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Week Links: 17 Oct 2020

Signal vs. Noise. Poetry: "preter-so(u)lar ⍟." Shutdown Rituals. Required Reading about Laura Southern and being a teacher. It's Week Links!

Week Links: 17 Oct 2020

COVID Noise / Poetry Signal

As with last week, I’ve really been digging into poetry of late. There are a couple of lovely things about poetry:

  1. I can sit down and read a poem in just a minute or three.
  2. I can choose how much I want to pour into it. Do I want to spend a lot of time with this one? Or just move on?

In short, it’s demanding reading, but it’s also reading on demand.

I’ve also been participating in a poetry workshop through InPrint Houston. The workshop is for teachers and costs only $45. Each Saturday morning, I get together with about a dozen other teachers to talk about teaching during COVID, writing during COVID, living during COVID.

COVID.
COVID.
COVID.

We can’t seem to escape it.

This week, our fearless leader, B. Ray Crowell (@braycrowell), asked us to think about the way that relationships have changed recently. How have they been impacted by isolation? By changed routines? By changed workalike?

For me, I thought of the decisions that Natalie and I have made. How do you make things normal-ish for your nine-year-old kid? We decided to strengthen relationships with some friends, friends who were taking COVID as seriously as we were.

As I wrote my poem this week, I thought about that relationship. For a fleeting moment, I escaped from COVID, but found myself in the disturbing blackness of interstellar space where our electromagnetic radiation goes to die: a faint signal lost in the deafening, multibillion-year-old echo of the Big Bang.

There’s so much noise these days. We’ve got to re-calibrate the antennas, so we can tune in to what is good and real, what is right in front of us, what helps and heals.

What are you tuning in to?
What’s your signal?

The Veil nebula, remnant of a dying star and still an astronomical mystery. This emission nebula of ionized gas is very large in size, both visually in our sky and physically in space. 6 full Moons wide and 90 light years in size, 5 to 10 thousand years old and 1500 lights years away. There is no neutron star at the center of this nebula, there is one neutron star at the base of the blowout region but of unknown distance. The intertwined rope-like filaments of oxygen, sulfur and hydrogen gas are all that remains visible of what was once a star in our Milky way galaxy.
Photo by Neven Krcmarek / Unsplash

I wrote these…

preter-so(u)lar ⍟
the exegesis of memes. the application of electromagnetic waves. extraterrestrial. the voyage beyond.
Stephen B. HebertStephen Hebert
Creating a Shutdown Ritual
No matter how much I work today, there will still be more to do tomorrow. So, I created a shutdown ritual to close out today and setup for success tomorrow.
ROOTEDStephen Hebert

RequiredReading

I’m keeping a #RequiredReading Collection on Twitter. Added this week: