future

‘DO THE MATH’

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

THE MARTIAN (2015) is one of my favorite movies. Even though it’s romantic nonsense, even though, even though I barely care about a space program, even though Matt Damon. As I write, it’s playing on Netflix, and at this moment I am playing hooky from cutting and sewing my quilt border in order to focus on the ending. Every time his character Mark Watney follows the science, every time he goes to the numbers, I want to cheer and laugh. That determination to find a solution in listing what he has available to work with, to calculate how long till this or that runs out, and every time he recognizes an opportunity, my heart sings. Mark Watney, Space Pirate. “Everywhere I go, I’m the first.”

They are always bright and silvery, brighter than shows in this photo, even though “the little silver fish” are dead when we find them on the sand. Maybe this is a tiny bit of a missed pelican meal. There were still six pelicans fishing offshore that day.
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“A LIKELY STORY”

/ janpriddyoregon / 10 Comments
Lorraine Ortiz and Terry Fullan read my recent post on the Brevity blog about missing my “Art Saves Lives” bumper sticker and sent me a new one!

A friend asked me the other day about our beach walks. How far, how long, how fast? We basically walk north on the shore and then home, sometimes south too. If we can get over or around enough creeks and headlands, we might manage to get two miles north, four miles round trip. But it’s not that simple; we also walk into the rocky edges of the shoreline, east-west, up and down, over and over. I told her that when tides force us to walk on the highway we manage better than 20-minute miles. That’s not fast, but good enough. When I log distance, I mostly count North-South distance because it’s impossible for me to accurately record what our zigzag path covers.

Life is like that, isn’t it?

It is the sky I love. These cool colors ended a bright sunny day on 11 March. It marked more than a year in mostly-isolation. Most of our friends have been vaccinated, many have been ill.
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IMAGINING THE FUTURE

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

Today on Brevity‘s blog, Lindsey DeLoach Jones illustrates “The Lost Art of Pretending: Imagining a Positive American Future” with her daughters’ play. Only by imagining what is possible, can we work toward a positive goal. Her idea of pretending focuses on our need for a “robust moral imagination.”

“We need a collective imagination like the one Martin Luther King shared at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. King insisted, “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair… Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” At his core, Dr. King was a writer. His dream speech was wishful thinking, yes, but it was backed by action, protest, force of will. One man’s private imagination had untold constructive consequences in the real world. We seem to think we have outgrown this kind of thinking, that hope is for suckers. But to abandon the project of pretending is to abandon any hope for improvement.”

Lindsey DeLoach Jones

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