Outside The Box

I forgot to turn on the electric fence around the garden the other night, and something deprived me of at least one good tomato sandwich. I won’t make that mistake again, and I’m looking for a recipe for Lapin à la Tomate. I wonder if you can substitute groundhog…

Parking arrangements around here are changing again as the attack of the persimmons has begun. But this year there’s a bear cub to help keep them tidied up. He’s already helped out by digging up the yellow‑jacket nest that took out a contract on the back of my leg.

This has been the greenest, wettest, steamiest drought I can remember, but the persimmons, the Jerusalem artichokes, and the uptick in hummingbird activity tell me that the muffled drum still beats the passage of time and our best weather is on its way. It was 53 degrees the other morning, and that’s good sleepin’ weather.

It’s been two weeks now since I put social media in the rear‑view mirror, and as I had hoped, that energy diverted and contamination removed has yielded a finer focus on the ground underneath my feet and the abundance of blessings all around. I did see a “cat post” the other day, but it was just Samantha on a fence post showing off.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” It’s not that the internet, news, and social media are inherently bad, but the combined effects are new enough that in some ways we are still children left alone with no adult supervision. We don’t yet know how constant connectivity to uncurated information will steer the generations that come after us. Some of the early indications are troubling.

But to reject the technology outright is unwise. You might as well try to live without electricity. It can be done, but the opportunity cost is high. It’s equally unwise to accept it all at face value and expect to navigate it successfully without understanding it. Ask anyone who has tried to log in to their bank account without a cell phone handy.

As for the great boogeyman of AI, it is much better to understand it than to fear it or reject it outright. You can reject it, but it will affect you anyhow. It’s here, and it’s rapidly embedding itself into all aspects of society.

I prefer to think of it as a tool, and lately it’s been a tool that has enhanced my enjoyment of that all‑important cup of morning coffee. After all, coffee, as Jackie Chan once said, is a language all its own.

Here’s how I did it. It took a bit of doing, but I used my AI assistant to set up a “regional intelligence briefing” that takes about a cup and a half to absorb. It scans my list of preferred sources, does a cross‑reference and verification, and creates a brief that includes only information that might affect our health, safety, or finances, come up our road, or be waiting for us at the places where we travel. There’s no rage bait, doomscroll, or celebrity, and not a single word about women’s basketball.

In the end, the world right in front of me has proven to be the best curator of all. The garden, the weather, the small creatures passing through — they remind me that a life is shaped by whatever we allow to occupy the mind. I’d rather let the quiet truths of this place dye my thoughts than the endless churn of the digital world. And if that means my days take on the color of persimmons, cool mornings, and a good cup of coffee, that seems a fair trade.