One sheet over the whole street

Dear friends,

My two kids and I were out of town for the weekend for some Halloween fun, so I am coming to you a day late this week. But with the time change and the overnight temperature drops of the past few days, the delay gave me a chance to reflect on the first real frost of the season. By the time I got out with my coffee to survey the landscape, the sun was already working on it, but the railing boards on my deck were still furred with crystals that stood up like the nap on an old coat. The grass had gone stiff and white-gray. The air had the particular stillness that the first frost brings, which I think is mostly the absence of crickets. They had been slowing for weeks, each night a few fewer chirps to the minute, and sometime after midnight they stopped.

Frost is a quiet thing. It arrives without a sound, asks nothing of anyone, and belongs to no one. I want to write to you this week about what it showed me, because it turns out the frost probably reads my neighborhood better than I do.

Us and them

Dear friends,

This week's letter is an essay rather than a note from the porch. I wrote it before I started down the path that became this project, and reading it again I can see the project already in it. It is about addiction, and about the broader habit we have of sorting people into "us" and "them." It ends with a small self-reflection tool, so if you would rather skip the argument and go straight to the practice, it is near the bottom.

The sound comes first

Dear friends,

This week the geese came back over the porch. You hear them before you see them. The honking starts somewhere behind the tree line, swells, and then the V slides into view above the alders, heading roughly south in the last of the light. The shape is never as tidy as the one on the poster. One arm runs longer than the other. A bird near the back drifts wide, then tucks in. The point wobbles, and for a few seconds the whole thing looks as if it might come apart. Then it doesn't.

Two parking lots

Dear friends,

Around a decade ago in southern California, three of my undergraduate students spent their mornings and evenings in two grocery store parking lots. Their job was simple and a little sneaky. They tucked a plain flyer under the windshield wiper of every parked car, then waited, out of the way, to see what each driver did with it when they came back.

Welcome to the first Sunday letter from Commoning Consciousness. Most weeks it will be a Porch Note like this one: a short piece written on my back porch, whether an essay, a poem, or a bit of creative nonfiction. Each one starts with something I noticed and felt grateful for, and follows it out to the systems we share. Now and then a longer essay will go out instead. If anything here stirs something for you, hit reply. I read every one.

Porch Notes, no. 1: lessons from a cooperative backyard symphony

As far as we humans know, sound is one of the main ways birds talk to one another: chirps, calls, the whir of wings, birdsong in all its kaleidoscopic variety. Which means that the air those sounds travel through is a kind of shared infrastructure. Within any local landscape, the airwaves are a commons that no one has fenced in.