Writing Updates, Gaza, Getting Post-Tragic, An Ocean in a Drop
A Mindful Miscellany, #33
Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, a newsletter dedicated to Story-telling and Sense-making in the Turbulent Twenties.
Fall alongside the Erie Canal
I love fall. It’s my favorite time of year. In this region of the world, it brings crisp air, cloudy days, and falling leaves. A reminder of the cyclic component to life.
Writing Updates
The Infernal Tower was cleared by the Department of Defense Prepublication and Security Review this week. Now, off to find a home in a publishing house. I’ve never talked about what it’s about here before. This is the verbiage I used in my query letter to describe the premise:
When a competition turns deadly, a disgraced Navy SEAL must survive at all costs to save his relationship with his daughter.
Roz Mehran is lost—estranged from his family and wandering the streets of San Francisco with the retired military dog, Diogenes. After a disastrous custody hearing threatens to rip his daughter away forever, he agrees to take part in a mysterious selection contest for leadership of a visionary foundation—a recreation of the journey of Dante Alighieri in The Inferno inside an aging art deco skyscraper. But a rival defense company seeking the foundation’s research takes control of the building, turning the contest from a test of character to a life-or-death struggle. Roz and his allies must evade devious traps, predatory animals, and deadly technology to escape and defeat an old foe. In the Infernal Tower, the only way out is through.Prewriting/Ideating on The Heavenly Tunnel continues. I have forty scenes blocked out, most of the characters identified. Going to do a NANOWRIMO sprint in November and see what that gives me for a first draft.
Short story in progress on the Metacrisis.
Essay on Spirituality in draft.
Reading on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Last week I gave our Midshipmen a primer on the conflict and started out with this:
Pro-Palestinian Perspective: Caitlin Johnstone
Pro-Israeli Perspective: The Free Press
Military Analysis: Futura Doctrina by Mick Ryan
Getting Post-Tragic
In this video, Jonathan Rowson distills his verbosity1 into a thirty minute video about the Metacrisis, and gestures toward a path forward. In the past, I’ve highlighted how Daniel Schmachtenberger talks about the attractor basins of an ordered dystopia and chaotic disorder, and the need to reach for the third attractor of complex global cooperation in the middle, Similarly, one of the topics Rowson discusses here is the post-tragic mindset.2 Pre-tragic is something like “We’re ok, it’s going to be fine. We can innovate our way out of problems with technology and creativity.” Tragic is “We are screwed — we’re collapsing already and we can’t do anything about it.” Post-tragic is “Yeah, things are bad. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Get in where you fit in.”
The point is, we’re here. This is us. As my grandmother would say, we need all hands on deck, thinking about the world as it is today, imagining ways we can improve, and acting at local/decentralized levels to bring it about. Without action, it’s just hot air and intellectual masturbation.
An Ocean in One Drop
This piece from Noema on the microbiome in the oceans and synthetic biology. Lots of interesting connections here — History, poetry, geopolitics, loss of biodiversity, and the deep interconnectivity of life.
Have a great week everyone!
Quite dense today-too much going on in the world right now. In 1960 there was a similar sentiment-"stop the world, I want to get off". Thank you for making sense.