A pretty normal day. Tayde, my Spanish teacher, had a scare with COVID this morning, but she was able to get test results back later today and is fine.
I finished the book Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta. It was a pretty interesting primer to Australian Aboriginal culture and philosophy. The book echoed a lot of work from complexity science (the study of systems which have greater properties than the sum of their parts) but packaged in the language of spirituality. This is a theme that interests me as it relates to climate change. The way we (as Americans? Westerners? Subjects of capital? I’m not sure who ‘we’ is precisely, but it includes both you and me) think about ourselves in relation to the world (and perhaps more importantly, how we have learned to feel without thinking) is fundamentally flawed and has been driving us toward a cliff for decades, if not centuries. It is my firm belief that building a sustainable future will require more than just a few tweaks to our consumption choices. Our world of atomized individuals, personal responsibility, freedom of consumption, and endless economic growth is built on a flawed understanding of the the world which views people as separate wholes, rather than inextricable parts of a global system. The economic restructuring necessary to keep this planet livable will not occur unless it is also accompanied by a spiritual awakening, a fundamental reassessment of our place in the world and our responsibilities to it. I don’t have all the answers yet, and neither does this book, but I think the author gestures in the right direction, or at least toward the right problems. Yunkaporta puts forward a philosophy where land and time are cyclical and inseparable. He roots the search for sustainable ways of being in the traditions of the people who have lived with the land for millennia, and contrasts this view with the drive toward expansion and domination which characterizes white-Australian culture and the Anglosphere at large. Plus, the book is often very funny. 7/10
FL Studio, the software I previously used to make music, has just released a version which runs on Apple, which is great because I upgraded my laptop about a month ago and haven’t been able to make music since, but it’s pretty much unusable without a mouse, so I’m right back where I began. I shouldn’t really be making music at all, because I previously gave myself tinnitus doing so, but everything in moderation.
AdamFendos.blog 