Me, in possession of new riding gloves: We can prance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind, cause your friends don’t prance and if they don’t prance well they’re no friends of mine. It’s safe to prance

Jeremy, very seriously: It is NOT safe to prance. Not without hats!

It’s a dream still, the dream of being allowed full participation. The dream is alive, I suppose. The dream is still in the process of coming true.

Last night the Saturn V looked very graceful, suspended by a cross fire of searchlights which made it sparkle like a delicate opal and silver necklace against the black sky. Today it is a machine again

He could watch long, solitary waves rise up in the middle of a relative nowhere, deep in the South Atlantic or far off the Alaskan coast, giant walls of water that were built up until they broke over themselves, having come and gone, gorgeous, and having been invisible to everybody but him.

We might discover life in other solar systems someday, but for now there’s nothing but chaos and blackness and desolation for billions of light-years in every direction. Yet here in the middle of all that is this magnificent place, this brilliant blue planet, teeming with life. It really is a paradise.

I can remember with perfect clarity the night we found Jupiter.

“The problem with Challenger wasn’t the machine. The machine was trying to talk to us, but we didn’t listen.”

It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived here how much we start to miss nature. In the future there will be a word for the specific kind of nostalgia we feel for living things.

Human intelligence is not a gift. It’s an occasionally useful plague.

We wouldn’t exist without the obliterating smack of cosmic rock that plowed itself into the ancient Yucatán. Both stories are present in that moment. The rise and the fall are inextricable.

Jeremy flew to Oslo on the solstice and we are all trying to be very brave about it. He sent a picture of a gorgeous 1am twilight. But this morning I got two more Heath Ceramics salad plates in another suburban parking lot transaction, so who is the real adventurer here, hm?

The last couple of rides on Lenny I have been struggling to level up, to lighten my contact, to make my signals imperceptible, so it was pretty nice today to be able to cue the trot invisibly, by flexing my inside hip. The hard part – one of the hard parts – about riding is getting the timing right. (Other hard parts include Paying For It and Not Falling Off.) I know the theory but theory gets you almost nowhere. Lenny is alive and sparkly and opinionated and I need to be able to react to him in near-real time, and it’s only after four years of very patient and consistent training that I can be strong and quiet enough in the saddle for him to hear me. I adore him. What a pony.

I drive back from the summery oak-savannah hills to into a curtain of grey fog. The garden is too windy to sit in most afternoons, but even here the green grass has turned pale gold. Mountain garland and wine cups and farewell-to-spring have taken over from the globe gilia and tidy tips. Their gaudy colors mean it’s almost time for Pride, and then Jeremy will be home, and then maybe Karl the Fog will ease off a little and let us have some summer evenings on the deck, with a little Hendricks and tonic.

We have the contractors back in to rip out the Mamie Eisenhower pink bathroom (I know, what barbarians, but it was leaking) and replace it with Fireclay tile and a shower under the skylight. Opening the walls revealed, as expected, eldritch horrors, most notably that the upper staircase was supported by an angled 2×6 resting on its narrowest edge.

I’m no expert but that ain’t right. While the house undergoes what’s essentially a heart transplant, the main level is a carnival maze of plastic walls with zippered doors. We’re still working from home, camping in the kitchen, on the deck and in the garden.

Luckily it’s spring and the garden is a little ridiculous, unphotographable. The box elders and grapevine are back with a vengeance, velvet green leaves casting dappled shade. The sticky monkey flower, purple and hummingbird sages are in full bloom and the meadow is a riot of poppy, tidy tips, Chinese houses, flax, globe gilia, bird’s eye gilia, the last of the five spot and baby blue eyes, Douglas iris and mountain garland. Fluffy black bees as big as your thumb buzz from poppy to poppy with panniers full of emergency-orange pollen. It’s gaudy, excessive.

Because we’re further up the hill than the Mission, closer to the edge of the fog-tide, it’s often windy back here, and I’m aware of the atmosphere as a restless, oceanic thing, always in motion. The bathroom will be tiled in celadon and silver-blue, with a terracotta sink. Earth, meadow and air. Opening the walls of my own heart reveals, as expected, eldritch horrors, but what a privilege it is to rebuild this lovely old home, make it sound and safe for the next fifty years.

I know what it feels like to fear that there might not be many meaningful strategies left.

We act like our preferences matter, because that is the job late capitalism has given us.

Hyacinth recognizes what very few people wish to admit, that civilization has a price, and a high one.

In such hours the great roaring, indifferent world of London seemed to him a huge organization for mocking at his poverty

Everything you hold onto too tightly will die in your hands.

…you have to stop working from a place that is about making some invisible teacher happy.

…nothing humans do is real, and the trees don’t care, and we are all here together in dirt. This feels to me somehow like the opposite of despair.

So. Space settlements. Have we really thought this through?