soul and creation cannot be rushed.
​
The musician Matt Pope (Milhaus) made the amazing video and music here from an interview with Donna Tartt on the Charlie Rose show. It took a lot painstaking edits to make something like this. It took a lot of listening to her words, to her voice. It took a lot of time to make this beautiful video and music.

Creating a body of work as an artist takes an entire lifetime. If that body of work is to have grain, the same kind of gnarl and character as a tree, it is slow work. In the attention economy where everyone wants eyeballs on a finished piece, sloppy work and to AI slop is just one one result. With the financial economy in constant chaos and shambles, perhaps it is also time to opt out of the attention economy. Attention isn’t a bad thing. It is a good thing. Yet the more attention is craved, the more attention seems to go towards its own bankruptcy and deficit. When I give my attention to shallow clickbait, my attention accelerates into hyperactivity, my focus decreases and my efforts become scattered. I lose my ability to hold attention and concentrate on something for a longer period of time in the rush for immediate gratification. The ability to concentrate for longer periods of time necessary to do what Cal Newport calls “deep work” is eroded. Giving up becomes easy, staying with something, or with someone, over the long haul, is just another option instead of a lifelong commitment.

Slowing down to extend our attention gives grain to a work, it gives what the science fiction writer Rudy Rucker calls gnarl. It is something he seeks to put into his novels, which are my favorite of the cyberpunk writers. His works went beyond cyberpunk of course. As a mathematician, his books are of high philosophical concept, and the way he used stories from his life and transposed them into science fiction settings (a style he calls transrealism), make them so unique, there is nothing quite like them in the SF canon.

In one of his blog posts Rucker describes gnarl this way. “I use gnarl in an idiosyncratic and somewhat technical sense; I use it to mean a level of complexity that lies in the zone between predictability and randomness. The original meaning of ‘gnarl’ was simply ‘a knot in the wood of a tree.’ In California surfer slang, ‘gnarly’ came to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, something gnarly came to be anything with surprisingly intricate detail. As a late-arriving and perhaps over-assimilated Californian, I get a kick out of the word.”

Rucker sought out the gnarlier end of literature for inspiration and sought to put the same high gnarl into his own writing. “If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy.”

Gnarl cannot be easily automated, because part of what makes something gnarly is the grain of weathered experience, the slow growth of rings over the tangled knots of life.

THE SLOW GROWTH OF MEMORY
​
Human memory is another thing that has atrophied under the influence of viral media that burns out after just a few infectious days. News cycles (or as I like to call them, noose cycles, because they cut off circulation to the head) are as disorienting as they are vapid. Memories should be generational, if not longer. Our phone enhanced collective dementia places some of our stories at risk of swirling down the collective psychic drain.
At the beginning of this essay I asked, “When was the last time you went over to an aunts house, or an older sister, and let her tell you something from the deep wells of her mind and heart? When was the last time you listened to the village wise woman tell you a tale around the fire? ” Hanging out with Pauline Oliveros, Ione, and her other collaborators feels like hanging out with some older wise aunties, even when I am only listening to their recordings or reading their words. Reading the words of Donna Tartt I feel like I am with a cool older sister. When I read the stories of Bette A. in her book Slow Stories, and listen to her words in the collaboration with Brian Eno that was made for the book, I feel like I have been invited over to a hearthfire for a cup of tea and to hear the wisdom of another time. It’s like I’ve gone to see this storyteller who has things inside of her she needs to share, and that I need to know. These stories seem to come straight from the dreamworld and carry me to a place beyond material reality.

​Listening to Bette A.’s voice and the soft ambience from Eno on the recording, I feel safe, in a cacoon. It is this primal feeling I get, of having a mother or an aunt or a sister read to me while in bed. It’s so primal. It’s so timeless, as we are taken into the world of story.

(As of now, there is only a vinyl version available of the recording. I got to listen to a promo as a music reviewer. It would be wonderful if they released an edition that made the recording affordable for everyday fans. That said, the entire art package does go to a charity, The Heroines! Movement, a global storytelling movement around women role models, co-founded by Bette A.)

The quality of Bette’s voice is such that it fills me with emotion. It is this feeling of being read to, slowly, softly. I realize I haven’t experienced this in so long, that I am overwhelmed with a grief I did not know I had, grief for something I did not know I was missing. I listen to audiobooks sometimes but those don’t really count. Podcasts can be even worse. Poetry readings are good, but there every poet wants to be heard. When was the last time someone told you a tale and you really slowed down enough to listen and take it, be absorbed into it, be absorbed by and saturated by the story?

The fact that they are slow makes them better. This isn’t an audiobook you are rushing to listen to because you need to fill up your information gathering quota. Information isn’t knowledge. These are stories and there is wisdom inside them. The information highway sped things up, this is an analog off ramp inviting us to slow down.

When they started to record the stories in this multimedia project, Brian’s only instruction to Bette was to read her tale “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow.”

It seems to me that “Slow, slower, even slower, yes, more slow” should be a new Oblique Strategy.

Slow down, listen deep, and find the grains of wisdom spoken by the wise woman in your life.

A Cheap Thrills Vacation Primer for Beating the Heat

May Day marks the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. It’s also the time of year when people start really figuring out what they are going to be doing for their summer vacations if they are lucky enough to take one. While it may not yet be blazing hot, the humidity and higher temperatures are coming, at least on this side of the hemisphere. With that in mind I share this Cheap Thrills article on what beating the heat might look like in a world of accelerated climate weirding and lower resource base. Along the way we take a dips in the lake at a summer Chataqua, hang out with Thoreau at his cabin, visit a bungalow in the borscht belt, and stop off for some gelato before having a siesta in the height of Ferragosto.
This article was originally written for the summer 2025 issue of New Maps and was edited by Nathanael Bonnell. 

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.” – Sam Keen

​​Sometimes you just want to get away from it all. Hit the road. Get out of Dodge, go someplace else for a little while, and then come back. One word for it is vacation. People really started going on them when the railroad hit its stride. The car, bus and airplane expanded the options of where to go, and for a time, long distance travel was relatively affordable. It can now be expected to become quite expensive again in the years ahead, thanks to the downward-sloping curve of Hubbert’s peak. Feeling that pinch doesn’t mean folks aren’t going to want to hit the escape button, though, as vacations have become a habit for the world’s industrial denizens.
Vacationing is, for the most part, a product of our industrial culture. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century the word itself generally meant a time when teachers and students vacated the schoolhouse. The main reason for vacating the schoolhouse was to get busy with the other work that needed to be done in the prime of growing season. To actually take a break from work, people had to have a bit of money, making vacations and resting cures the domain of the wealthy. As the oil gush of prosperity drove everyone’s fortunes up, the middle and working class were able to start taking a break too. A bit of surplus meant that taking a week off for a bit of rest and relaxation didn’t have to drain the coffers to their dregs.

Nineteenth-century physicians started to advocate that such breaks were good for the nerves, while other advocates of leisure suggested that they could be used as a time of spiritual renewal. This was all in contrast to the way many Puritans and Calvinists preached the gospel of work from the pulpit, proclaiming that idleness created a playground for the Devil. As more liberal forms of Protestantism such as Unitarianism came to the fore, they pushed back on this work ethic, and contributed to the idea of the good that could be had by taking a break. The influence of the Transcendentalist movement, and their ideas of taking time for reflection and self-culture, played no small part in this change of attitude.

The practice of going on a vacation is something that can be saved as a habit of leisure even as the industrial economy continues to decline. Adjustments into how far and how often a person will travel will need to be made, especially by those belonging to the international jet set class. Even those of us who are used to more modest vacations will need to change our expectations. The days of hopscotching across the globe in planes are, in the long run, numbered. Most folks never could afford to go even to the other side of the country, much less another continent, anyway. Finding contentment in our home counties, states, and bioregions will be one of the waves future vacationers aim to catch. Meanwhile, those with an entrepreneurial spirit, and who live in the right kind of place, might even be able to cater to the wants and needs of future travelers as a secondary source of income in a time of decline.

The issue of climate change and seasonal work is not unconnected to vacation. Decline brings with it many difficulties, and one of them will be adjusting to harsh outdoor work as the limitations of air conditioning begin to assert themselves. Summer is the traditional time of a break from school in the United States. This was ostensibly tied to the needs of farmers. Extra hands were needed in the barns and fields during the long hot days. Yet hot days also make hard work more difficult. In places like Italy, where the summers can be as humid and scorching as here in Ohio, it has become tradition for most of the country to take off for at least the first two weeks of August. One way to cope with increased heat is to slow down and go for a swim.

The exact patterns around vacationing will be different in Illinois and Indiana compared to Texas or Maine. For one thing, many people in North America are landlocked, and it won’t be so easy for everyone to get to the ocean to escape the heat, though rivers and lakes are likely accessible, and even closer to home, so are swimming holes in creeks and ponds. If trains can be kept chugging for a longer time, and buses used in place of atomized cars, they may take some people away to a variety of shorelines. The trains were the first to take people to the oceans for getaways in the first place.
​
To return to the Transcendentalists, it was in the nineteenth century that one man made a personal escape, and set a promising pattern for future vacationers in America. That person was Henry David Thoreau and the pattern he pioneered was established in this nation’s collective consciousness when he built a small and economical cabin for himself down by Walden Pond.

​For the American, getting away from it all seems to have started when Thoreau went to Walden to live his life in the woods. Walden wasn’t that far away from his original home in Concord, Massachusetts. He could easily walk back as needed, and he did so often to eat dinner with family or friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson. Being a prolific walker, heading into town was no problem for Thoreau. His isolation was, in this respect, mostly internal, as he also received visitors. But just being on the outskirts of town, it was enough for him to help his mind escape from the kind of thoughts people had in town, to really start thinking his own thoughts. He collected those thoughts in his book Walden and now they continue to echo down the years. I think they have led to the establishment of a permanent Walden in the American mind. He moved in to his cabin on the Fourth of July, after all.

It seems appropriate to start with Thoreau when talking about vacation, considering that in the last issue I wrote about the practice of naturalism. Of all the things Thoreau was, he liked to consider himself as foremost a naturalist. His imprint is all over the environmental movement. Yet the word vacation and the name Thoreau aren’t often thrown together, even while for many people a vacation is a way to get back to nature. At least for citified folk like myself, I often think of vacations as a journey to a place where I’m going to do some hiking, some swimming, some walking, some spending time outdoors. They’ve often included camping, and it’s always a bonus if I can get far enough away from the light pollution of the city to really be able to see the milk in the Milky Way.

​As Thoreau’s good friend Emerson wrote in his essay “Nature”:

​Restoration from real sorrows can come from being alone in the woods, in communion with the trees, bathing in the air of a forest, the light of the stars. A cabin is a place to, in Thoreau’s words, “Simplify, simplify, simplify. ” This is in contrast to the complexity of the contemporary vacation, whose planning, execution and cost often create as much stress as they are supposed to alleviate. It can be hard to simplify when our internal and external lives are a cluttered mess. Breaking from regular routines, forgetting about work, errands, and chores, and stopping long enough to allow what matters to us to register inside our minds can be considered a first step towards simplifying.

The urge to rusticate loomed large in our collective imagination even in 1845, when our population was smaller and our square concrete cities less sprawled. Despite the language Thoreau used to talk about Native Americans (“savages”), it is clear from his writing he truly admired their way of life and gives many passages of his prose to praising it. One way of looking at his experiment at Walden might be as a white man’s vision quest, a search for what a person could be in America. Thought of in this way, a vacation can be used to retreat from society at large, a tool to recalibrate ourselves to our own inner vision. A cabin retreat is a great place for such a quest.

The cabin in the woods takes on another resonance today as a possible place to “bug out” when the shale hits the fan. A person would flee to such a bug-out location if their main domicile was struck by a disaster of some kind, whether natural or man-made. Stocked up and equipped with the tools of survival, these kinds of shelters are for more than just getting back to the basics: they’re places to hunker down for shorter or extended durations. Consider working on them as a kind of vacation a prepper might have now, before taking a permanent vacation later.

Thoreau’s cabin escape was, for the most part, a solitary venture. Not all vacationers have the luxury of that kind of alone time, nor the funds for a plot of land and the permits required to build if a person wanted to keep it legal. A secondhand camper or a repurposed van is more affordable for people, as evidenced by the many modern-day nomads living in them. There are lots of people already living in campers and vans stationary as well. As the cost oil continues to go up, living in these kinds of vehicles, parked in the yard of a family member, a vacant lot, or hidden away elsewhere, will continue to be a downwardly mobile home option.
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Sometimes being alone isn’t really what a person wants anyway. Sometimes they want to get away with a spouse, family and friends. This brings us to a slight detour at summer school, or summer camp anyway, and that convivial movement of gathering together for self-improvement known as the Chautauqua.

he Transcendentalist movement helped to get a number of ideas and practices around education into circulation. The majority of Transcendentalist movers and shakers had worked as teachers to one degree or another. This includes Emerson and Thoreau, but also Amos Bronson Alcott, whose ideas were a forerunner to much that is taken for granted in education today, such as his taking kids on field trips to learn through experience. Field trips were a radical idea in the 1800s. Now they are standard educational practice. Thinkers like Elizabeth Peabody promoted a view of education emphasizing the innate knowledge within a person, and teaching as a way to help facilitate a flowering of what might as well be called intuition. Getting an education, then, became a mode of self-culture and spiritual refinement. As such, it was considered to be a lifelong endeavor.

In time, people would even take vacations from work to attend lectures in the summer as part of the Chautauqua movement, which had a precursor in the Lyceum movement.

The Lyceums were kickstarted in Massachusetts by Josiah Holbrook in 1826. He was another believer in the notion of self-improvement by learning across the span of an entire life, and his efforts promoted the transmission of “useful knowledge” through public lectures. After he created the National American Lyceum to teach his method of teaching, other Lyceums grew up all around the country as if a colony of fruitful mushroom spores had just erupted from the soil. By the mid-1830s there were 3,000 Lyceums catering to the public’s inclination to learn, and to be entertained while learning.

A number of the New England Transcendentalists got involved, using the Lyceum as a way to transmit their philosophy to the wider country on the speaking circuits that developed with their growth. Emerson and Thoreau were both avid Lyceum lecturers, and many of their talks were later polished up into poetic prose for publication.

Following the chaos of the Civil War the Lyceum waned as a cultural touchstone, but in 1874 the Chautauqua waxed in its place as something of a successor. The Chautauqua started off in western New York near a lake of the same name, as a summer training program for Sunday school teachers and other churchy types. The Methodist ministers John H. Vincent and Lewis Miller were the two people behind it, and like other summer traditions, it was first organized as a camp, this one geared towards religious instruction. As interest and enthusiasm for this camp of learning grew, they loosened things up a bit to include talks on general topics, music, and recreation. The success of the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly was such that the format was copied and other Chautauquas sprouted around the country. Later in 1904 the enterprising Keith Vawter and Roy Ellison took the show on the road and presented the Chautauqua in tents as they traveled from town to town, city to city, giving people the chance to pay a modest fee to attend.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering its religious origins, that mixed in with the whole Chautauqua shebang was the idea that society could be improved through teaching citizens to be morally upstanding. As such it was in direct competition with other circuits of the time that had more in common with the circus. In other words, vaudeville. Whereas racy vaudeville offered humorous and libidinous ways to take the mind off of everyday stress, the Chautauqua billed itself as being able to improve the mind and character. As such it aimed to appeal to self-styled upper-crust highbrows, and keep out those deemed rancorous, lowbrow, and lower-class. Failing that, it would build them up into something better.

As the role of education continues to be questioned in America and change with time, the possibility of developing a new kind of summer school for “useful knowledge” might be a potential model for vacationers who want to improve their life of mind and have uplifting entertainment. As with any organic social movement, it is the people in the movement who get to decide what it is about. If I had my druthers future family summer camps would be devoted to the Humanities, Ecology, and Memory, or what I call HEM (in contrast to STEM). The inclusion of some bawdy songs and ample time dipping in a lake might be enough to keep it free from moral grandstanding and appeal to a variety of peoples. For that matter, there might as well be multiple types of summer camps catering to the needs of a diverse array of communities. After all, WASPs bent on social reformation aren’t the only ones looking for a distraction in the dog days of summer heat.

For the greater part of fifty years smack dab in the middle of the twentieth century Jewish vacationers from New York City regularly headed to the Catskill Mountains to what was called the Borscht Belt, also known as the Yiddish Alps. In a large part, it was driven by the need to get out of the hot multistory apartment buildings of the sweltering metropolis. The mothers and grandmothers would get a place at one of the five hundred resorts that catered to people at various income levels and head up with the kids as soon as they were out of school. This vacation land was in its prime between the 1920s and 1960s. Excluded elsewhere, especially during the 1930s, the Jews found an oasis in the Catskills. In the seventies, the rise of affordable AC, cheaper air travel, and the decline of rail service to mountains all contributed to their downturn and, in many cases, eventual abandonment.

There were fancy hotels for the wealthy, but for those of lesser means, bungalow colonies and kuchaleyns. The bungalows were little cottages all grouped together. Usually just a bedroom or two, kitchenette and screened porch to play cards in when it rained or get away from the mosquitoes. The same families rented the same bungalow year after year so when the kids went up with the women for the summer, they got to meet up with their summer friends, different from the city friends they had the rest of the year. There is something about being with certain group of people for a specific set amount of time during our adolescent years that lends itself to creating a sense of enchantment.

These bungalows had communal centers where people gambled in little homespun casinos, comedians told jokes, and movies were screened in the evenings. Sometimes a musician would pop in. All of these and more were standard fare at the hotels as well. Meanwhile, the kuchaleyns were even a bit more down-at-heel than the bungalows. This Yiddish word means “cook it yourself” and was used to denote boarding houses where people could stay but no meals were provided. People went to them anyway and managed to have a good time.

Modern stand-up comedy in its present form owes quite a bit to the entertainment circuit of the Borscht Belt. Just as the Transcendentalists polished their material through Lyceum lectures, Jewish comedians crafted their art of talking into what we now know as stand-up comedy on the circuit. Comedians such as the late Joan Rivers cut their teeth catering to the roughly half-a-million people who went up to the Borscht Belt each summer, giving them plenty of experience for their further efforts in showbiz. Others such as Sid Caesar and Jerry Seinfeld were influenced by that particular style of humor. All of this has left an indelible mark on American culture. It makes me wonder how future patterns of summer leisure, and the entertainments provided for them, will in turn influence the larger cultures in which they are nested.
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During these summers it was standard for the men to stay in the city to put in their work hours for the week. By the time Friday afternoon rolled around they were eager to get in on the comedy, the card games, and time with their families. They got into their cars and headed up to the bungalows as fast as they could. This particular behavior is less likely to be emulated in a time of increased fuel shortages, but the other pattern, where children and their caregivers (of whatever gender) go to a kind of retreat for a part of the summer, just might. Another possibility for getting away with the whole family is to just shut everything down for a few weeks in the summer, like they do in Italy.

​If summer has a last stand, it’s in August. The promise of a summer and its freedoms are in full bloom on Memorial Day. As Labor Day draws near those promises start to wilt. I can still relate to punk rocker Henry Rollins when he wrote, “August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame.” I remember wanting to pack in as much time with friends as I could before the school bell rang again. August is a time when everyone might as well have one last hurrah for the summer before getting back to the grindstone, and the Italians have good enough sense to just close it all down for half of the month.

They call this time of year Ferragosto and it goes all the way back to Emperor Augustus in 18 BC. He gave the first day of August off to farmers following the rigors of the summer growing season. When the Catholic Church gained ascendancy, the holiday needed some religious mojo and got moved to August 15 to celebrate the Assumption of Mary into heaven. During the Fascist years when Benito Mussolini was in control, he threw the lower classes a bone and gave them three days off from August 14th to 16th and made tickets on the trains cheaper so they could go to museums in the cities and to their beloved beaches. People would pack up lunch supplies and head out for fun. As the twentieth century wore on, many workers got in the habit of taking a week or two off in August. Since this made it difficult for anyone else to get anything done with so many other people just taking it easy, the culture as a whole followed suit. These days Italian businesses by law give four weeks off a year, and most companies generally just close down for Ferragosto, and that word is now associated with this collective pause. Travel agents advise against going to Italy in August because many of the shopkeepers and the like are on holiday, the big cities are deserted, and everyone has gone to the beach.

Part of my interest in Ferragosto came from when I was reading about the “Lazarus Lizards” or common European wall lizard (Podarcis muralis), that was introduced to Cincinnati around 1950 by the son of the owner of the Lazarus Department store. This so-called “invasive” species is now prolific. Someone else told me how the climate here is similar to Italy (hot and humid in the summer). One branch of my family is Italian (from the town of Ripafratta, outside Pisa) and I had been reading about the kitchen gardens of Italian immigrants in the United States. Thinking of the climate being similar, I started to wonder what else I could learn from these ancestors, such as how they coped with the heat.
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Soon my mind turned to gelato and how a summer vacation isn’t really a summer vacation without at least one stop at an ice cream stand. One of the most beloved of my Italian ancestors was a guy named Ice Cream Johnny. He lived from 1851 to 1943 and made his life in the hills of Kentucky outside of Frankfort. While so many of our other relatives are forgotten, we are still talking about him. That’s what being an ice cream maker will do for you. Give you immortality, or at least your name a longer memory.

Hand-cranked ice cream freezers were invented in 1846 by Nancy Johnson in New Jersey. Before that time, ice cream was an occasional luxury of the rich. After that, with new ways for transporting and keeping ice frozen, ice cream became something even poor little whippersnappers could get as a summer treat. Ice Cream Johnny had his own dairy cows to make his own ice cream with, before taking it into town on a horse-drawn wagon to sell to his fellow Kentuckians.
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Hand-cranked ice cream is a low-tech process, so the possibility of ice cream can remain in our hot futures as long as ice itself can be kept and the special metal-lined bucket and canister used to make it can be crafted. For that matter, shutting everything down for a two-week holiday requires zero technology. What it does require is a willingness to slow down and set aside production to practice il dolce far niente, or the sweet art of doing nothing. In a world of strict energy limits, periods of time where no work gets done can be great for everyone.

RE/SOURCES:

​Aron, Cindy Sondik. Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Carter, Jamie Betesh. “Back to the Borscht Belt.” <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/back-to-borscht-belt-jewish-catskills-revival>
Groubert, Mark & Hunley, Eric. “Levine’s Bungalow Colonies.”

​I first heard about the bungalow colonies on this episode of America’s Untold Stories. Mark Groubert is a great story teller and he tells about his time as a kid growing up and spending summers in one of the bungalow colonies. He even snuck off to visit a music festival known as Woodstock. I don’t endorse Groubert or Hunley’s political views, but for history and JFK assassination lore, the earlier episodes of their program are worth digging through.

Hayes, Brittany. “The Fourth American Institution.” <https://ushistoryscene.com/article/chautauqua/>
Joelle, Memoree. “Comedy in the Catskills: Remembering the Borscht Belt” < https://newyorkmakers.com/blogs/magazine/comedy-in-the-catskills-remembering-the-borscht-belt>

Minchilli, Sophie. The Sweetness of Doing Nothing: Living Life the Italian Way with Dolce Far Niente. London, UK.: Thorsons, 2020. This little guide to slowing down in the manner of the Italians is the perfect thing to read in a hammock.

Nichols, Ashton. Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement. Chantilly, VA.: The Teaching Company, 2006. This course of 24 lectures on DVD with accompanying guidebook was a great source of pleasure to listen to this past winter. There is no need to watch the lectures as it is just Professor Nichols talking with occasional slides. I listened to them on my headphones while working, playing the DVD in a computer. Courses from the Teaching Company are the kind of thing you might be able to find at your local library!

Provenzo Jr., E Eugene F. & Provenzo, Asterie Baker, ed. “Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education.” <http://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/foundations/chpt/lyceum-movement>
Visit Italy “15th of August: origins and facts about the Italian Tradition of the ‘Ferragosto’” <https://www.visititaly.eu/history-and-traditions/ferragosto-origins-and-facts-about-the-italian-tradition-of-august-15th>

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