Matthew Chisholm > Recent Status Updates

“I see someone who cares...perhaps too much. Who feels too much. I see someone lost, and hungry. The kind of person who feels like they’re wasting away in a world of food, because they can’t decide what they want.”

The premise of this book, although slow to unravel, is one of the most unique I’ve ever experienced.

Continues to be more or less an imperial story with some sprinkles of native and female voices. McCullough is gifted in telling a story as it happens on the ground, but he’s not very clever with interpretation of his source methodology.

A top down look at the first pioneers that set West to explore the would-be imperial American frontier land grab. Refreshing revision to the idea that Lewis and Clark were first. Still a bit too reliant on rich, white men’s stories. I’m still intrigued so far; mostly because I feel like I should have been alive in the 1780s.

"More often than not, he'd felt like a spectator in the background of his own life. He thought after he'd bought this house it would be different. It wasn't. He thought after he'd let Misty move in that things might change. He could have some semblance of a normal life. He was wrong. Most of the time he felt as hollow and lifeless as the ghosts he spent all his time with." (91)

...much of the experience I try to share in this book is, at its deepest level, inaccessible....I am left, ultimately, at an end of language, having nothing more than my own emptiness to report, though gradually coming to recognize emptiness itself as a profound and wonderful gift.

The same man who ran through his university yelling that he had a hotline to Jesus created a formula that explained altruism in purely evolutionary terms. Humans are crazy.

The treatment of women in the National Forest Service is appalling. Shocking to see how sexual harassment fell WAY under the radar decades after the Armed Services found competent ways to fight it.

There are tens of billions of exoplanets that exist in the habitable zone of the Milk Way Galaxy alone. 😳

“Our mind can live in the past, the future, or any fantasy place it wants, but our body only processes the now.”

How do we keep what is left of Bears Ears National Monument but still also allow some form of responsible use of the landscape for resource extraction? How do we stop a mindset of mutual exclusivity?

“We are a show-me species, wired to look for visible evidence of invisible harm.”