I'm happy to say, I made it through a calendar year of sending out Gnamma every week. Some posts weren't much—some links, some scrap paragraphs—but some I felt great about.
Gnamma has been a terrific opportunity to practice turning a half-baked thought into a (semi-?)cogent line of thought, in short time. I hope to keep practicing such. It has also been an opportunity to refine some realms of ideas. My goal was to have
some redundancy present—it usually takes me twice to learn anything—and I think biggest things I circled around were about landscape and human activity on it. About the
falsity of the
nature-culture dichotomy, about how
expectations of a
steady-state "nature" are fraught, about
finding ways to
play at the
same pace as
natural processes. And I hope to keep pushing here, either in my studies or in a job or just in sending off this damn newsletter, because I believe that to be responsible squatters on planet earth we need to find ways to work with nature, so that 21st century climate change can be accounted for just via "
the hard way".
I really, really enjoyed getting responses. Thank you if you ever responded!! It's nice to know there are people reading on the other end, and a way to keep in touch with people far away. 2019 has been a bit lonely at times (often self-imposed, I admit!) but an earnest reply is a reminder that I'm no island (just a peninsula, maybe). I've long had a bit of a divide between what I talk about in-person versus online (also self-imposed), and this barrier has eroded this year. Gnamma has been a place to bring a bit more of my day-to-day to the friends I keep in touch with via the internet. The majority of my internet feed content, aside from the relative uselessness of instagram, is other newsletters, and I like to think I've been able to contribute to the fun email newsletter landscape of 2019, chugging along together.
I started this newsletter as the result of a New Year's resolution for 2019. I don't intend to keep up a weekly pace here in 2020, but I do want to keep writing regularly; if I really start to lose steam, I may need to hold myself to monthly writing. Every week can be a tough pace in an otherwise busy period of life, but it can also be clarifying, forcing my hand to sit still for a couple hours every weekend.
Thanks for following along.
Periodically,
Lukas