Greetings from the Porch,

We've had a very wet spell and that's made the ground too muddy to work, but a sunnier stretch is forecast for this week, so I'm hoping to get the first seeds in our garden soon.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about abundance, Chromebooks, and satellites.

• Reid Makowsky ponders the moral benefits of gardening: "For humility, there is nothing like gardening."

• Elizabeth Stice proposes developing a religious exemption framework for those who have moral concerns about AI: "Even those who do not personally want a religious exemption should welcome the existence of such a carveout. It reinforces the truth that technology adoption does not have to be automatic."

• Hadden Turner reviews The Land Trap and reckons with the challenges that high land costs pose to agrarians: "Land is only going to become more expensive and thus ever more unaffordable and inaccessible for the agrarians of the future."

• Joe Duke suggests that consuming the news does more harm than good: "The 1890s gave rise to the journalistic trope, if it bleeds, it leads. And news has never been the same since."

• Jon Schaff reflects on what the Iranian film It Was Just an Accident has to say about civility: "Civility is a virtue—one that, to paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous description of a classic book, is widely praised and rarely practiced. If it is a virtue, then, as Aristotle would insist, it has both an excess and a defect."

• Michial Farmer listens to (and tries to define) alternative rock this week.

I've been greatly enjoying Seth Wieck's new book of poems, Call Out Coyote. It's a book I expect to return to many times over the years. Here is a poem suitable for this Triduum:

"Pontius Pilate--Fifth Prefect of Judea Under Tiberius--Judges Jesus"

How many would-be kings have I crucified?
I don't think I could count them on these hands.
One claimed he bricked a tower so high the sky'd
knelt to bless him. The nails unctioned his feet and hands.
He bit his tongue, babbling curses on his own name.
One more screeched, 'I've the golden head of an eagle,
bronze legs, fists of iron!' Rome proved those same
iron fists could bleed and crown nailheads regal.
Tiberius--son of a god's son--compels
the world to map his godlike form onto star charts;
we navigate by his visage the ocean swells.
Did you know his spear reaches here to drain hearts?
Come, render to Caesar lest Caesar rend you.
Will your undoing, ten empires' undoings undo?"

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro