Conversations and Connections

“So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.” — Roald Dahl, Matilda

“Ultimately, the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or friendship, is conversation.” — Oscar Wilde

“Good conversation can leave you more exhilarated than alcohol; more refreshed than the theater or a concert. It can bring you entertainment and pleasure; it can help you get ahead, solve problems, spark the imagination of others. It can increase your knowledge and education. It can erase misunderstandings, and bring you closer to those you love.” — Dorothy Sarnoff

There are days I think about not writing these letters anymore. I love writing them, but I wonder if I have any right to throw my opinion around without solicitation. Who am I to think I have anything worth saying anyway? 

I decided to continue for a few reasons. First, because I think it would kill me a little not to. Writing has always been a way for me to make sense of the mess in my mind. 

And second because I feel that some of the best things in my life come to me in the form of books with ideas that jump like currents into my body; so consuming and invigorating that they rewire the way I interact with my inner and outer worlds. They live in me, continuing to shape and mold and to do work that may only end when my last synapse goes dim. 

I like sharing those books with you to gift you some of the vitality they give me, and to add onto the conversation I start with those authors and artists. 

When I looked at it that way, as a way to carry on a conversation, passing along the spark, it made all the sense in the world to continue. 

I might not be able to fully articulate what I’ve been pondering, but I hope you will look at my ideas with an open and understanding heart. I say heart because in Punjabi, the word for mind and heart are the same. And I like that. 

This month I read Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture and Colin Ellard’s Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life. On the surface these books and authors have little in common, but they both made clear to me how we build our world and how our world builds us. They both have a lot to say about our ancestral history and how our culture, biology, and physiology intermingle to create our present and future. 

Berry laments the loss of the America where the economy built on small family farms was annihilated by factory farming, where a handful of corporations control agriculture through machinery, mass production, and food marketing. How that has fundamentally changed food, work, family, the environment, our health and our culture. 

Think about the word ‘husband’. It’s built up of the Norse roots, hus meaning house, and bondi meaning occupier or tiller of soil. 

That’s why they call it animal husbandry, it is the care, cultivation, management, and conservation of animals and resources entrusted to one's care.

The nurture and care for the earth and its creatures is something entrusted to us even in our wedding vows, the oldest and longest lived contract humans have with each other. We house (hus) each other in the shelter of our care. It is our oldest responsibility. 

Berry was a college professor who gave up his position to become a farmer in Kentucky where he uses horses to plow land. 

Why horses?

Because they don’t compact the earth, like a tractor, to the point where seeds struggle to sprout, but instead gently loosen the soil and breathe air into it.

Because their manure adds the lively microbes that keep it healthy and alive. 

 Because we have a responsibility to the earth and the life on it to live within our means in a connected balance. Not simply to plunder and ravage. 

Because he knows that animals and machines are not interchangeable.

Though this book was written in the 70s, it has an alarming resonance with what is happening today as we hurdle towards a world where machines are poised to be poets and people are swept aside as easily as scrap metal and spare parts. 

Berry’s is a connective mind, a collaborative mind, a problem solver’s mind, a philosopher’s mind, a farmer’s mind. He sees the connections and relationships between things. In a world keen on dissecting and separating. He tends to marry concepts together in such a poetic way it achieves a wholeness that fills me up. 

I’m tired of fragmentation and life without context. Especially in my work.

Farming isn’t just something you do, it’s your entire way of life. And that’s how most of humanity lived for thousands of years. People worked at home, both men and women. That’s not really a new concept. What is a new concept is the idea of “work life balance”. We like to think there is a split between work and life. We create work spaces and cultures removed from personal lives. But personal lives always seep into work and work always seeps into personal lives. We are sold the idea that we work hard and take what we can for ourselves while we can so we can retire and not work anymore. 

We make work a drudgery to be escaped. 

This drudgery includes growing and cooking our own food, so we are told. And now with AI we don’t even have to write our own letters or paint our own paintings. 

So what do we do?

What do we do with this one wild and precious life, as Mary Oliver once asked?

We are alive because we have energy, or “the ability to do work” as in “exert force on another object” as a physicist would tell you. Life/energy and work are literally the same thing. You can’t really divorce yourself from what you do all day. It shapes you.

Not just the work, but the physical environment. 

“Buildings have been man’s companions since primeval times…Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art.” 

- Walter Benjamin “The Role of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Colin Ellard is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. He specializes in the study of how places, architecture, technology, and nature impact our minds, bodies, and culture. 

His book was a thrilling look into the impact homes, cities, and natural spaces have on our minds and bodies. 

Boring and unstimulating places can actually cause people to engage in risk taking and negative behaviors. They create undue stress on the mind and body. Having open, orderly, and pleasing/stimulating designs can create trust and openness. Maybe even creativity. That is the role of beauty in our lives. It’s inspiring. It’s life affirming. 

I’ve talked about this theme before; having been a housesitter for so long, I know that different houses bring out different dimensions of my personality. Some make me feel safe and cozy and willing to engage with new and challenging things. 

Others make me feel intimidated or on edge, risk averse and low energy.

It’s no different for work environments like offices. 

Ellard paints the example of how a German philosopher, Heidegger, wrote some of his more profound works in a little hut in the woods. Much of the imagery of his writings is shaped by his surroundings. Ellard proclaims “his work was enmeshed in the environment of the place where he wrote… in a way, Heidegger’s hut was the philosopher.” 

Heidegger’s son, when visiting the hut where his father wrote, said “he is still alive here as far as I’m concerned.”

The city is not our ancestral home. Our genes can feel it. For many, the city is not even where we live. We commute long distances to get to work, clock in, clock out, and then commute back home. And many cities and living spaces are not designed to be beautiful or compatible with our physiology, but some people, like Ellard, are trying to change that. They are studying how to construct cities and works spaces to create healthier and more human environments. 

Both Berry and Ellard warn against the mismanagement of emerging technologies. Many billionaires and investors are now flocking to “responsive housing technology” or smart houses. These houses or buildings would use biometric data and heat and cool your home, adjust lighting, and more. 

Like most people trying to take your money and your autonomy, the sell will be the conveniences. Isn’t it great that you don’t have to deal with the banality of adjusting your own heat or lights? But what you will give up is the immense amounts of data these companies will collect from you and sell. 

Just like Meta and Google steal data and content from artists and use it to train their AI. 

I hate what these companies are doing to artists and creators. It’s not fair that they make money off of work they didn’t do. I hate that these people hide behind their technology and act as if they are slaves to progress. The AI is not, in fact, the one doing the stealing and interpreting, it is the men and women behind its programming. 

And if now corporations and machines would like personhood, shouldn’t they be held accountable for their actions, just like a person would?

 I honestly feel a little bad for the types of people that are drawn to AI art. Art really is about the creation process. The end result is a fun by-product, but it’s hardly the point. Not to an artist. It’s about problem solving and expression. It’s about communion with the subject of your attention and focus and the time it was constructed. 

If AI steals my style, I’ll come up with a new one. Because that’s what art is about - forging on and experimenting. It’s about play. 

It’s about the doing. Not about escaping it. 

Oddly enough, Jordan Peterson, not someone I thought I would have a lot in common with, has a little rant about why the humanities are important, especially now. I’ll link it here so you can take a listen. It really sums up what I feel is the point of art in our society. Artists solve problems. They contend with the unknown and make sense of it.  

You want a bridge built, you need an architect who can not only draw, but anticipate potential risks and future issues. And you’ll need them to make it beautiful, because you want people to actually enjoy using it and feel safe being on it. An imaginative mind as well as a constructive one. And most likely one that takes into account the particular environment and community. The economic value of minds like this is incalculable. And yet we think art is just a frivolous pursuit or just pretty pictures. 

The other thing most people tell me is that you can’t make money as an artist. 

So why is it that these companies are stealing all this art? Why are they training their AIs to be artists?

It’s because there’s so much money in it! 

Most artists are just the types that don’t value money much, but there are so many people who make a good living as artists. It’s not easy and it’s not a clear cut path. It’s one you forge yourself, a path less taken. But if you do it right, it’s very lucrative. You just can’t be shit at it. Most other jobs you can get away with being kinda shitty. Not at art. 

You have to be able to tell a story, make people laugh, or make them cry, or inspire them. And you have to be able to do it again and again. You either can or you can’t. That’s why art is hard. Not because it’s not lucrative. 

So why am I going on and on about this? Well, I think, for the first time in my life, I’ve found out how to mesh my work and life. I’ve found a way to work partly from home, use my art and writing skills, and combine it with sustainable farming and community. 

I’m starting a new job this week! It’s with the Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Market Association as a Graphic Design and Marketing Manager. It’s full time, year round, with full benefits. 

I’ll be doing artwork and copywriting, marketing, fundraising, and doing interviews in the field all in the hopes of expanding food access for those in need and increasing education and support for those growing delicious, nutritious whole foods locally. It’s all about creating a more delicious sustainable place to live. Because where we live is who we are in so many ways.

I will continue to work as manager for the Redmond Saturday Market as well because it has been such an uplifting experience for me and I love the friends I’ve made there. 

I’m very excited and nervous about this new chapter of life. Thank you to all of you who have supported me through the years. It truly does take a village.

I’d like to finish by saying that both Berry and Ellard, despite their weariness about technology, also acknowledge and honor the benefits of these technologies. 

Humans are not really human without our tools. 

Our tools are important and even sacred.

I treat my paint brushes like magic wands. My phone lives in my pocket. And I spend a lot of time in my car. It’s been through a lot with me. Having penicillin is nice, and my washing machine saves me a lot of time. I’ll even admit that AI has some really amazing uses, especially in the medical field. But what we can’t afford to do is let machines and tools and greed disrupt the balance between progress and responsibility.

Simply moving forward blindly is not progress, that’s a stampede.  

“It can only make us imperialist invaders of our own country” (Berry, 172)