Daylight savings time ends next week, meaning dark late afternoons and brighter early mornings and I am not a fan. Just leave us here so the darkness doesn’t descend so fast. I don’t mind getting up in darkness, in fact I kind of like it. I can watch the light come up.

We have had an unprecedented stretch of absolutely perfect days, glittering days, nearly a month of them with little rain in sight. We need it. Or so they say but I’m ok with nice weather. The sun is low in the sky and the shadows in the afternoon are long and you can watch them move with the sun if you are patient. That’s a decent meditation practice, watching shadows move, especially when they are so sharp and clearly defined in the cloudless dry air.

It’s a calamitous time in the big world and I probably pay too much attention to it but things are being messed with that are important to all of us, like basic rights and the rule of law. Human things, not worldly things. But this is our world, at least to us, shadows and all.

Because of the luminous weather I have spent quite a bit of time just watching small things around me. Squirrels are everywhere, gathering nuts I guess. At night I surprise small rabbits (our city is full of them) while walking and they freeze up when they see my movement. Many predators, like cats, only see movement well, so freezing up is a legitimate self defense tactic.

I’ve adopted that tactic in the rare instances where I might be walking at night and prefer to not be noticed. Just stand still in the darkness and maybe you disappear, is the theory. Fortunately I have had little need to test it.

Big moon the last few nights. It changes the night walking for the better despite the myth that it brings out the crazies. Or maybe I am a crazy, walking around at night. But the icy sidewalk time is inevitably coming and I need to get my walking in so…I recommend it if you feel safe where you can walk, getting out at night. Take a friend and go walk somewhere for a drink and a conversation.

Despite the name of this newsletter being Rich Without Money, I have rarely mentioned money here. There are apparently rivers of it flowing around but not in the circles I move in, not in the quantities we read about in politics and finance, those billions and billions. I have a theory about that.

When riches went from millions to billions, something happened to the power value of money, its ability to give the holder power over others. Somehow, as those measurements rise, it loses its value. You can only buy so many super yachts and houses and then what? You run out of stuff to fill whatever void all the stuff is supposed to fill.

Surprisingly few ultra wealthy people and businesses are giving away their money, which mystifies me. It’s so obviously the solution to money being a source of satisfaction and a better quality of life. Just keep a chunk of it and give the rest away (there’s a link at the end of this to buy me a coffee if you like. Maybe it will make you feel good for a minute). I’ll actually buy a cup of coffee and enjoy it.

There’s a Yemeni coffee place a few blocks away from here and their coffee is really good. The place is really nice and does very well. It seems odd that coffee places run by Yemenis are popping up around Rochester, NY while we are in a conflict near there but I’m ok with it. The coffee is good and they appear to be very good businesspeople.

Long shadows, long thought streams, lots of light and lots of darkness and it costs nothing at all except time. Riches.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

“Beyond love and sadness and worldly identities there is something magnificent, something that exists at the coordinates of absolute stillness.”

Sunita Puri

Sometimes, when I’m thinking about these sketches, a theme will show up in an unexpected place. I get dharma (teachings) quotes in my morning email and the one above appeared today. I was struck by the word stillness because it’s something I’ve been seeking more lately.

Then, while eating a late lunch, I watched a documentary on Edward Hopper who literally painted stillness. And loneliness. His cityscapes are quiet and rarely convey the hectic pace of these places. The doc, a PBS American Experience film, takes care to find landscapes and views that match paintings in both composition and color. It’s beautifully done.

And very still. We’re in a long stretch of perfect October days, brilliant blue and sunny with a fast chill descending as the sun goes down. So I’ve been able to meditate in my neighboring Zen garden later in the year than usual. It’s an island of quiet surrounded by a city with all the noise you’d expect- lawn mowers, loud cars, leaf blowers, not my favorite.

So, not exactly a still place but the point of meditation practice, as far as I can tell, is to find an inner stillness and just sit with it. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m finding the former more often these days. The main lesson I’ve gotten from it is to not think about any of that. Which of course does not happen.

One of the things that I don’t think about much is love but I feel it all around me and that is a good thing in a world that often feels on the brink of something not good. But when I see two people together or find myself with a friend, I feel that bond that so many poets and artists have fed on, a kind of deep source, a still place.

Looking at the Hopper paintings appearing on the tv, they convey their message of stillness across time and I think the artist would be satisfied with what he accomplished even these many years after his death in the sixties. I’ve seen many of the pieces in museums and like all great paintings they stop you in your tracks, both mentally and physically. They are timeless.

It’s an odd thing how an artwork in the flesh has a different aura than a print in a book or an image in a documentary. There is a power in those things. The first time I saw a Van Gogh I was struck by how visceral it was. As though you could plunge into it. I get the same thing from a Pollock or a Rothko. Immersion.

After feeling that need for stillness I thought I might find a park and try to get a little forest bathing in, a Japanese practice that has almost become a cliche in our society, where there are less places to practice that immersion. Or are there less? I’m not sure.

I find it in writing these little essays, in part because I have no rules, no outside guidance, and agenda for writing them, other than liking it. There’s a stillness in that practice too. Even in a noisy city it’s out there, often where you least expect it.

Last year I was housesitting my friend’s downtown loft in late summer. There’s a bar and restaurant downstairs and I got a martini and sat outside on a lovely warm evening. The view was of some trees, and a highway exit ramp and behind it you could see the reflections of sun on the river that runs through our city.

Then a large African American man came walking by holding the tiny hand of a little girl who could barely reach his hand and they stood between me and the sun silhouetted by the light. It hardly seemed real but that moment is frozen in time for me.

Stillness.

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***

As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

As a professional writer, I’ve done just about everything with one exception, technical writing like manuals and disclaimers, though I was marketing director for a company whose software helped technical writers manage large volumes of documentation. But these days my writing is basically newsletters and a novel or two and I’m ok with that.

Would I love a book deal for those novels? I would but that world is basically an unpaid full time job before you even get in front of a legitimate publisher. Frankly, I may be too lazy to chase that dream. But who knows, I might get a burst of energy and go for it.

No one tells me what to write these days, other than my own outrage at times and its opposite, my quiet meditations on the life around me. Riding the bus earlier today there were four older women, who obviously knew each other, and all with big rolling baskets of stuff. They spent the whole time I was on the bus talking about food in a conversation I suspect has gone on for ages.

So by the time I got off the bus and starting walking home through a wooded park behind our science museum, finding a quiet bench in the sun was heaven. Fall is full on here and it is a chilly, brilliant blue day with a northern breeze but in a sheltered spot sitting with the sun on your face is one of those daily miracles I search out these days.

It’s possible in these times to lose track of those moments, to not stop for a minute and just do nothing except enjoy wherever we are. It’s such an obvious and free thing that anyone can have, and that’s not something to be taken for granted during these hard times.

Moments that soften those hard parts. They are not earthshaking breakthroughs or opportunities, they are just what most of life is made of.

Artificial intelligence has made writing suspect these days and it gets better at it as the time goes by. In my mind as a writer, it is a form of pollution that has made its way into our communications, making really strong writing more of a rarity. I never use it and never will. Why?

Because it takes years of doing this to find your own voice, the natural one you do not have to think about. To me it is the essential skill of telling a story that is compelling, that draws the reader in, a page turner. I know a huge number of novels are being cranked out with AI, but I have yet to read an artificially generated story that was not simply a collection of things stolen from the human archive, not experienced by the code that generates it.

There is a deadness to it though obviously it must sell. But a lot of very bad writing sells. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. In his books that phrase would appear after a character dies. So it goes, there’s not much we can do about it now. Now that AI is out there, it’s not coming back in. There’s no kill switch.

In my political newsletter, I plan on writing about the emerging AI financial bubble that threatens to take down a chunk of the economy. But not here. This is a place for my small time writing and I’m ok with that.

Newsletters have always been the province of small time writers, including some who were also the big time ones. I was never much of a letter writer when that was a thing and only really started writing for real when I got my first, now ancient, Macintosh computer. Miracle of miracles, I could fix mistakes! The words started pouring out and they could be made readable.

Little did we know what that would lead to. But you could kind of see it coming and it was exciting for a long time. Nowadays, not so much, which might be why I am so much more conscious of the moments in the real world, like warm sun on the face on a chilly fall day.

Not bad.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

Yes, that’s me. But I really am a lot friendlier in real life. M

Note: This is a crossposting between my two newsletters, Rich Without Money and The Witness Chronicles, because it felt like it fit both places.

Rich Without Money is a newsletter about personal experience. My other newsletter is about political shared experience. They are meant to counterbalance each other, in part to help me maintain a human perspective, because politics is only one piece of being human.

I became a sort of activist at age thirteen because of the Vietnam War. I skipped school and went downtown to participate in war protests, but I stayed on the fringes, mostly. I was a kid and I was probably the youngest person there and it was a bit overwhelming. But I did learn that tear gas reaches the fringes too.

Another life long ago in another century. Strange to think about, living in two centuries, but I’m twenty-six years into my second one. A lot of things have changed, but activism is still out there, for good reason. Things in the human world are pretty messed up.

But, paradoxically, things are also beautiful, and that contrast is the true challenge of a life. Beauty creates questions. What is it? Why does it sometimes abandon us? Why do some people seem to have it and others don’t? Big stuff.

I walk a lot, sometimes in pain from sciatica, a thing I never knew about a few years ago. If you walk you are constantly confronted with beauty if you can see it. It’s always there but life can blind us to it sometimes. The things we have or do not have contribute to that blindness.

I’m not a person who suffers from depression. I’m fortunate in that, the only thing that brings me down is worrying about money but I have learned that the universe, or whatever you call it, usually comes through. But you have to be engaged with that universe. You have to keep looking and keep being astonished by what you see.

I know I am.

My activism these days is my writing and my looking. Reminding myself that politics is important but only a part of being. These days, a lot of us are finding unexpected common ground, often in unexpected places. It might be money, it might be loneliness, it might be stress, it might be something you can’t pin down.

I’m a big believer in what some friends used to call ‘subculture hopping’, putting yourself in places and situations outside of your comfort zone. When we were bandmates together that might have meant a trek to a Latino chicken joint where you grabbed a beer from a plastic cooler and ate great chicken in the ghetto. Or a country western bar in the sticks.

That was life and still is. My activism these days is more subculture hopping, not less. I have the advantage of something that can happen when you get older and less publically involved. You become a little invisible. For some this is a real problem, but it can be a decided advantage.

Maybe you lurk, listening to a conversation and then add your two cents and doors open. Another voice in the mix, a conversational activist.

I attended a big No Kings protest last March. I happened to be in NYC visiting a close friend and she was engaged with the march. It was fun, but it did not move the needle as far as I could tell nationally. Why? Because our current administration does not care.

My activism as a kid was angry activism. They were killing my generation for no reason. They are still killing kids but not by literally killing them, by killing their ability to enjoy life. It’s a costly thing and it worries me a lot. Life is beautiful and I wonder sometimes if we are denying that for some material power or desire.

Right now, 11 pm on a week night, my tv has beautiful images of African landscapes and peoples. Typical PBS stuff that we take for granted. I will not experience these things in person and I am ok with that. There is only so much we can experience in our brief time.

Activism means being active in the world. Seeing it, being it. It’s everything in my humble opinion.

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Times are tight and your support helps me justify continuing my observations of this historically consequential time for our nation. If you are capable please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or smaller donations via the Buy Me A Coffee site. It’s beyond the money, which is welcomed, it’s a show of support that means a great deal to me.

Thanks for the real,

Martin

(Need a break from the mayhem? Check out my new newsletter, Rich, Without Money. It’s my counterbalance to what I write here. Simple observations of what we should really be paying attention to).

This is not a newsletter about writing, though that is my profession and has almost always been, in some form or another. There are plenty of newsletters about writing. However it’s a bit too meta for me to write about writing. But the act of creating something from nothing and what it does to my sense of time’s passing is interesting.

There is an old expression about ‘a busman’s holiday’. The reference is to a bus driver, who on his day off, rides other routes to see what they are like. He either cannot imagine not being on the bus or he has a limited life or imagination. I’ve always felt some sympathy for that driver and visualize a simple guy enjoying a simple pleasure.

He doesn’t need adventure, or maybe traveling a route he is not familiar with is his idea of adventure. Either way, it has an appeal to me. In my town riding a bus as a senior is incredibly cheap, nearly free. Normal fare is a buck but over 65s pay fifty cents. A five dollar metro card gets you all over town for days and even better, once you’ve paid for three rides in a day, any others that day are free.

So, occasionally I do take a ride through a part of town I rarely see. Maybe the long ride up Lake Ave to the beach on Lake Ontario (that is its name), or out to a posh small town suburb I lived in for a few years two decades ago. It’s divided by the Erie Canal with an idyllic canal path filled with casual walkers and cyclists.

As I write this I may just head out later for a random ride. It’s a perfect cool fall day out there.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with writing? That’s pretty simple. To write well in a way that others can relate to requires experience and observation. Those bus rides could be a lesson in humanity. You certainly see a cross section of it that you might rarely encounter otherwise, believe me.

There are two ways to experience things, in my experience. One is to only live in the moment and instantly forget it after, or to save things up, on an unconscious level, for some unknown future use. A quick character sketch of someone on the bus maybe, that somehow finds itself inserted into a scene to give it a bit of reality.

Or, in my case as a political observer, a chance to overhear others’ opinions without engaging them. These things that help keep your creative resources fresh can be experienced anywhere. Maybe just sitting in a bar watching a game on a rainy day, making small talk, or sitting at a counter in a diner just watching the short order cook.

That was a favorite activity of mine as a kid having lunch downtown with my mom. I always wanted to sit at the counter as close to the grill as I could get. Unfortunately these days diners are a dying breed and hamburgers at fifteen bucks are a good deal.

When I sat down to write this I had no intention of writing about buses or short order cooks. In fact I had no idea what I was going to write about except that it might be about writing as I experience it. The act of writing stops time for me while I’m doing it. I might lift my head to get a breath of air and realize an hour has gone by while I tapped on my iPad.

I meditate most days, usually somewhere outdoors, weather permitting. And you would think meditating would stop time too but for some reason for me the opposite is true. I almost always know, to the minute, how long I have been sitting. But like those bus rides, my mind is gathering something, often something minute like twenty minutes spent watching pine needles blow around on a brick path on a gusty day.

Who does that, and why? Frankly I’m not sure but I’m ok with that. For those twenty minutes I might have a favorite little bunch of pine needles that I’m rooting for to catch a good strong gust.

Maybe years later that guy watching a bunch of pine needles whirling in a breeze becomes the opening scene in a novel, a metaphor for something he is going through. Who knows? I don’t nor do I care while I’m there.

My mornings are typically spent gathering news and opinion about the latest mess in Washington or on the campaign trail. Things that can get me worked up or offer a point of view for a post on my other newsletter. But is that more important than watching things blow around in a fall breeze?

You tell me, but I might not be listening.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

Around here the first fall color is yellow. I should know the name of the trees with the tiny leaves that rain down with each gust of wind, but I don’t. There are a lot of them around here and this time of year when we get a bright sunny day (no guarantee of that), they glow.

It’s one of those things that only lasts a few days and then we have bare branches. But, like most ephemeral things, it is exceptionally beautiful, a glow up before the approaching darkness.

I don’t always do well with the shortening of the days, though that seems less important than it used to. The winter equinox was always a turning point for me because it meant we were on the way back to the light, though we still had all of winter ahead. Nevertheless the days began to very slowly lengthen, a few seconds a day to begin with, then accelerating to a minute or two.

We could tell the difference at that point. Instinct kicks in and just a little more light triggers things. That is the kind of thing I notice more these days, the infinitesimal changes. Though celebrating a few more seconds of daylight is a bit of a stretch.

One of my favorite Substack newsletters is Tending Gardens by Kana Chan, young Canadian Asian woman who moved to a tiny village in Japan that is a zero waste town. Her writing about this quiet place has led to a book deal and her book focuses on the 73 microseasons celebrated in Japan that connote specific short-lived natural events. I’m looking forward to it.

So I guess my yellow season is a microseason. The idea of assigning names to cyclical events in nature appeals to me, though with climate change going full tilt those seasons may change or even disappear completely. Fortunately this year we are not seeing extremes around here though we had an exceptionally high rainfall earlier.

The result of that was that we had no seasonal burn off of dry grass which usually occurs in high summer. Today, in early October after a morning rain, the skies cleared and turned a crystalline blue and the green of the grass and most trees was positively iridescent.

That made the piles of tiny yellow leaves stand out even more.

I have found my life compacting a bit and I don’t mind a bit. As I grow older I see more things that interest me in places where I seldom noticed things when more involved in the rat race. Though I never really was in the true rat races that require unbounded ambition, the A word in Type A.

I know quite a few of those driven types and it is interesting to see them react to leaving the work world. A lot of travelers and a lot of non profit board members. They are schedulers and sometimes I envy their activity level. But I wonder how often they find a seat on a park bench and just watch the world go by without any agenda. Those times are increasingly important to me these days.

They are recharging moments and, paradoxically, they energise me to do my political writing, which is anything but low key in these tumultuous times. While the political world is crazy, the natural world still carries on, at least around here so far.

In another sign of the changing seasons, this morning I was walking and I caught myself crossing the street to walk on the sunny warmer side, something I have not thought about for months. Just the opposite when it’s hot out. Now I know thinking about this isn’t particularly productive in the usual sense, but these are things that show even an urban dweller how we adapt to changing nature.

As a kid I basically lived outside as much as possible. Then being outdoors became a weekend thing and hanging in the city and the nightlife took more priority. But these days, with more open time on my hands, getting out has become essential, especially with winter not far ahead.

I think that explains my writing about things we take for granted like seasonal change, miraculous things if you look at them from a different angle. In October every day could be a tiny season, chilly this morning and warm later this week. Yesterday I woke to drenching rain and five minutes later the sun was pouring in my east facing windows.

Growing up in Western New York usually means liking weather because what’s your options? It used to be traditional for retirees from this area to buy homes in Florida and there were communities of Rochesterians down there. But now I think that’s over. This place looks more desirable every day when you look at a lot of the country.

So, I’m not going anywhere, not for good anyway.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

If you’ve been reading these things, and some people do, which I appreciate, you know that despite being called Rich Without Money, this is not about being frugal, or even minimal. But it is about understanding that we have virtually unlimited ways to enjoy life that are right in front of us.

I woke up this morning to a cloudy mild day with a sprinkle of rain, very typical October around here. During last week, when a nor’easter ravaged the Atlantic coast and inland, we managed to miss it and had some perfect fall weather. But my Facebook feed was filled with pictures of expensive boats washed up on beaches (the algo thinks I like fancy sailboats for some reason) and the news showed endless shots of cars stuck in deep water on streets. Those stories are almost a staple on the national news shows these days.

But we somehow manage to miss those calamities, which is a good thing. But winter here can be nasty or at least uncomfortable. My weather enemy is icy sidewalks because I am a pedestrian and they can make walking a little scary. But those days are hopefully a few months away. As usual I made a resolution that I would walk every morning through the winter no matter the weather.

Resolutions can be seeds that grow into habits if you stick to them for a bit, whether you feel like it or not, and facing icy sidewalks will be my winter challenge. But not yet please.

Last night I watched a baseball playoff game between the Yankees and the Red Sox, basically marking the beginning of my very brief season of being a sports fan. I know because I watched an entire game for the first time this season or even more than a few innings. The Yankees trounced the Sox, thank you, and will move onto the playoffs, some of which I will watch.

In the late season I watch sports a bit more but cannot be called a serious fan with one exception, maybe two. I watch golf, or at least have it on in the background on weekends if I’m home. It’s nice to see people outdoors in warm green places when it’s crappy out here. That’s my sport as much as anything else is.

Living in Western NY, being a Bills fan is a big deal and in recent years I have found myself watching more football games, though not games for other teams. Bills fans are ever hopeful as we often get close but haven’t closed the Super Bowl deal for many years.

The wide reaching effects of legalized gambling are changing sports in ways that make it annoying for the non-gambler. Too many obscure stats and too many ads for gambling apps, but that genie is out of the bottle and is not going back in.

Taking regular walks and watching long sporting events don’t mesh well but I always feel good when I turn off a game and get outside. After all, for a non serious fan, games are not all that important. Not for me anyway.

Somehow I missed the game addiction thing, maybe because I was never good at them. Friends think because I am a writer, I must be good at word games like Scrabble, but I suck at them because I can’t be bothered to learn the tricks that all experienced players know.

I have a bar owner friend who is a big sports fan and a political junkie so watching a game in his place is one of my social spots. I learn enough about what is going on in whatever sport is on the tv and we dissect politics just like a spectator sport, which it sorta is these days, though the stakes are scarier than losing a football game. A lot scarier.

Baseball for me starts and ends with the playoffs and the Series. I really only watch Yankees games and when they find themselves out for the season, my interest disappears just like that. But they look really good so far.

I realize that I’ve become ok with a quieter life socially after years of being a guy who knew everybody or seemed to. Though a good conversation about local politics still gets me going. That definitely follows the same pattern as being a sports fan these days.

I used to be a bit of a snob about sports fans. And a few other things. That’s called growing up, to stop judging the pleasures of others. Like almost all judgemental things, letting that go opens up more space for simply enjoying the world.

I’m getting better at that, I think. Go Bills!

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

After seven decades on the this planet you’d think the changing of the seasons would be something you take for granted. But no, not ever.

There’s a head cold going around and I am just getting over it. Which is apropos as we just turned the astronomical corner into autumn. We’re in that strange time when the days retain some summer warmth but the sun is lowering in the sky and night comes early.

Walking out of my building yesterday morning I was startled to see leaves falling in a shower from the big tree in front and remembered that this tree always seems to drop its leaves first. The crunch of dryness underfoot and the third season seems instantly upon us.

There’s a big nor’easter blasting the Atlantic coast right now but here in Western NY the rain isn’t quite reaching us, though there’s a stiff wind out of the northeast, not the usual prevailing wind direction for this region.

I’ve often thought that fall always seems like a quiet interlude before the winter and recent days have that exact feel. No real chill in the air yet.

You may wonder why I’m writing about this non-event, a shift in the calendar that takes place every year. There’s a reason. These ordinary events are important as markers in time and paying attention to them is its own way of capturing a moment in memory. There’s a lot going on in the big world these days and most of it is not good.

But just living in the here and now and noticing things like dry leaves floating down around you reminds us that those events will pass. I had a dream last night that AI was running things and humans decided to revert to being animals, just living for the basics and gradually forgetting this monstrous civilization we have constructed.

An interesting idea but upon waking and vaguely remembering that scenario the practical person in me wondered just how something like that could happen. Would people just gradually decide to not care about all the things that we spend endless hours building and maintaining? To let entropy do it’s inevitable decay?

You might say decay is the presiding spirit of fall. The color falls out of things, green turns to brown and a chill begins to invade the edges of days. Is this time meant to signal us that it is time to hibernate and forget the world? Especially my personal bane, politics?

Not an option, but simply enjoying early fall is a perfect counterpoint to wondering about the future in all its craziness and it’s my goal to take it all in, every leaf. And to dedicate that time to nothing at all for a few moments. Without them I’ll find myself cursing the icy winter and not even remembering how sublime it was just a few weeks earlier. Dry leaves on a mild day.

Last night I sat outside my favorite cafe enjoying the last warmth of the day and watching runners going by, the inevitable idiots in their ridiculously loud sports cars roaring down this normally quiet street, and feeling alive. That’s about all I could ask for on a mild fall evening.

Fall is not an exciting season, unlike spring when everything is suddenly new and freshly green. Fall strikes me as being about memory, a favorite theme of mine. Would our animal selves have memories? Or are they only captured in instinct, that warning system that tells us that danger is near or it’s time to sleep or eat?

I’m rambling but that’s my state of mind this drowsy afternoon. It’s a Sunday, so not being productive is perfectly acceptable, at least around here where no one is keeping track. The best part of my day might have been a walk to get a cortado at the Yemeni coffee shop down the street and I’m alright with that. Their coffee is out of this world, which it should because it comes from the part of the world where great coffee originated in the hills of Ethiopia.

In ancient times Ethiopia was a great kingdom and it guarded its coffee bushes zealously. Much of the coffee in the world was robusta, considered inferior, but Ethiopian coffee was arabica, the coffee that helped humans invent mathematics and eventually dragged most of Europe out of a drunken stupor. But that was later.

The story is that some enterprising Yemenis smuggled some coffee plants across the water and somehow found a hospitable place to grow them in that desolate hot country. They thrived but supplies were limited. Yet somehow they made their way across oceans and time to get to a cafe down the street from my apartment.

Amazing world we live in and if I was not in the pleasant stupor of fall on a Sunday I would never have followed that digression to my cup and a morning walk on a fall day. An almost perfect segue that likely makes no sense but makes me happy nevertheless.

Rain is coming.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

Here in the West, rituals seem limited to Sunday church services, evoking the smell of incense, or a program of events like hymns and sermons that drone on and on. At least that is how I vaguely remember it. Boring to the point of pain. But we all have rituals we run through every day whether we know it or not.

One of mine is making coffee in the morning, a pretty common thing. Grind beans, load filter, steam milk, dispense high pressure water through finely ground beans. And the coffee ritual, which most have some variation of, illustrates how rituals can be viewed as recipes for consistently achieving a desired result. In my example, a perfect cappuccino, light on steamed milk and richly flavored with beans I grind fresh every morning.

Excuse me while I go make another one…but that’s not part of my ritual because I usually just have one. So, rituals have rules too.

I grew up reading the Carlos Castenada books as each came out, only stopping when they got so weird that they really did not make sense anymore, or maybe I outgrew them.

For those who don’t know, Castenada was allegedly an anthropology grad student living in LA but born in Columbia. He befriends an old man in the Sonora desert called Don Juan, an enigmatic creature who is a Yaqui Indian sorcerer. Castenada was ostensibly researching peyote rituals. He becomes Don Juan’s apprentice.

It should be noted that the books were sold as non-fiction but these days, many years later, there are questions about virtually every aspect of Castenada’s life with many believing it was a hoax he made up. Personally I think if he made this up he had an extraordinary imagination, so I do not care. The writing is often remarkable.

Carlos, being a westernized logical creature, proves to be a stubborn student who simply cannot accept the possibility of the alternate realities that Don Juan shows him. So the sorcerer resorts to psychedelic trips to break through Castenada’s crust of Western pragmatism, usually with datura, a plant that in the wrong doses can kill.

So the preparation of the plant, the environment, and Carlo’s state of mind are very fine-tuned, with no deviation from the ritual. These ritual preparations serve to control the dosage and the outcome without killing the subject. We also see similar rituals around the use of the psychedelic cactus, peyote.

Strange things then happen.

Later, Carlos learns that the psychedelics were only used in his case because his Western view of the world was so set in stone that breaking through took heroic measures. Later in the series drugs are put aside and even stranger things take place.

One of the convincing aspects of the books is that they show the evolution of Carlos, who initially believed he is the sophisticated one and Don Juan the ignorant peasant, a role the sorcerer plays to perfection.

But by the third book Carlos realizes he has been duped and that he is the naive student and his acquired knowledge was all a distraction designed to keep his conscious mind from getting in the way of his subconscious mind while learning.

Whether fake or not, the stories ring true and the rituals described make sense when dealing with substances that are enlightening at one level and deadly beyond that point. And I’ll argue that looking at rituals as recipes designed to achieve a consistent outcome are why they are powerful.

When I was much younger I worked in a bakery making pastries, things like croissants, petit fours, danish, etc. Fancy stuff, and I quickly learned that with baking you don’t mess with recipes unless you’re trying to create something new. Baking is basically chemistry and varying things can screw the entire process up.

It’s not improvisational for a reason. Once you’ve thrown a batch of cakes in the trash because you messed up with the quantity of an ingredient, you don’t repeat your mistakes.

Ritual is integral to a lot of things we do, from morning coffee to mediating or preparing to take a hike in the woods. I, like most writers, have my own rituals for doing what I am doing right now. And those little things are how you get through a big project like a novel. Waiting for inspiration is not a great way to get things done.

In my case, 600 words a day, stop before you’re tapped out, what Hemingway called leaving some gas in the tank for the next day. Probably the best advice for writing in general I can think of. Hemingway was a big proponent of ritual, whether hunting or making a martini. In his case when the rituals no longer worked, something broke down and he became a shadow of his former self.

So rituals have their place as tools for life. But there are times when they can limit you. If rituals become compulsive to the point where you can no longer deviate from them they can become chains.

One of things I learned from thinking about rituals this way is how to change your ways when they are no longer working. There are plenty of things we did ritually when younger that we no longer need. It may be that we have internalized processes until they become automatic. That’s how writing works for me.

One of the reasons vacations and traveling recharge us is they break the rhythm of our daily routines and help us rethink things that may have stagnated. More of the rewiring of synapses in the brain that I think is required as we get older. New pathways. And new rituals can help us do that.

I walk every day and I am constantly looking out for new routes to take as a change of scene. Finding one to add to my mental map is always a good thing.

Much better than turning to page 36 in your hymnal, at least for me.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

This is really about the march of time. Modern means of now but what about old modern things like mid-century modern furnishings and architecture? And that thing called post modernism. How can that exist? And why am I thinking about this?

The first band I was in was a punky pop band in the late seventies jokingly called the Hi-Techs. Hi Tech was a short-lived design movement that utilized industrial materials in domestic design. Think lots of rubber, glass block, and embossed stainless steel. That stuff with the diamond patterns. It was pretty silly. A fashion forward friend of mine went to my father’s industrial supplier warehouse where she had once worked and bought enough black rubber o-rings to use as arms full of bracelets, and she had a rubber blouse.

Yes, the same kind of o-rings, only much smaller, as those whose failure brought down a space shuttle.

It was all very modern and all mostly silly but we were kids having fun. The band eventually morphed into a more sophisticated affair just in time for the eighties and the next version of modern. With a more sophisticated name, Personal Effects, which didn’t really mean much. Fans called us P.E..

As we get older and wiser we know trends come and go faster and faster and it gets easier to totally ignore them, which, take it from me, is a lot less stressful than trying to be the latest thing and only getting it right when it’s too late. You once again missed being at the cutting edge.

That edge moves blindingly fast these days meaning those chasing it are doomed to never be actually modern. You might as well not bother.

We all knew that person who always had their own thing, were comfortable in it, and consequently they were always the one who wasn’t trying. Personal style in other words. You might wonder what this fluffy topic has to do with the search for meaning in life or whatever this newsletter is about.

Well, it’s about the march of time and not wasting those fleeting moments worrying too much about being cool or whatever the latest slang is for being the One. Take the red pill and move on.

I have a knock-off Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed Barcelona chair and ottoman in my living room, all shining chrome and black leather. The knock off is a virtually identical copy of the original authorized version which is still made and costs north of $6000. This set is a classic mid-century icon except it was designed for the German Pavilion at the Barcelona World Fair in 1929. Yes, it was super cool nearly 100 years ago and still sells. A classic.

Unfortunately, it is not very comfortable, to be honest, though it looks great. Which says some things are timeless and designed to survive the winds of trendiness, a difficult thing to do. That may be the true test of being modern. Old in other ways but still relevant, not a bad life goal!

Sometimes modern is paired with minimalism, a movement where design is achieved by ruthlessly paring away anything that is not absolutely needed. And much modern design follows that general rule. But so do things like the famous rock and raked sand gardens of ancient Zen temples, which are designed to help create a leap beyond base thought patterns.

This rerouting of neural connections is associated with sudden bursts of insight. Psychedelics are often thought to work the same way, helping people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), among other things. And that treatment via mushrooms or other natural chemical agents is both modern and steeped in ancient rituals.

Modern may mean ‘of this time’ but it was always of its time, the eternal present.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

There is a generational thing going on with talking to each other, yet reaching out almost always means learning something, sharing something, or helping the other. Yes, reliance on phones is a thing and it does effectively create a barrier that can say, I don’t want to interact or know you.

Sometimes that is a personal safety thing, the ability to avoid people you don’t want to interact with. But, in my experience, even a few words of small talk can open people up. Some have just gotten rusty at being with others, even on a superficial level. And of course there are those who collar you and monologue on whatever random thing that enters their mind.

That, btw, is not a conversation. Conversation is two way and even a small one can change your day. Conversation is medicine. The other day I was walking in the neighborhood and I was approached by an older woman with a cane. I thought she might want money but no, just directions to a nearby bank.

I suggested she could grab a bus because it was several blocks away but she said no, she had to walk because of sciatica, nerve pain. Walking helps with that pain as I know too well. Common ground, and we commiserated for a minute then she continued on her way. An innocuous conversation.

But I thought about it while meditating that afternoon. Yes, we’re not supposed to think while practicing but our minds have a mind of their own. And I thought that little shared moment, nothing more than a minute, had its own value. And it was mutual. It might have been her only contact that day, or mine.

Zen Master Dogen says that one day is composed of 6,400,099,980 moments, a preposterous statement by the mischievous monk, who also said we have sixty-five opportunities during a snap of the fingers to wake up*. I love the idea that someone calculated, out to the exact number, that we have over 6 billion moments available to us daily, even if it is obvious no one calculated anything like that.

So, a minute’s conversation and connection might be counted in millions of moments, fragments of time that we can call on to remind ourselves we are not alone. Pretty strong stuff.

*Hat tip to writer Ruth Ozeki for those numbers found in her novel A Tale for the Time Being, a favorite of mine. Dogen Zenji, who lived from 1200-1253, is known for his Shobogenzo, his collected teachings and interpretations of the unsolvable challenges known as Koans, brain twisters used to break down logic that shields us from the present moment.

Or something like that.

In another favorite story, Lud in the Mist by Hope Mirlees, a charming fantasy novel that goes to dark places, old friends get together and share old stories repeated through the years as though they are vintage wine, getting a little tipsy from the conversation. A charming scene that unexpectedly turns dark when someone speaks of something they are not supposed to talk about.

The book is worth searching out but it is very obscure. The writing is lovely and she makes a fantasy world that is scary but challenging, a place you might not return from.

A lot of my conversation these days is around the demented politics of this administration, which I write about elsewhere. But those conversations are usually people sharing their worry about the direction of our country, a conversation that certain parties have worked hard to make forbidden or uncomfortable.

Conversation may be medicine but it can be toxic too, just like many medications. It is interesting how we have been intentionally conditioned to walk softly around certain topics by political figures who see power in division. But that ice seems to be breaking, a very good thing.

Conversation is also about sharing. Maybe simple things like commiserating on a street corner about an ache or pain with a stranger. Or learning that someone you’ve just met, an articulate black man raising a daughter is headed to federal penitentiary for as long as ten years for what he admits were bad decisions. That happened to me recently and we exchanged information because the conversation had been rewarding in its way for both of us.

Nothing simple about his story.

Sometimes I’m not even sure the topic of a talk is really that important. Small talk about weather or sports or some mundane subject is more than its content. It’s something under the surface, a shared recognition that we exist and have value to others. Even a simple hello to a passerby has that value.

I’ve written about loneliness vs being alone. The former is a need for contact, the latter is time we use to recharge our engines, a form of meditation. The single best cure for loneliness is a shared word or two, or a thousand if the connection is right.

If conversation is medicine, it is prescribed, among other things, for loneliness. So, say hello back when you’re greeted by a stranger. You might be giving them the stuff they need for that moment.

You’ve got plenty of moments.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

Not going to get too esoteric here. Somehow we bridged the yawning abyss between simply being alive and becoming aware of ourselves as individuals. It’s very likely other species have achieved something similar or are close to getting there. I no longer eat octopus because I’ve seen too many examples of them showing awareness.

Call me politically correct, but remember I still eat most of the other stuff, except tripe. L keeps telling me how wonderful it is when she makes it but sorry I tried it once. I guess I’m way too Anglo.

Anyway, I got thinking about this awareness thing while sitting this morning. Looking around at all the living things around me I wondered if they were not better off simply being alive and unaware of the things they don’t have or stuff other people have. It wasn’t any kind of epiphany, it just had me wondering about the role of stuff.

Presumably, we started acquiring things because we needed them to survive and expand our horizons. If you want to cross the river and move north for better land or whatever, you better get some furs so you don’t freeze your ass off. And maybe a partner to stay warm with and other stuff. And so it begins.

When I look around my apartment I sometimes feel like there’s too much in there and I’m a pretty diehard minimalist bachelor dude. But all those books…

I have friends who now own multiple houses, not just a cottage for the summer, places all over the country and sometimes abroad. It’s an odd bug that seems to come with money, to need to own something in every place they like. It’s not logical, most of the time for what they spend owning those places they could stay in posh hotels as long as they want, without the headaches.

Logic and the material world bear no relationship to each other. I don’t really want anything but sometimes I daydream about what I would get if big money fell into my hands. That’s really just a way to kill time because that isn’t happening. Though I do buy the occasional lottery ticket now and then.

Hope springs eternal.

Some things are important. I like to cook and certain kitchen things and cookbooks improve the quality of my life in nice ways. But I have a tiny apartment kitchen so every purchase needs to be considered in that context. Where the hell would I put a rice cooker? That kind of thing.

Necessity is a good editing tool.

But in general the acquisition of things is tiring to think about. My small family decided years ago to not exchange Christmas or birthday gifts because we agreed we did not need anything. But there was some push back because giving is fun and feels good. I get that.

Minimalism is cool but sometimes we just need to indulge. These days indulging is most rewarding if it involves something ephemeral like making a good meal or an unexpected conversation. That’s high value without increasing the amount of things you have to pack if you move. Or die, which we all will do.

My mother passed last year at 94. It was time and she was in her house, the house we all grew up in. She didn’t give a damn about stuff but she loved giving gifts (she stubbornly ignored the family pact to stop getting presents). My sister inherited the house and all the stuff in it which feels like a dodged bullet to me. I inherited a Steinway grand piano which I’m trying to sell without much luck so far. If you’re in the market I have a great deal for you…

When I was sitting this morning and that thing about self-awareness happened I was looking at a bunch of nature around me and I had a pang of regret or maybe jealousy. These beautiful plants and insects, and squirrels and even rocks, likely do not covet things unless they can eat them or use them to survive. Or seduce. Mynah birds pile up stolen stuff to find mates.

That does not count as materialism though if you are buying multiple homes and expensive cars to attract mates maybe you’re not so different. I wouldn’t know, nor do I care. To each his own, or her own, or their own.

We can actually be rich without money if you drop desire for things you can’t afford. It’s not for everybody but it can be a less complicated life. Less complicated is a good goal for the third third of a life.

The impetus for this newsletter was to talk about the richness of life, richness not measurable in dollars and sense. But it is also not a diatribe against being well off. Money can be liberating if you don’t let it own you, but all too often having some means wanting more. When that happens money becomes stuff, only valued for how much there is and how much more can be gained.

There can also be a fetish about minimalism, making it almost an equal to senseless greed.

Not being owned by things means not having to carry heavy burdens through life. Liberation.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

Disclaimer: I do not ever use AI knowingly. I am not a Luddite, in fact I worked for several rapid growth software and tech companies, as a marketing person. But I am a writer and I find most AI writing to be lifeless at best. As for AI in education I fear we could raise generations who no longer know how to learn.

So, if AI is not intelligence, what is?

There are a lot of brainy people out there wrestling with that question, and many are trying to recreate intelligence to see exactly how it works. The issue is now in the political forefront and while that is not the subject of this newsletter, there are definitely things to explore about the nature of intelligence itself.

When I was young, IQ tests that measured something called Intelligence Quotient were relatively new and were all the rage. They tested us in school, mostly without telling us they were doing it, and the scores were confidential, but I knew mine because a teacher in fourth grade revealed my score to my parents and they must have told me.

These days why a teacher would share that is a mystery and the value of it has fallen out of favor. I had a high score which should have propelled me into quantum physics or something similar, which didn’t happen. What did happen was I went from a straight A student in elementary school to ending my first year in middle school with an F.

I have a theory about why. If I was so smart, why bother? I failed spelling because it seemed obvious to me and a waste of time so I did no homework. A new school, a teacher I didn’t like, and impending adolescence may have had something to do with it.

So, where did the intelligence get me? Did I go from bright to dim over one summer? I would say not, I was still an annoying know-it-all after that Fail appeared.

We have all known intelligent people who were hopelessly bad at life in general. I think that is because being able to think abstractly and solve problems quickly only applies to some things. But those IQ tests back in the day had another effect. They served to sort us into tracks ranging from idiot to genius and for my generation at least it was very difficult to undo those assumptions.

You were either destined for college, or not. I went but mostly because I was supposed to and eventually dropped out to join a rock band and have fun. When my career started to look more promising I had to deal with my lack of credentials so I did a smart thing. I positioned myself as an expert, got a book deal about that expertise, and went on from there.

If you ever want to avoid the subject of your record in higher education, legitimately write and publish a book, that is, get paid to do so. No one ever asked after that. So, I guess that was an intelligent move in its own way.

I basically declared myself an expert on the topic I wrote about.

In my AI disclaimer above, I mentioned my fear that young students with ready access to AI risked the possibility of not learning how to learn. Why bother when AI can do it for you? It’s kind of like those kids who used those condensed versions of famous books to avoid reading the big real versions.

Was that intelligent? I have no idea nor do I really care, and that in itself is yet another strange thing about intelligence when you examine it. It manifests itself in a lot of ways, good and bad, which is at the heart of the fears about unleashing AI on the world (which, btw, has already happened. We are not getting that horse back in the barn).

One interesting thing is that meditation is not about increasing intelligence, not the Zen kind of practice. The goal there is nothing and you try to achieve it by not trying. After decades of studying that, I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the not doing thing.

We have some pretty public disavowals of intelligence these days, from accusations of elitism to banning books that may say something true you don’t want to hear, know, or pass on to others. As I wrote that, it occurred to me that the act of passing knowledge and experience on to others may actually be the definition of intelligence.

Just thinking this through has me tied into knots which brings me to a couple of questions. First, why does it matter? And if intelligence is such an indefinable thing why try to build our own? Because we can? That’s pretty scary.

I used to think about where the line between a normal person and stupid one was, and whether it existed at all. But I thought about a lot of stuff like that especially when I was a pot smoking stoner kid. Then there was the time my friends and I found the center of the universe in a parking lot and took it with us…

The friend who determined that this thing we found was the center of the universe is now a very wealthy real estate developer who get his suits made in London. And a genuinely smart guy. Nice too.

Seeking out things like the center of the universe or the real meaning of it all no longer interests me, not on a day to day level. I’m happy enough when I get up in the morning and find that I washed the dishes the night before. That always strikes me as an exceptionally intelligent thing to do and I admire the guy who did it.

Since I live alone I guess that would be me.

So, are we clear on this intelligence thing? Good, I hoped so.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

This was quite a week with the Trump lovefest descending into madness, threats, pledges to ‘the greatest President the U.S. has ever had’, and a party wide decision to simply break the law. But outside of all that distraction was the beauty of September with its warm days and lengthening nights.

Balancing those two realities makes it clear that something is seriously wrong with the right. They no longer see the beauty in the world, so consumed are they with hatred and fear. Their loss.

Keep on looking up.

Martin Edic

From The Witness Chronicles

9/2, It’s Too Easy to Mock Trump.

When you rant and rave and insult Trump you are playing into the real villain’s hands by elevating this bumbling old man and creating a perfect distraction from the terrible things his people are doing.

9/8, An Undeniable Majority is What They Fear Most,

With all the election manipulation possible, a big majority vote is our best chance to deny Trump.

9/11, The (Trump) Check is in the Mail…Right.

I predicted it and he came through, promising us all $5000 checks if the Republicans prevail in November. No one believes that…

From Rich Without Money

9/6, Grace.

When you wake up wondering what the definition of Grace is and the dictionaries are lacking. Then I try to define the undefinable. It’s definitely something elusive.

9/12, Perspective, and the Inner Life.

Somehow combining political opinion writing with a perspective shift as a survival tactic and a path to compassion.

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Image, dried Rose of Sharon pods. Copyright 2026 Lucia Guarino

There’s a lot of crazy in the air these days, especially when it comes to politics, which I write about 4-5 times a week in The Witness Chronicles. That involves a lot of immersion in news about that crazy and sorting out what may be real and what is speculation or simply made up. But I cannot be immersed in that all the time. Real life, inner and outer, is far more important.

My main takeaway from trying to resolve this disparity between whatever passes for reality in DC and the normal calm of day to day life is that division as a political tactic has its limitations and we reached them in the past year. Fortunately the violent language that creates that division is wearying and a lot of us are very weary of hearing it day in and day out.

But down here on the ground, as I move around, I simply do not hear the hate being repeated among most ‘normal’ people. Instead I see people doing small things to help others because it is normal to do so, not because there is something in it for themselves.

If someone is angry at everything, and there are people who carry that curse, they are not normal. Something is wrong and unfortunately there are people who take advantage of that unending anger. But that is surpassingly rare. It’s easy to forget that when we see people on television literally ranting about some perceived evil done to them by some unknown group of others, they are likely responding to a kind of hypnosis that says others are to blame for your troubles.

Most of our troubles are generated within, not because of some nefarious plot cooked up by someone else. Unfortunately right now we have too many leaders who see plots around every corner and take them personally.

There is a common maxim used when dealing with anger or jealousy. It says don’t take it personally. Why? Because it is very rare for someone to go out of their way to hurt you and if they do it is because of something that is wrong with them, not necessarily you. As simple as it sounds, it is liberating when put into action.

I started writing this newsletter with little understanding of what I was going to say, or why I wanted to say it. But it may be about compassion, a complex thing that requires courage to practice. When we don’t take things personally the next logical step is to try and help those who are hurting others, something that goes against the grain of most of our experience.

Compassion requires perspective, the ability to step away from our internal dialog and see things from a different angle. That can be a difficult thing because it requires change. In my case, writing about the charged world of politics and worrying about the state of our hard fought democracy puts me in one camp. But I have to break out of that perspective so I don’t go nuts.

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that. But if we only live in one camp and only hear one side we’re missing out on a lot of life. And that is truly tragic because as you get older you know that things go by faster and faster. I think about that first day of summer recess from school as a child and how the two months of liberation seemed infinite, until they weren’t.

We experienced the infinite when we saw it as a universe of possibilities. But as we get older it is harder to see things so simply. We know how time passes and how all things must change, but all too often we try to resist the inevitable and that limits our day to day experience.

For me, the best tool for staying open is meditation. Working out is another way. These are activities that force our conscious mind to stop thinking, giving our subconscious a chance to roam a bit and see life differently, if only for a moment.

That moment is liberation.

It occurs to me that for me writing is a form of that liberation. With my political writing I have to think through my opinions and observations. Here, I get liberation from that track of thinking, to a more abstract place. Though I’ve only been doing this newsletter for a few weeks, and it only gets read by a handful of people, it has helped me be a little more balanced in my perspective.

I hope this isn’t too preachy. It’s just an hour of riffing on an idea, trying it out to see its potential. And letting my subconscious speak its mind once in a while.

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As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

Image, Inadvertent Zen, copyright 2026 Richard Edic

After my wake up routine this morning (drink coffee, skim political email, rub eyes), my little brain somehow decided I needed to write about grace, something I have rarely really thought about. Which may be why once I thought about it I kind of had to write about it.

But what is it? Feeling exceptionally logical, I Googled its definition and was shocked by how mundane the various dictionaries made it sound. Apparently its main definition is about movement, as in dance or sports. After that disappointing discovery the second definition was entirely about its use in Christian doctrine. You know, Hail Mary Full of Grace.

I’m not sure what my early exposure to the Methodist church did to me but my view of Christianity was that I don’t get it. And as soon as I was old enough to get away with it I told my parents I wouldn’t go. I just didn’t get church school and those Pharisees.

Our family really only went because my mother was a trained singer and they would give her solos. My father was brought up by three Irish Catholics (mother, aunt, grandmother) who went to Mass several times a week and whose brother was a priest and the head of the Franciscan order for North and South America. Hard core Catholicism.

My father, an only child, enlisted and went to Korea and in the process married a Protestant women, literally a cardinal sin where he came from. My belief is that he was being groomed to be a priest and he wasn’t having it.

That would be the extent of my relationship with Christianity so my understanding of grace was somewhat limited. But when I read those very mundane definitions of the word, I was a bit deflated. Grace, to me, is…nope, I can’t define it.

It’s one of those ‘I know it when I see it’ things. For example, yesterday I was meditating in the garden and found myself a little mesmerized by a mature Japanese maple a few yards away. Though I had sat there hundreds of times, I had never noticed how gracefully its branches had grown. Lovely curves an artist would struggle with.

That to me was grace and the catalyst for me writing this. But the definition of this amazing thing is something I can’t articulate, nor do I want to.

I was reading about AI this morning and as usual I found it disturbing. Like a lot of us I wonder if some coder nerds accidentally opened Pandora’s Box and let troubles out into the world. No offense to developers (a more respectful term) but many of those I worked with had a disturbing lack of the ability to think through the real world or the implications of what they were making.

You need an autonomous weapons targeting system? I’ll get right on it.

So what does AI have to do with grace? So far, nothing that I can tell. And that may be its biggest flaw, the utter lack of grace as a specification in its planning. Understandable because how do you determine if something is graceful? It’s one of those things that are truly indefinable. I’m certainly not coming up with anything so far.

Maybe it does have something to do with movement. A graceful dancer has something a clumsy dancer struggles to achieve. And like many easy looking things, struggle and grace don’t easily evolve from one to the other.

This week, the writer, farmer, and ecologist Wendell Berry died. I was vaguely aware of him but not familiar with his work beyond the surface. But he had a huge influence on a lot of people and his poetry and stories of him were surfacing all over social media. From what I could tell he was a graceful man though he would likely be uncomfortable with that description.

Too big a compliment to bear in life. And something he might have had to be conscious of, a burden. He lived his life with grace.

That is exactly why dictionary definitions are so unsatisfactory with a concept like grace. And why writing a piece titled Grace is proving so elusive. Yet the thought of it unleashed all kinds of things, too many really.

I lean towards the Zen bit of Buddhism with a little Tibetan thrown in. The Zen notion of removing any unnecessary things until you get to the bones of a thought, its essence. Which must, by definition, be graceful. A single brushstroke. A stone carefully placed in a garden. That kind of thing.

I ask myself daily what exactly it is I’m doing here with this newsletter. In spite of its title, it is not about creative frugality or self help. It might be about trying to see the grace in things right in front of us, except how can something that huge be my underlying theme?

Nevertheless that might be it. Yikes.

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***

As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

I’m about a month into my new very non-political newsletter, Rich Without Money, and it is going well and starting to take form, though I’m still not sure what that form is. Definitely about taking time to live in the moment.

Of course, politics is still the big story and it gets more demented every day, which hardly seems possible. The reality that we have at least two more years of this crap is hard to imagine, but in the meantime, I’m going to keep writing about pieces of it. No one can cover it all but sometimes something sticks out to me as inspiration, if you can call it that.

So, here is the week’s writing. If you’re a Witness reader, check out the Rich Without Money stuff for a little perspective shift, something we all need. And thanks!

Martin Edic

From The Witness Chronicles:

8/30, A State of Constant Crisis Cannot Be Sustained.

Every hour the Trump administration invents a new crisis, until the next one, but none are ever resolved. Because that would mean doing the hard work and these guys are lazy.

8/31, The World We Take For Granted is Disintegrating, Fast.

Trump didn’t create global warming, but he delayed doing anything about it for years, and we are seeing the results, everywhere. Mother Nature will survive, with or without us.

9/1, The Midterms Cement is Setting Up Fast.

With only weeks left the right is out of time and they can throw all the money around they want- their voters are not going to show up. Stick a fork in them, they’re done.

9/4, The Coming Trumpapalooza Debacle

As expected, Trump is having a midterm convention and it’s all about him. Never mind the $25k ticket price and the fact that it goes up against the first two NFL games of the season. I’d expect nothing more from these knuckleheads.

From Rich Without Money:

8/30, What is a Sentient Being? The Rock, Tree, and Bug Question

Assumptions about the nature of consciousness and reality are risky territory.

8/31, Retirement, or the Third Third.

I guess I’m retired, or am I? And why can’t we retire at various times when we need change and then start up again?

9/1, The Other Reality, Our Reality.

The world can be sublime but that doesn’t always mean nice and neat.

9/4, Living Under the Canopy.

I live in a very green city, basically a forest with buildings. And living under those massive layers of green means oxygen, birds, and something wonderful for free. Never take that for granted!

I live in a forty unit apartment building, circa 1940 (art deco-ish) on a beautiful boulevard about one mile from the center of our city of around one million (metro population). Not exactly a home in the woods. But next door is a boutique hotel with a rooftop bar on the ninth floor with an unobstructed view in all directions. The only nearby tall structures are steeples and the downtown skyline in the near distance.

From up on the roof the striking realization is that we live in a forest. As far as the eye can see there is an uninterrupted layer of treetops, dense green right now after a rainy summer. Only a few buildings, including those steeples, interrupt the carpet of green, soon to be multicolor.

The trees are mostly deciduous, that is they are hardwoods that lose their leaves in winter, with the occasional evergreen. If you head northeast towards the Adirondacks the pines start taking over. But here it is dense canopy overhead, not just dense with foliage but dense with birds, the song of insects, oxygen, and deep shade. From the ground it’s lovely but we do not get the sense of how much we live under that canopy.

I have been out west many times, principally to California, which is still exotic to me because the landscape is so different. Reclaimed desert in many places. I love it and in a different life could have been very happy living there. All those Beach Boy records growing up didn’t hurt that mythology.

But I would miss my trees, especially the huge oaks and beeches that drape the elegant lawns of the huge mansions that line much of my street, now mostly condo conversions and offices. The entire neighborhood is protected by historic status requiring those conversions to retain the character of the street in its prime, circa 1900-20.

A street of titans of industry. Wells Fargo, Eastman Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, Xerox, and many more, many of whom are long gone. But their temples to consumption remain under that canopy.

There is a large lawn outside my building, a sign that it was once intended to be posh urban living at its best, and two enormous trees that shade my apartment. It’s very nice though a bit worn, which I am fine with. I am a bit worn myself.

Trees are somewhat of a luxury these days, especially long lived ones. Blights, like the emerald ash borer, have city foresters struggling to save the many beautiful ash trees here. An effect of global warming that made our growing zone more hospitable to the bugs. Even worse, the scourge of ticks, but I’ll leave that for now.

Most of us don’t really realize what living among these trees, under that dense canopy, offers us beyond green and shade. When I spend several days dogsitting at my friend’s downtown loft which is surrounded by freeway ramps, when I get home, only a mile away, I can feel the oxygen rich air emanating from the greenery.

In fairness there are many trees downtown but unless they are in pocket parks, they don’t grow to the towering heights I have around me. Evolution says we are descended from primate tree dwellers and I think those memories are etched in us on some deep level. We want to get up there where it’s relatively safe, at least in some visceral memory.

Like many kids, lying on your back under a big tree in full leaf and gazing up was a magical experience. Seeing the symmetry, the circular canopy far above, and the green light filtering through. You could imagine a portal, a magical entry to a fantastic world.

Regretfully, these days I’m not doing a lot of lying on the ground but I still spend some time almost daily watching the treetops wave in the breezes or swinging violently as a storm blows up. Anyone who thinks trees are static beings is missing the boat and needs to spend more time on this ‘useless’ activity.

Probably some of the most useful activity time you could ever pursue. As I meditate more I see meditation opportunities all around me. It’s a perspective shift to see ‘useless’ activities as those moments that might be most valuable where growth comes from simply appreciating the moment.

I suppose that’s an emerging theme in this newsletter, seeking increased awareness in unexpected places. When I started a month ago I did not pursue themes, I wanted to see if they were there, so seeing something come out of it so early is gratifying. We’ll see what else shows up.

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***

As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

Image copyright 2026 Lucia Falsetti Guarino

I started this newsletter a few weeks ago for a very specific reason, to counterbalance my daily immersion in the demented world of US politics, and it has helped, in part because talking about daily life helps me reconnect with the things around us, our daily reality.

I can understand why spiritual seekers have always sought solitude, often in the wild places or a quiet cloister somewhere. In our chaotic world, that sounds idyllic though I suspect the reality of it is that it is simply another way of being in the world, because escape is not what life is about.

When I meditate for a few quiet moments, time slows down and I notice the slow things, an insect crawling across a vast plain of brick, a squirrel hiding nuts, the cooing of a morning dove. Wind in trees, cicadas singing on a warm night as fall approaches.

But also the roar of an overpowered sports car ripping through the neighborhood, or a blast of hip hop from a passing SUV, trailed by the dense fragrance of burning weed and laughter. That’s reality in my hood, a combination of beauty and a background of other humans passing through, constantly passing through.

No sheltered cloister with silent robed figures moving slowly by. And certainly not a cave high on a mountain range only populated by sheep and sky. Spiritual fantasies.

The constant reminder of this dichotomy between the raucous modern world and vestiges of an older one is everywhere if you slow and let it go by paying attention. Yes, I could internally bitch about that jerk in the unnecessarily loud sports car roaring through the neighborhood or those kids joyriding, music pounding and senses altered by a drug, now legal.

Far be it from me to criticize that. I was a kid once doing exactly the same thing on a late summer night, though we had the added frisson of getting high being illegal and the possibility of getting caught. The laws were draconian back then in an misguided attempt to solve a problem by arresting everyone.

Some lessons are never learned. Deportations without cause…

But politics is not allowed here, not too much anyway. Reality does not need politics, the power struggles are age old and rooted in evolution, the need to procreate, and survival. That squirrel squirreling away nuts for the long winter.

As the days visibly shorten, I squirrel away these moments of being outside in shorts and a tee shirt at night, savoring the warm evening air and the fragrances that are there if you stop and let them find you. I’ve noticed that when you pass a fragrant shrub, trying to smell it doesn’t work, you have to simply let it get there on its own.

Trying too hard defeats the fleeting nature of that kind of beauty. A good thing to remember when life gets overwhelming. Stop trying. Just go do something else, something quiet, and the fragrances will find you.

There is a Zen saying that says when you wash dishes, just wash dishes. It helps me when I have to empty the dishwasher or take out the trash. Just do it and move on. A lesson that takes time to be learned. Buddhism talks a lot about not doing, which is basically just emptying the dishwasher, then it’s done.

I spent my twenties and early thirties in a rock band on a path to making it, though we did not quite get there. Eventually the stuff involved outweighed those moments when it was magical, a room full of hundreds of kids all in the same moment and the band in sync. Fame is not the why of that, the moment is the why.

That hasn’t changed, if anything it is the reason to do anything, to tap into the flow which only exists right now. It’s not always easy to find that because, like all magical things, you can’t really seek them, all you can do is be open to the possibility. And know it may come when we least expect it, often in places where would never expect transcendence.

Maybe while meditating in a quiet garden while just outside cars roar by and kids chase their own bliss. Noise can be music.

“Do not doubt that mountains walk simply because they may not appear to walk like humans.”

Dogen Roshi

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***

As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic

Image copyright 2026, Lucia Falsetti Guarino

My career, if you can call it that, did not end with an announcement and a gold watch, nor did I get pushed out for being too old. Instead I had a more modern path towards the mythological state of retirement. The last two years before the big R I had a contract with a small company and then when Covid hit I made the transition to freelancing, doing writing for two small software companies in Europe.

I never actually spoke with my contacts at those companies. We communicated via Slack and email and that worked well for all of us. And then I stopped pursuing it, the lockdown and the rise of AI changed things, and I found myself retired.

It was only when asked what kind of work I do that I mouthed the words ‘I’m retired’. Or, more accurately, I’m a writer and I’m mostly retired. Both were true, I no longer worked for others but I have always been writing and getting paid something for it.

My newsletter on politics kept my hand in and I recently added this newsletter. They generate pocket change which is common for most writers working here on Substack. However, adding a second letter has me rethinking whether I am really retired in the old sense of the word.

I spend about four hours a day writing, researching, and editing so it feels more like a part time job, albeit a poorly paid one! That’s alright for now.

Retirement used to be a cliche, move to Florida and play golf, that sort of thing. I’m not a Florida guy. I can handle a weekend there near water in mid-winter but long term, no thanks. I am happy to say that despite being relatively poor, I like my life where I am. Though if you ask me in February when the end of winter seems far off, I might claim otherwise.

Lately I’ve been refocusing on walking and meditation as a counterbalance to writing and so far so good. When I look around me at friends and family I find they all keep busy. My brother and my closest friend are both artists and when I meet strangers while out who are retired I find they generally are pretty busy with their own interests.

But those who do not have a personal avocation, something they pursue both for pleasure and possibly profit, often become lost. You lose touch, they stop socializing, or worse. If you’re not retired yet, I seriously think you should think about what you are going to do because we don’t do weekly living with no direction.

That direction has to come from within and it must fulfill something besides killing time. You no longer have others supplying motivation and reason for what you do. You’re on your own with that.

For me that is a form of bliss, though the money thing can get stressful at times. But when I look around I am astounded at the things people casually spend money on when they have it. I was the same way until it became obvious that buying drinks and dinners out several nights a week was no longer viable.

In some strange way, the Covid lockdown helped with that transition. It was actually hard to spend money on frivolous things when no place was open. To judge by the onslaught of packages accumulating daily in the lobby of my building, people were still spending but that tapered off in recent years.

I suspect the lockdown sped up retirement for many as they realized they could get by and could keep themselves busy and stimulated. Though others may simply have given up, never an option for me.

(It occurs to me that maybe we should consider temporary retirement at various times in life when change is needed, a reset of sorts…)

It’s a bit strange finding yourself doing things like simply sitting outside and watching the world go by, clouds and dog walkers, joggers, and the occasional crazy person having conversations with themselves. Or are they on the phone?

Life. I make time everyday I can, weather permitting, to simply find a nice place to sit outdoors and not think. I probably know every place to sit within miles, in part because of issues with a back injury, which are now subsiding, thank you.

Of course the subconscious is thinking all the time, but letting the surface be calm offers the subconscious the ability to operate on autopilot. In my case it is often about something I’m writing or thinking about writing.

This all seems a great luxury to me these days. To make a coffee, read the news, or simply watch the world. I know that for many that seems like giving up but I’d argue that you are living more when you are no longer conforming with the world of work.

There is always a dark side to this waking dream and unfortunately many do not have the option of those luxuries. The dark side generally has something to do with health issues but these days the sheer cost of everything is more than a bit scary too. I’m not eating a lot of steaks these days.

But even that is interesting. Because a steak is a rare treat, it can be viewed as another luxury, one that I don’t need everyday. And that turns out to be the case with a lot of things that were once taken for granted. They turn out to be just things. The key is to find pleasure in what we have. And that’s really not hard.

Sometimes, when I’m watching the clouds go by from a perch on a parkbench or writing with a cappuccino at hand, I remember when the luxury of those things was equally as rare as those steaks today.

I don’t miss sitting in an office and wanting to be somewhere else. Though I’m happy to say that didn’t happen often.

I do remember the kid I once was, staring out the windows at school as summer approaches, impatient for days of just living. Full circle I guess.

When I started thinking about this newsletter, my working title was The Third Third. That was based on the idea that a life can be divided into thirds, roughly years one to thirty, when we explore, learn, and screw up, thirty-one to sixty, when we grow into this life a little more calmly, and sixty-one to…when we mentor, thrive or fade, and get reborn maybe. The Third Third.

It’s catchy but I did not want to write exclusively for people my age, I don’t only hang out with my peers, I try to interact with anyone up for a good conversation, and I’ve had some doozies. But the thirds idea still hangs out there when I write about my situation.

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***

As with my other newsletter, The Witness Chronicles, both paid subscriptions and free get everything. There is no paywalled content. Paid subs are simply a way to show appreciation.

Substack requires monthly payments for paid subscriptions to be at least $5. I wanted a way to offer a discount on that so if you pay annually the cost is $30, a 50% discount over monthly payments. I offer another way to show a little support and that is via Buy Me A Coffee, a site where you can contribute in $5 increments. It’s legit and uncomplicated.

Thank you for joining me on this new little journey. It’s evolving, so you never know what will come up. Subscribe (free or paid) to see for yourself.

Martin Edic