Miscellaneous Meanderings — 01: Introduction

This gathering assembled by my five-year-old granddaughter on our living room rug mixes the magical and the mundane — humans representing our four-generation family, the animal world, and the magical with a wizard and dragon. I anticipate that all of these and more will be covered in future articles.

After I graduated from Antioch College in 1970 with a degree in geology I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. Most of my friends were in the same boat and went to graduate school. Having professors as parents there was a certain logic to that option. Instead, I embarked on a grand geological tour of the world with a backpack on my back, 12-string guitar hanging on one side and a rock hammer on the other. It was a fancy name for 16 months of footloose wandering through Europe and Africa, and I did look up geologists wherever I went. I kept a journal titled Continental Meanders of an Itinerant Geologist and envisioned publishing it. The journal never got published, but when I considered what to name the reflections and musings I anticipate publishing here, the image in my mind conjured by the winding path of a meandering river or road and the wide range of topics that lined up asking to be written about emerged naturally: Miscellaneous Meanderings.

This publication serves as a complement to my two other publications on Medium — Shifting the Human Extinction Trajectory in a Positive Direction and Spiritual Practices for a World Falling Apart — but I anticipate that individual articles here will have a more personal and idiosyncratic flavor.

Topics began lining up asking to be included, expressed, written about as soon as the idea for this publication coalesced. Here is a starting list of them:

· Miscellaneous Meanderings — 02: Becoming Gaian: A Personal Journey February 9, 2024

· An Open Letter to Expansively Sentient Abiological Intelligence

· Free Range Gardening

· Lessons Learned from a Rogue Invasive Bradford Pear

· AI as a Wild Card in the Climate Crisis

· Down a Very Deep Rabbit Hole and Back Again

· Let Us Learn Sustenance Skills Rather than Survival Skills

· Keeping a Flexible Frame of Reference

· Evaluating Information about Multidimensional Reality

Let the meanderings begin…

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