Weeknotes: 06/14/25-06/20/25

This Week:

• We celebrated Father’s day with a delicious breakfast and a trip the Muddy River Brewery in Unadilla.
• We spent thursday (Juneteenth!) in Binghamton, visiting Ross Park Zoo, and the Columbia Park Spray Pad.
• We very proudly celebrated our son’s getting bronze academic honors at the Middle School Awards.
• We had our annual visit from the students of Riverside Elementary school.
• I finished reading Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain”, which is ostensibly a kind of deep guide to the Cairngorn mountains in Scotland. But really, it’s a book about the interrelationships of bodies and places and the way in which the lines between ourselves and the world around us are astonishingly thin and interdigitated. In his introduction, Robert MacFarlane compares it with Merleau-Ponty’s “The Phenomenology of Perception”, in the ways that it posits the body and the senses as prefiguring our rationality and our modes of interpretation, and that as we move through a space like a mountain or it’s foothills, it changes not just what we see and feel, but how we think. It’s also a gorgeously, sensually written book, full of heart-stopping passages and sweet, thoughtful reminiscences. I had started this book as we were driving through the Cairngorns on our way to Loch Ness (we actually took a wrong turn!) and that brief exposure expanded as I navigated the rest of this book since we left.
• I made some steps towards a much fuller, richer celebration of Indigenous People’s Day in Oneonta.