The good life

Ecological sustainability, self-sufficiency, community building, everyday wisdom

Netpoetry #11
Perform your bullshit jobs on music and a 30 minutes task becomes just too short for a Mozart sonata
Upbringing
Authoritarian upbringing: If you misbehave, you don't get any food. Modern parenting: If you misbehave, your food won't taste good.
p2p housing experiment
We are a Dutch-Korean family; our daughter was born in 2013. We work as independent writers and we get by. We are not dependent on any specific location for our work, so when we choose where we want to live we ask ourselves “do we fit in?” or “do people like us here because of ...
Fearless
Dear Miru, There lives an intuition in me that wants you to be fearless. I know that fear has a vital function, but it only works when you experience it against the background of fearlessness. When your mind is troubled by unprocessed phobias, the fear that might have saved you will become useless and irrational. ...
What is a ball?
Dear Miru, We were playing with a ball today, but you said it wasn't a ball. Or, as you put it, that the ball was "kapot". You meant that the ball lacked significantly in "ballness"; that its "ballness" was broken. I understand your intuition: The ball we were playing with didn't look like any other ...
On Education
Dear Miru, Today, I want to tell you about Education. Even if we would want them to, our children don't accept the concept of schooling as the transfer of a canon of established facts. They are so much used to Wikipedia and Google that it would be practically impossible to convince them that carrying knowledge ...
Alphabet
Our letter 'A' started his career as Aleph, the first letter of the semitic abjads or writing systems, including Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician, Arabic, Armenian, and Hebrew. The Phoenician letter was derived from an Egyptian glyph depicting the head of an ox. The Greek alfa has its origin in this Phoenician letter, and it's obvious how ...
Coming out
When people ask me "when are you publishing"? It sounds to me like "when are you coming out?" Well, with everything I do I am coming out. I am always coming out.
Hitch
Christopher Hitchens died four years ago today. Of course, he went far too early. We need "contrarian" intellectuals like him more than ever, to put into words what we would call the enlightened position on the Issue, because there really is only one Issue left. Call it the refugee crisis, call it climate change, call ...