things I took notes on this week
a brief collection of things I took notes on this week (or looked up, or described to my husband over coffee, &c &c). some of these have a whole post of their own brewing.
cultivating an experimental mindset
I got about three minutes into the Mia's Digital Diaries video "I Spent 3 Months Being Curious Instead Of Scrolling (Here's What Changed)" before pausing to get out the notebook and start jotting things down from the introductory section. She was in turn inspired by this video by Big Think Media about fixing your mindset.
The first 15 minutes of the video lays out mindsets characterized by high vs. low ambition and high vs. low curiosity and details how to cultivate a high-curiosity, high-ambition mindset where you design & implement time-limited "life experiments."
Actionable steps:
- Create a home screen photo widget mood board.
- Come up with a one (1) week experiment to start immediately. I decided on doing a 15ish minute yoga flow while listening to lauds every morning right after brushing my teeth/washing my face, in the guest bedroom before I go downstairs to start the day. Day one ✅ complete
how to trim a blueblossom
Our ceanothus thyrsiflorus, aka blueblossom or California lilac, is going into its second growing season and looking a little leggy. Some quick research showed it's important to tip prune ceanothus to make them grow bushier, bloom more, and live longer.
what about the church?
I've been participating in my parish's Alpha program as a table leader this year.1 This week's talk was "What about the Church?" Why not do spirituality on your own? Why organized religion? I took a couple pages of casual notes but my table mainly talked about how much we wish our church had formal small groups like the evangelicals do, and laughed our asses off building an inside joke about what ours would be like.
how to stop checking your phone all day?
The big insight I took away from Elliot's post "How to stop checking your phone all day" was paying more attention to pick-ups than screentime. Phone and "social" media2 addiction is an addiction to checking, not finding.
cool birds
I spotted two large birds soaring & swooping together during my lunch stroll, and snapped a picture in hopes of getting enough detail that I could identify them later on. Between the Merlin Bird ID app,3 judicious googling, and some zoom & enhance, the 4-5 bold white and black bands on their tails gave them away as being red-shouldered hawks. Merlin says they're "unlikely" in this area at this time of year but I saw what I saw.
what comes after removal?
I don't have the link now but a youtube short about rewilding talked about how you can't just pull out invasives and stop there; the soil will be chock full of their seeds, and disturbing all that soil & leaving it empty can just create space for them to grow back (or for their later-germinating evil friends to flourish even more.) You have to come up with a plan for what can go in their place to fill that ecological niche in a healthy way.
(Naturally, this put me in mind of the parable of the unclean spirit who returns to a swept out soul with passel of friends, leaving the exorcised person worse off than before.)
notes app miscellany
From my running notes app checklist of stuff I want to remember, expand on, look up, buy, &c. to be acted on or "downloaded" into the relevant places when I get the chance:
- herbert mccabe prayer essay
- @ ulta pick up rosewater, ouidad air drying cream or mousse, cerave pm
- filling my lamp4
- pope peace vigil stream, sat morning
- [redacted husband birthday gift idea]
- tattoo aftercare: when to stop 2x/day washing, restart using sunscreen
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It's pretty cheesy, but St. Frances de Sales and the Holy Spirit convinced me that if I want to build spiritual friendships and fellowship I have to... start participating in the stuff my actually-existing faith community does. And Alpha is our big thing. The topics aren't groundbreaking, to say the least. The big change has been that I finally know people at my large parish after a decade of semi-anonymity.↩
that shit is not social anymore and we all know it. we socialized on forums, myspace, early facebook/insta/snapchat. we are not socializing on the highly algorithmic or visual platforms and barely socializing on any of the rest. we're pulling the lever on a slot machine like zombies.↩
this app is a treasure and should come default with every smart phone↩
this was a reminder/motivator that getting back in the habit of digging into the sunday readings with my mass journal ahead of time is like being one of the wise young women who filled their lamps with oil to prepare for the arrival of the bridegroom in the parable of the ten virgins.↩