Social Icons
Background image: Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs Background image: Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

careA collection of 4 posts

What the Water Knows
Books & Poems

What the Water Knows

There are people whose ethos reach us through a sentence, from many miles away, long after they claimed it. Since this summer, Wendell Berry has been keeping me company. Others may leave a garden, a footpath, a stubborn patch of green that might so easily have become something else. In today’s world, we may struggle to remember that we inherit more than what has gone wrong. We also inherit what humans before us loved enough to keep. So with Berry in mind, I’m trying to think more about life’s quieter bequests. The places that still make room for us. The words that arrive at just the right time. The care we never witnessed, but whose consequences we are able to enjoy. What would it mean to recognise this inheritance while it is still alive, and leave something living in return?

Same As It Ever Was
Public Life

Same As It Ever Was

I went looking for the history of ÅHS and found a repertory company. Think Ålandic Blackadder, with more organisational charts and a remarkably durable cast. Doctors become politicians. Journalists become board members. Each decade brings a change of wardrobe and a cunning plan to resolve the difficulties created by the previous cunning plan. Hippocrates and Montesquieu are summoned to an argument neither lived long enough to regret attending. The lawyers get repeat business. The rest of us get another premiere. Somewhere beneath it all lies a question we have been reorganising for thirty years: how do you get an institution full of people who know better to work better together?

Remnants
Life & Place

Remnants

A toddler’s bad morning changed our plans for the Boston Marathon. Thirteen years later, an old newspaper brought the afternoon back, along with a question that relief alone cannot answer: what do we owe one another when we get to go on living?

Page 1 of 1