Prosaic Ponderings

I recently watched the movie Turtles All the Way Down (2024). It’s the classic teenager with things that differentiate her from her peers trying to lead a normal life story. Unlike the supernatural movies and t.v. shows I usually watch, the nature of her uniqueness is not magical but very, very natural (and relatable): anxiety and OCD. I think it struck a chord with me because 1) I’m not-so-secretly a sucker for YA movies and 2) I deal with anxiety.  Anxiety is not exactly a rare affliction in this day and age, which is why I think this movie will resonate with a wide audience. I was amused by its directness, although of course plenty of other mainstream movies I've seen have made mental illness the subject matter (Girl Interrupted, Silver Linings Playbook, Melancholia…etc). Regardless, it was an interesting choice for a plane watch.  The day after watching this, I was listening to an interview on the podcast Talk Nerdy with the author of "The Age of Magical Overthinking: ...

 In death do we finally outlast time? It's hard to arrive at any concrete place with an abstract concept. We are reminded of Time when we measure the distance from here to there. Something I've been reflecting on since my last visit to a Zendo I started going to recently is just how much less anxiety seeps into my life when I try to cram fewer things into my schedule. Those who know me would agree that I've always had a rather antagonistic relationship with time, either willfully ignoring or being annoyed by its existence. Sometimes I think my seeming inability to keep track of it is a form of protest against a thing that rules so much of our lives.  Ever since the hecticness of grad school, it seems as though my main goal in life has been moving towards spaciousness. You can't create more hours of the day but you can develop a better relationship with time. Less is more, has become my mantra I tell myself anytime I get the itch to overschedule. There will always be sc...

Jacques-Alain Miller, a French academic, said, "For it is a simple matter to love one's neighbor when he is distant, but it is a different matter in proximity." This is an iconic dilemma of the modern man; that we value proximity without closeness.  Between our virtual social networks, news bubbles, internet shopping routines and private modes of transportation most of us living in the modern world have gone to great lengths to re-route our social wiring, making our mindset less collective and more self-focused. Despite trends leaning toward social seclusion, t here are still people out there who seek out their neighbors with the intention of arranging a lifestyle that will be greatly influenced by them. These groups of people are sometimes as close or even closer than one's blood family and are called intentional communities. To many, the term “intentional community” evokes an image of cults that incorporate pedophilia into their religious practices, small groups ...

 In Virginia Woolf's feminist lecture  A Room of One's Own , she articulates what seems to be a common truth for most people, introvert, extrovert and ambivert alike: that people need both the physical and mental space to be undisturbed if they are to generate their best creative work. While critics have pointed out that her treatise on the creative needs of literary women was an elitist argument based on her limited experience which failed to consider women who were not "independently wealthy," as she was, she still broke important ground. Woolf's premise focused on access to a private environment conducive to creating works of fiction, but in this brief musing I will expand upon that idea and ask, what about a seemingly more universal need to access a space which simply affords us peace and quiet? What does that space look like? Usually, when people talk about finding peace and quiet, they bring up a pristine concept of nature in which they can finally connect w...

A short critical essay for an Environmental Justice/Indigenous Studies class: I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be “of the land.” Here in the big city, I find myself thinking a lot about the land I grew up on. I dream of it, long for it, and only truly feel at peace when I return to it. It’s like all of the noise slips away when I am deep in the woods I grew up in, sitting on that sacred hill overlooking the joining of three streams. I think you can, over time, develop connections with other places that you spend a significant amount of time in, but it will never be quite as significant as the land you were raised on. I only moved away from this land four years ago. Since the age of five I lived in an intentional conservation community in the rural outskirts of Clarke County in Athens, Georgia. Named for the white family who maintained the 132 acres as a cotton farm in the century following the Creek nation's removal, Kenney Ridge Community was started in 1993 by a small gr...