The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is, “Look under foot.” You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the centre of the world. Stand in your own dooryard and you have eight thousand miles of solid ground beneath you, and all the sidereal splendors overhead.

—John Burroughs, (1908)

Ghosts of utopia

“He was a searcher for universal salvation. In him the feeling of responsibility of all for all reaches the ultimate and acutest expression… there was no man on earth who felt such sorrow at the death of people and such thirst to return them to life.” —Nikolai Berdyaev

Culture I/O is now Common Task.

Blame it on a 19th century Russian called Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov. ➡️

 

My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.

—Ursula K. Le Guin