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.