March
29
2026
Yesterday was a snapshot of the life. First, town meeting where the vote for the library article was unanimous. All the fabulous characters were there, the people with whom I have 30 years of history of committees, projects, disagreements, collaborations, tragedies, celebrations, plots. Then Saturday morning kitchen time at the library which looks like this: Lucky and I and Linda S are animatedly reviewing the grant for our public art project. Kari, Sara are making coffee. Parents and children come in and out getting cookies. Markos & crew are gaming in the meeting room. Melissa is doing a seed art project with littles in the children's room. It's a swarm of activity and multitasking which could be stressful but somehow it is not; it's a peaceable hum, a chorus.
It was a sunny 28 degrees in Belfast and obviously warmer in Covington, La, where Colleen took this picture of Jinx & Peg. Nationwide protesters numbered about 8 million. Nearby Monroe, population 941, reported 42 protesters. Next time we will organize one in Unity. We will warm up to it with candlelight peace vigil with resistance singing.
March
23
2026
A couple of these cute apothecary cabinets will house the seed library. Sometimes I think I am operating under the assumption that things are going to get bad, that there will be another great depression, that energy prices will skyrocket, that we will be affected by environmental disasters, and maybe we'll have another pandemic just for good measure. Hence the seed library and the library of things. Those are not bad assumptions if they help us to be ready for anything. It has become so evident that fossil fuels will always lead to wars. They are environmentally and politically disastrous. Solar and wind and other renewables, in contrast, are evenly distributed and do not have to go through the frigging strait of hormus or be shipped in sinkable vessels or leaky pipes at all. Solar is now the fastest and cheapest way to add energy infrastructure. Like my ancestors, I have no control over wars and invasions and other grand derangement. All I can do is help the village endure.
Empires come and go; the village endures.
Mark Twain (maybe) said that god created war so Americans could learn geography. War is also currently teaching us about macro economics and hyperglobalization and how the parts of an iPhone come from all over and the inputs that make up those parts come from all over and how Hormuz is certainly not the only choke point for essential things moving around. The mad king with dementia and no impulse control cycles through ten social media posts a day, each one reversing what was said before. If the 25th admendment does not apply now, when would it ever? Paul Krugman: "Over the past 40 years or so we’ve built a world in which national economies are so interdependent that there are potential choke points everywhere you look. Yet this global system of interdependence was reasonably workable as long as a key linchpin – the United States – supported it and made sure that goods, services and money kept flowing freely...But now we have the worst of both worlds. The world is now highly dependent upon a complex global supply chain and the erstwhile leader of the free world is erratic."
Some hopeful things: the world is breaking the embargo of Cuba to bring it oil, food, and medicine. Chris M will lead some resistance singing at No Kings in Belfast on Saturday. Elizabeth Warren endorsed Graham Platner.Talarico in Texas looks like the real deal. Raspberry pear crepes.
“The world doesn’t need what women have, it needs what women are.” ~ Edith Stein
March
5
2026
Weather permitted a quick trip to the Curtis in Brunswick to meet Hazel and pick up a load of stuff for our Library of Things, including a sewing machine, a projector, and a metal detector. Hazel has built an amazing LoT at Curtis and is the go to person for all things LoT and resilience and sustainability. She replies to emails almost instantly usually from her phone. I mentioned that we would have things for power outages and she showed us these cool solar lamps. We will have those and a variety of power blocks for sure.
Two other library projects are cranking up. Today I ordered two stackable apothecary cabinets to house a Seed Library. They will go on the wall in the meeting room; a launch is scheduled for this month as a seed saving talk. Another volunteer-initiated project is a Trad Music Jam, twice a month on Saturday mornings. For this we are partnering with Bagaduce Music a non-profit music library in Blue Hill that promotes traditional music played by regular people. Our first jams will be led by the amazing multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Foss, whom I think of as Maine's Dirk Powell.
With the present war in Iran or rather the whole of the middle east, I was remembering Wolf Blitzer's CNN coverage of the first Gulf war in 1990, before the internet. He was there reporting live and there was only TV to tell what was happening and there was just one version. Now with Bibby's war, it seems like there is an official version that tells of the US and Israel bombing Tehran and other sites, but there is a lot of unofficial reporting or reporting from unverified sources that tells how Iran has destroyed US bases in the other gulf states and how it has attacked critical hubs like Dubai, showing those states that they are not safe, and how they are making the US waste its missile supply while doing constant damage with its drones. It is hard to know what is true. The unofficial reporting sources seem to be better at placing the war in the amazingly complicated context of global energy supply chains and relationships with India, China, and the European Union.
