First off: For those Imaginary Friends interested in the Substack Visual Strategy Workshop, here is a quick signup form. We’ll meet on Zoom and discuss the way our Substacks look. Let’s set up a time to meet and go from there.
Secondly: The video above (or below) is the narrated version of his letter. Substack is letting me test video mode, and one thing led to another.
Dear Titus,
This week there where shooting stars here and so I thought of you. The setting was this: midnight bathing in the pool, floating in the water on the side of the old castle walls. My ears underwater giving me that flow state where you can't hear anything else but your own inner systems. And above me, three bats flying around, plunging down towards me to sip water from the pool. Then, as we sat on the deck chairs, we saw shooting stars and talked about the life this very old place has had.
It's been almost 800 hundred years since these walls have been put up, silently letting history go by since. Fights have happened, fires, plagues, then farming, cows and hay. And children, pools and cocktail parties. Now, the place is silent, with only us as witnesses. I wonder if these walls keep, embedded in them, the tragedies and joys that have past by them. I hear one farmer killed himself on the steps here once, not too long ago. The idea of haunted houses doesn't seem so strange at times.
We spoke the other day about craftsmanship and the idea that all well made craft has a spirit in it, provided through the love and care with which it has been made. The life and philosophy of the craftsman gets transmitted into the work and is then passed on to us by living with it. A door, a table, a wall, a roof, all are vessels of the love somebody poured into them. And then, as they together make up a house, a building, they all bear witness to the lives of people passing by them, living their short lives in them. Do they absorb some of that life too? Do they get imbued with the tragedies and joys than they sit through?
There are no craftsmen anymore you told me. The workers, plumbers, builders, all work for money and time. They hurry to the finish line and hop on to the next job. The materials they use are inert, production line rubbish, the cheapest commercially viable option. They install it with the least effort required to get the job done and that's it.
No. I won't have that. I know there still exist ways to craft well crafted homes.
The making of a roof is not an easy task. What makes it or breaks it, the builder said, is the natural ventilation. The way the heated air moves - or doesn't - once it reaches the highest part of your house, is crucial to the life expectancy of the assembly (efficiency, efficiency...).
And it's not as obvious a thing as one might think, they say. It seems that every roof is different in the way it will respond to the air movement. A good roof maker or carpenter will know - or better still, feel - the best way to build any individual roof.
Will he feel the wind coming in from uphill? Will he know that once the evening sets in the summer, the pond nearby will change the course of the draft? Does that air vent or window or pitch need to be 10 cm more that way? Does the house speak to him these things?
I don't know. But I trust that if a craftsman like that puts his hands on the roof above my head, I can be confident it will be a good roof that shelters me, and that the love and care he poured in while building it will pour back in me every day I spend there.
The stars above that evening. I have always been a warm weather, starry nights person. Knowing that there is a cosmic magic happening reliably every year at the same time in the summer sky is comforting to me. I had always thought of stars as this incredible scale, the importance of which was mainly to remind us how tiny we are in return. The enormity of stars and their static forever-gaze. For they are looking back at us I feel. Silent and loving, above the old castle roof.
Yet lately something has been different. Some of the stars would sometimes become shuttles to Berlin or satellites for Netflix binge. That, my friend, sorta ruined it for me.
But coming back to stargazing. Isn't it - or shouldn't it be? - the right of every human being to be able to sit on a warm summer evening and stargaze and remember they are infinitely tiny parts of this unbelievable majesty? And that some of the stars are airplanes? I wonder how many kids today have that. Living in the city, there is as little place for stargazing anymore as there is for bathing in the creek or eating blueberries from the bush.
We don't know how to be with nature anymore, slow down and linger. You can't stargaze in a rush. You have to make your eyes lose focus and be with the whole sky at the same time, holding it all in your eye. Then, when a star does get the courage to shoot, you only ever see it with the corner of your eye. But if you tried to focus on just one spot in the sky, you'd lose the moment for sure.
This moment of letting go of focus and lingering in the possibility of magic, you can't have that in a Twitter scroll.
Love,
Jo
P.S. In this month of evening respites from heat, please make space of some stargazing. I'll be doing the same. I'll write to you again mid-month my friend.
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Jo's Epistolary is tapping into a strange immaterial quality of homes. Trying to put a finger on the undefinable. It's a niche alright. But it surely is interesting and sometimes even profound.
So, if it's your type of thing, welcome.
Earworms much?
This classic. Obviously.
The Carbon Almanac
The Almanac is out! We've been working like bees for months, hundreds of volunteers from all over the place, under the genius wand of Seth Godin, setting up what Inc.com has branded as "The Whole Earth Catalogue of the 21st century". Totally badass. The book is super cheap and all profit goes back into more Carbon Almanac. All the rest is free, from podcasts and The Daily Difference newsletter to Kids Almanac and an extremely useful "Educator's guide".
"The Whole Earth Catalog for a new generation."
-Scott Omelianuk, Editor in Chief, Inc. Magazine
Bonus: I've been part of the team that built this graph, a visual map of the interconnectedness of our possible climate actions. It speaks to 1. The importance of systemic change instead of greener light bulbs and 2. the way everything is related.
Jane Goodall, who is a partner in the project (!!! I was in a freakin' zoom call with her last week!) is all into interconnectedness and it's all very very exciting.
Other Letters from Jo you might enjoy:
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