www.toshen.com Open in urlscan Pro
173.236.243.19  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

Woodworking · Reading · Living





SEARCHING FOR CONTENTMENT

In the fragrance of freshly worked wood

The soft glow cast by shoji lamps

The inspiration of good reads

The wonder of daily living


She hadn't exactly feared the word contentment, but had always associated it
with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer
a thing. To be restless, striving.

Louise Erdrich
The Master Butchers Singing Club


GLOBAL TEMPERATURE CHANGE (1850-2023)


See your own area: Show Your Stripes⩘ 


MY HEART IS WITH THE PEOPLE OF UKRAINE



#StandWithUkraine⩘ 


MY CONTEMPLATIONS ABOUT UKRAINE >


READING


SANORA BABB, WHOSE NAMES ARE UNKNOWN

Well narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan

After watching the Ken Burns documentary, The Dust Bowl⩘ , I decided to listen
to two related books, both written in the late 1930s about the same people—the
farmers driven off their lands by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression—during
the same period, the decade of the 1930s: Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora
Babb, which was scheduled to be published in the late 1930s until the second
book was published first, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, and Babb's book
was shelved until 2004, a year before her death.


JOHN STEINBECK, THE GRAPES OF WRATH

Well narrated by Dylan Baker

Both of these books are tough to experience as they dive deeply into the misery
visited on good people by circumstances beyond their control, as well as by the
way people with money, capital, and land ruthlessly took advantage of their
plight.

I appreciated Babb's book more, as I found it more succinct and personal, but
both books are well worth listening to or reading.

As I was listening to these two books, I kept thinking about how this story is
being repeated now and is going to be repeated many more times over the coming
years and decades due to our current climate crisis. Also as I was listening to
them, I read, in as state of stunned disbelief, about how Governor Gavin Newsom
in California is leading a massive charge to force homeless people out of their
encampments, stripping them of their meager possessions and destroying the
encampments, even when many of the homeless have nowhere else to go. How
heartless can you get?

From Whose Names Are Unknown:

> What these big companies got is power. I've been reading the papers whenever I
> can find an old one laying around, and everything in the world now is power:
> countries trying to get more power than the next one, and they're mean getting
> it, like our bosses're mean getting theirs and keeping it. You can laugh if
> you want to, but I figure these bosses of ours, they might as well be
> outsiders for all they care about the people that do the work. They're looking
> out for the Almighty Dollar, and if they have to starve us to get more'n they
> can count, they can do it because there's more where we come from; they can do
> it because they never have to look a poor man or woman in the eye.

Whose Names Are Unknown: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004; audiobook: Recorded
Books, 2014.
The Grapes of Wrath: The Viking Press-James Lloyd, 1939; audiobook: Penguin
Audio, 2011.


MORE RECENT READING >


CONTEMPLATING


THE DUST BOWL, A FILM BY KEN BURNS
CHRONICLES THE WORST MAN-MADE ECOLOGICAL DISASTER IN AMERICAN HISTORY.



A powerful documentary film.

In the 1920s, the Great Plains were the bread basket of America, with millions
of acres of wheat replacing the wild grasses that had originally grown there.
But bad ecological practices, in part driven by unadulterated greed on the part
of land speculators, created a disaster in waiting. When drought and
accompanying winds hit in the 1930s, and the Great Depression drove down prices
on wheat below the cost of production, the disaster hit with gale force, and it
lasted for a decade.

> It was the result of a whole bunch of things that are just innate to human
> beings.

While we learned some lessons, like contour plowing, we are now rushing towards
another, perhaps far worse disaster, as now irrigation water is being pumped
from the great reservoir beneath the great plains that was deposited there
during the last ice age, and it is being used up so fast, that we have perhaps a
decade before there won't even be drinking water left for the entire region, let
alone irrigation water.

And while the Great Plains makes up a significant portion of the U.S., it is
small compared to the world, and we are now treating the entire world with the
same greedy disregard as we treated the Great Plains in the 1920s. As
devastating as the Dust Bowl was to the people who lived there, they did at
least have the option, unattractive as it was, to leave their entire lives
behind and at least try to restart somewhere else. What will we do as our entire
planet becomes enveloped in ecological disaster and we have nowhere to escape
to?

The Dust Bowl, a film by Ken Burn⩘ , PBS, 2012.


MORE RECENT CONTEMPLATIONS >


LIVING IN THE ROCKIES

There were a lot of gifts on my walk today, like these clusters of peach-tinged
boxelder seeds that are forming in preparation for taking flight later in the
year.



There are a fair number of wild roses growing along the way, though most have
only one or a couple flowers. These wild roses are growing in a protected place
at the base of a rocky cliff where they get some sun, but not too much, and
therefore are in soil that is slower to dry out during the sometimes long
stretches between rainfalls that we have here. So they are big, vibrant, and
full of fragrant flowers.



It looks like we're going to have a year rich in wild grapes. Soon, the air is
going to be full of their most wonderful fragrance wafting on the breeze.




LARGER VERSION OF THESE PHOTOS >
MORE RECENT PHOTOS >


WOODWORKING


A NOTE ABOUT THE IMAGE AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE



The Windtraveler—a shoji lamp I created in the shape of a deltoidal
hexecontahedron—is made of 60 deltoid-shaped faces (like kites) framed in maple.
Each five deltoids meeting at the more pointed bottom tips form a pentagon,
creating a total of 12 pentagons, which is a dodecahedron. Each three deltoids
meeting at the broader top tips form a triangle, creating a total of 20
triangles, which is an icosahedron. Within each deltoid frame are thinner 1/4
inch inner frames made of mahogany, with additional strips that run from the top
tip to the bottom tip of each deltoid forming 120 right angle triangles, which
reveal a hexakis icosahedron. The inner mahogany frames are backed by washi, a
traditional Japanese paper, which creates a gentle shade for the light cast by
the light bulbs within to pass through.


MORE ABOUT THIS PROJECT >
MORE WOODWORKING >


MY JOURNEY



Love nature. As a kid, I just wanted to be out playing in the woods that
surrounded our small town home. When younger, I lived a few places around the
world and visited several others … then found a place in the foothills of the
Rockies and my heart was home. When I'm out walking, I snap photos and post the
better ones on this site to preserve the opportunity to revisit some of these
exquisite experiences. Photos >

Love reading. Growing up, I carried armloads of books home each week from the
library. Now tend to carry around a virtual stack of audiobooks. I deeply
appreciate authors, narrators, and translators. Since 1999, I've been posting
reviews on this site, in the more recent years focused on just those books I
appreciate the most. I listen to or read a lot of genres, fiction and
nonfiction, and particularly appreciate well done speculative fiction. Reading >

Love woodworking. A passionate amateur, I revere wood. My main focus has been
shoji lamps in the shape of polyhedra. I love the light that glows through washi
and deeply appreciate the folks who make these papers. I'm entranced by the
dance of polyhedra patterns, and keep notes on my website about the experience
of making some of the lamps. I've also made a fair bit of our furniture, and
have done some woodworking to fix up our old home. Woodworking >

Love our beautiful, fragile planet. I'm deeply concerned about climate and all
the life we are carelessly and rapidly degrading and destroying.


Photo credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

Awed by space and astronomy. Photos of a spiral galaxies melt my heart and also
inspire me to wonder whether I'm originally from another planet in another
galaxy. See also: Our home in this wondrous universe⩘ 


Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Value privacy. I think online privacy should be the default state. Because it's
not, I try to protect at least some of my privacy online, especially against
greedy corporations. I deeply appreciate the work that folks like Cory
Doctorow⩘  and organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)⩘  are
doing on our behalf.

See also: Privacy Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your
Data by Carissa Véliz⩘  and McLuhan lecture on enshittification by Cory
Doctorow⩘ .

Some helpful online privacy tools:
 
Also: DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection⩘ 

Keystones: Respect, compassion, empathy, acceptance. We're all in this together.



Home · Woodworking · Reading · Living

 
Hello

he/him

@Mastodon



This work by Toshen⩘ 
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 4.0 International License⩘ 

I code this site by hand using
Nova by Panic⩘ 
HTML5
CSS3

Since 1999

A note on the fonts used:
My logo uses Jill Bell's Bruno JB,
"an enigma wrapped within a riddle,"
which I enjoy for its playful flair.
The rest of my website uses
standard sans serif,
which is simple
and respects
 privacy.

Privacy statement⩘ 

Background image:
Fern Lake
Rocky Mountain National Park