Local sunrise / publish time: 0349 UTC (+3m)Hello world. Can you believe we've made it to this side of the apex? The long nights and frost are drawing in and .. well, not quite yet. But summer solstice always reminds me a little of where I was 6 months ago, and a lot more about where I'll be in another 6 months. This week the thunder was loud and even the ants are flying.“If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day." - Anthon St. Maarten I've been falling into a permaculture rabbit hole recently, on the back of reading Looby Macnamara's book mentioned last week. So this week's links might have more of a garden and farming feel than usual. Enjoy.Linksprinciples: Thinking a lot about principles as a way of guiding our actions this week. Some links on my radar are the three ethics of permaculture which I like because three is a good number, a new solarpunk manifesto, and six …

Local sunrise / publish time: 0346 UTC (+1m, ☰)Well, my calendars say it's summer solstice on Saturday, and my sunrise checker says Saturday and Sunday have the same number of seconds of daylight, so I figure somewhere out there, some major computations have decided that Saturday was a teensieth quanta of a grasshopper's leg shorter than Sunday. Either way, it's solstice weekend and a time to celebrate, take a pause, look straight up and see the clouds and that ring around the sun which you can't always see but you know it's there and you can feel it in your heart warming you when you wake up until you go to sleep. Bang the drums, blow the flutes, salute the flowers and spin in circles - fill yourself with light!And because there are too many words and not enough silences in this world, here is a void to fill with the songs of birds:Linkscommunities: Could mini-forests help establish networks and corridors of biodiversity in urban (and, indeed, rural areas crowded …

Local sunrise / publish time: 0345 UTC (-2m)Well it's one of those weeks when the flies are buzzing and the links are jumping out the walls. Not long until we hit maximum daylight here in the summer hemisphere, and the bindweed is having a party. Today the clouds looked like feathers dropped by the great god of birds for seagulls to play in. There's a clue somewhere in that. Get out and spread your wings.It's Sunday, here's the Beamspun.Returningintegrate: I've been fascinated by foraging for a few years, so was looking up cow parsley which also looks like hemlock it turns out. Anyway, the first half of this video on cow parsley and hemlock is all about not just foraging, but about getting away from books and screens, and getting to know plants up close and personal, out and about, in the wild. Embrace the wild, learn from each other, take a journey.healing: We're not happy, and we don't know what comes next. Here's a long read where humanity goes throu…

Local sunrise / publish time: 0347 UTC (-5m)Feels like a strange week to be writing about the future. The recent past seems like lifetimes ago, and the bitter histories people worked so hard to cover up carry on blowing into the present. Bait and switch between then and now, buried spirits becoming the shoots of something new, and yet so familiar. The summer weeds returning to the pavements and the undeveloped land, WE KNOW ALL THIS yet we want to be distracted by the future. Let's face it, the world has been driven by a longing for sci-fi since before I -probably you too - was born. Our sense of control and connection was always a myth from the before-days, yet here we stand, able to do anything we want, if we really want it. Or is that just an illusion too? Like the eyes on a moth's wings telling you that you're beautiful. Believe the wings, trust in the wings.And yet among the confusion, we find togetherness. We thread our strings through voices and ideas and "yeah…