The music up in my head is the Every Valley intro section of the Gospel Messiah that we watched on Maine Public. The Albert Hall was rocking. I would love to know how the classically trained tenor learned scatting. And scatting is not so different from what Handel was doing with the elaborate climbs and trills on the vowels. And if a black classical tenor is scatting to a jazzy arrangement of Messiah with millions viewing it, does that indicate that a valley did indeed get exhalted? I'm still waiting for the mountain to be brought low.

At the end of this year my thoughts are about empires, both evil and benign, and how they roll across history like some atmospheric turbulence and how ordinary humans are just hunkered down on the plains trying to find shelter and live a life. My heroes are those who spoke out against evil when others tried to appease it or who organized against it or who found some way to make life better for people in spite of it. The catholic church seems to have a good memory of what happened last time they sided with the nazis and are doing it way better this time. I fervently hope that 2026 is the year, things begin to turn around.

I'm reading a fifty year old Russian science fiction novel. It's considered a classic, although something written in 1972 will almost always be demeaning to women. One reviewer says that the book's "pragmatic nihilism" rejects the very thing science fiction so often depends on: human significance. The aliens visited earth and left a ton of artifacts and weird tech in six zones, but had no contact with people. But the story is about people, scavengers and scientists, trying to make sense of worlds beyond our comprehension. So... daily life with a few more props.

Solstice celebration, auction, and staff breakfast. Somewhere in all that I caught a cold and it's wonderful to be home dully staring at the christmas tree. If there were more books like Revenge of the Tipping Point I would read them one after the other until my brain exploded. Citing the example of the change of opinion on gay marriage, he shows how a percentage of support creeps up until it hits the magic third or the magic quarter when 25 or 30 percent of people change their minds and then boom, the tipping point is reached and the "overstory" changes to general acceptance. Some people attributed that to the one on one, door to door work done by activists; Gladwell says that the overstory was changed by television, by eleven seasons of Will and Grace which started in 1998 when most people watched the same thing, network television.
People never see the tipping point coming. Nothing happens, then everything happens. I think we could be close to a tipping point on single payer healthcare, Medicare For All. And I'm watching democratic socialist candidates win elections in red districts.

...the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”

Maybe a tiny house condo? No, it's how the Amish ship a load of ice huts.

The Penobscot Bay Singers performance of the Vivaldi Gloria in a Belfast church was lovely and satisfying and their conductor has the kind of energy that turns regional choirs into stars. Driving home in the dark was fine; the roads were clear and my car has good headlights. We shouldn't be such weiners about it.

Interesting to chat with the Piotti's at intermission. John was the person who started economic development and community building in Unity twenty years ago. He is the model I follow; from him I learned the practice of matching income streams with projects, the efficiency of a director with a governance board rather than a working board, the reality that financial investment and volunteerism go together to build community, the inefficiency of grudge holding, the beauty of risk. He designed the building that houses the library.

Six of us in a room for two hours decided what our group would read in 2026. Here it is. We don't just read pretty novels, and we like diving in on current political topics.