Every day when I sign out of our company slack, I post a moon emoji to signal ‘goodnight’. I’m careful to choose the actual correct moon emoji for the time: 🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘, as is appropriate to the day. I don’t know why, except I like the idea of incepting my coworkers with some kind of moon-sense. But for my site, I wanted something more specific to my spot in the world – and the moon is a global phenomenon.
Let’s start here with a jaunty one-footed hop: Matt Kirkland, quoted above, has addressed this desire for a localized website feature by building an automatically-rotating playlist of bird calls and songs based on current migration patterns in his region. To this I say: !!!
I have never loved anything more. (Also his reading blog? Swoon.)
Next hop, all in: I’m a big fan of the moon.
I’ve been running a space via Patreon for the past year and change called Nü Mün Creative Club, which helps folks carve out two hours of dedicated monthly time to attend to what truly matters to them. Wherever you fall on lunar wooga wooga stuff, the fact remains: new moon time is DARK. It’s secret and quiet and a good time to focus on things I care about that need to be just for me. But doing that together? It rules. We get to have our secrets in concert.
Funny, then, that it felt so much harder to launch a similar Community Hour (also via Patreon, but free) for people to gather on Zoom at the other end of the lunar cycle. Launching something full moon-adjacent is scarier because it’s light. You gotta be visible.
I’m trying to illuminate the people who spend time in this online space I’ve created—to rest a little more weight on the ties that hold us to each other. It’s important work, but the kind of thing that’s taken a back seat during a season when I need people who are close enough to hang out with my dad of an evening so he doesn’t fall over.
Sideways hop on a tenuous single foot: Matt’s post also introduced me to Low-tech Magazine‘s SOLAR-POWERED WEBSITE.
Because our load (the server) has a rather constant power use, during the day our battery meter reflects the local solar conditions. If the panel receives full sun, the voltage will raise above 13V, coloring the whole website in yellow. However, if it gets cloudy, the battery meter will decrease and the blue background is revealed. During the night, the battery meter reflects the storage capacity of the battery accurately.
When the voltage of the battery drops below 12V, and the whole page is coloured in blue, the solar charge controller shuts down the system and the website goes offline. It will come back when the panel receives full sun again.
I’ve been on the hunt for something as clear and useful as their explainer on building small solar power systems for ages. Instant bookmark.
A further hop-skip in this direction: I totally forgot that I wrote an essay for the inaugural issue of The Disconnect, a magazine you have to turn your wi-fi off in order to read.
Returning to the main business with both feet on the next square: I’m feeling the tension Matt names between global and local phenomena in my online habits these days. Ojai and its surrounding unincorporated areas are home to a little over 10,000 people. That’s about the number of folks who follow me on Instagram or (RIP) Twitter, and realistically a very small percentage of those people live anywhere nearby.
But I care a lot about what happens here! I wish I could bring all my cool internet pals down to my studio for a drawing night, or meet up at the newly-reopened Ojai Playhouse for a free screening, or have a community picnic at the park. This is something living in Portland was pretty good for—I could throw a wide invite net onto social media and reliably have a crew gather for An Event.
I’m working on building that network here, and it’s coming along, but it’s different. It’s always different everywhere you go.
(Maybe come get your portrait drawn for free next month at Night Bart’s?)
A one-footed leap to the next tenuous link in this thought cloud: I’ve seen a handful of links to Elise Granata‘s newsletter in the past week and finally clicked through this morning and oh wow, what a crush-worthy human. This one about “7 ideas to jumpstart community practice” is riffing on the local web-weaving theme. I’m grinning and nodding along to bulletin boards and email lists and all the ways beyond social media we can find out what’s going on around us. (I have yet, however, to find a good substitute for Pete‘s rainfall gauge reportage on Instagram.)
Her essay on Becoming a High Agency Person is singing in harmony with Marge and I love it:
For the purpose of this piece, I’m thinking about agency on the (seemingly) smallest scale. I experience agency when I sew a button back onto my sweater that has been dangling for months. When I tidy up my clothes chair that I have been meaning to tidy for months. When I mail a friend a letter…that I have been meaning to mail for months. (There is a theme and the theme is “for months”.)
It is desiring something and acting on that desire so that it leaves your consciousness and now exists alongside you in the real world.
Agency occurs when: the gap between the idea and the realization of the idea is as small as possible.
^ That’s the mock-up and realization of my studio window display, which has only grown more elaborate as time’s gone by.
Another hop, more certain now, nearing the end of the line: A link in Elisa’s newsletter leads me to Garrett Bucks and the Barnraisers Project and this list of “Thirty lonely but beautiful actions you can take right now which probably won’t magically catalyze a mass movement against Trump but that are still wildly important.”
I get halfway through before I realize these things are the sign I need to make the thing I want to make for my neighbors—a little zine introducing myself and trying to build out my map of who lives where in my immediate surroundings. Our street has no sidewalks. Traffic is fast, and most places are set back from the road. Hence: no trick-or-treating when I was a kid, no cul-de-sac games of basketball in the road. But I’ve met a couple people while dog-sitting (a dog walk is the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation with a neighbor) and I’m curious. I want to know who else calls this road home.
The questions that kept stopping me were things like “What if nobody writes back?” “How can I be sure I’m reaching out to people who are aligned with me?” “Should I use a burner number?” “Do I need to make an online component?” “What if I just end up reinventing NextDoor with all the NIMBY racism that entails?”
Mailing a zine doesn’t require answers to any of those things. Not really. It’s an excuse to do something that might spark surprise and delight in the people around me. It’s laying groundwork for something to come. I want to trust that the right people will find each other; will find me.
Last square, both feet: My new friend asks “So…what are your dreams?” as we sit under the awning at Rainbow Bridge with a tumultuous downpour flooding the streets.
I take a deep breath
and begin.
