apple crumble and partial solar eclipse

Saturday morning, the house smells of apple crumble, R tells me he is using up the jumbo oats. His cooking and baking skills improve with every new step on the road to using up food that could go off. When many years ago, his parents had a nasty stomach bug, he began to silently clear way-past-due-date items from their fridge and freezer every time he visited in an attempt to keep them healthy. They both died of cancer and much too young but not because there was any rotten/rotting food in the house. His mother initially got furious and called it waste but after all, he is a science teacher and they loved each other. Anyway, just to explain why R makes apple crumble at 7:30 am on a Saturday.

This time of the year, the garden is taken over by pansies (which is what we call primulas because family folklore), those little flowering bunches that just sit there in the shadows of the big and famous plants. The thing about pansies is that they spread, like buttercups, quietly and efficiently, so much so that today, I stopped counting at 100, including the ones that have come up between the paving stones. Here's a selection, inconclusive but they are all different in small ways. We could do our own Gregor Mendel pea flower evolutionary research with our pansy fleet.

 

 

There's much to enjoy and be delighted about in house and garden and family and I am trying hard to stay with it, while watching the polls and the way the neonazi column is growing and listening to various government officials on the real danger of what that mad man in Moscow will do next.

 

And then we watched Adolescence, of course we did and when it was over R, bless him, said, will there be a second season concentrating on the women, the girls? I realised that at times I had held my breath in anger. Don't get me wrong, excellent tv and all, but maybe read Rebecca Solnit's review also.

 

And I'll leave this here from poet Hollie McNish. 

And right now, there is a partial solar eclipse, nothing dramatic, the birds did not stop singing, but I can see my neighbours of all ages on their patios and on the sidewalks looking at this celestial wonder through weird googles and there's much whoa and awe.

In the twenty-first century, evolutionary thought shifted to the group and culture as the units of analysis. Discoveries of the cooperative tendencies of young children; our universal inclination to share; our instinct to attach, belong, and be tribal; and the neurophysiology of empathy, contagion, mirroring, connection, compassion, and exploration were revealing a new lens upon human nature: we are hypersocial species who accomplish almost all survival-related tasks, from raising the vulnerable offspring to provision of food, in collaborative, often altruistic groups. 

Groups that collaborate well and build a sense of shared identity, this reasoning would advance, are more likely to prevail and survive. And culture - the system of beliefs and practices that unite individuals into community - is an ever revolving repository of shared knowledge and experience, a collective mind that enables us to adapt together to the challenges and opportunities in our natural and social environments.

Dacher Keltner