Prefigurative Hospitality with Hestia

I appear to be the last person to figure out I am in some kind of longterm thing with Hestia, but in retrospect it’s really really obvious given my priorities and values.

I recently started making all kinds of leftist type connections to Hestia. Hospitality ethics are important to me (being a good host but also being a good guest) both personally and on like… a broader Global Citizen sort of level. I have a lot of reflexive animism type habits, and I definitely think of a home as a sort of… creature? A partner. Home protects me, and I take care of it the best I can too. I did some emotional/personal work in college around the importance of generally-devalued domestic stuff like juggling the needs of the people who live in a place, and that has stayed with me. Being attentive and curious about what people need is not just important; it’s interesting to me.

This means that, in a very real way, deliberately creating a society that requires a desperate underclass, that requires scarcity, precarity, and deprivation… that’s fucking blasphemy to me. Sweeping the encampments of houseless people? Blasphemy. Evicting people because it isn’t profitable for their landlord for them to be housed? Blasphemy. Buying up living space to make sure it stays empty long enough to appreciate in value? Blasphemy. Shutting off people’s utilities in dangerous weather? Blasphemy. Fuck all of that shit. Utterly repellent.

I also love the mechanics of homes. All the material systems and factors that go into making a building habitable and hospitable? I love that shit. Shit like plumbing and wiring and stuff. It’s really fucking cool to me.

There’s also this concept of prefigurative politics, which is generally considered an anarchist thing but I think is useful more widely across a lot of frameworks. Basically, if you want society to look a certain way, but your methods recreate The Shit, maybe you need to rethink. Like how a lot of activist orgs are hideous places to work: fighting for health care access without providing insurance, supporting the idea of unions but depending on an organizational structure that workplace democracy would utterly destroy, etc. Basically, if you can’t achieve something resembling your goals on a small scale right now, it’s gonna undermine your credibility when you say we can and should do it on a societal level. Because like. Do you really think that? Do you?

This connects for me with the Hellenist idea of the oikos (family/household/etc) because the oikos was society on the smallest possible scale, the tiniest component part of society that still reflects and creates it. Hestia didn’t just have household altars; she had pride of place in the ancient equivalent of the city council and the capitol building. Because that concept of a hearth runs from the broader national scale all the way down to the family, and all these mutually-supporting moving parts do the same thing on different scales and all of them owe the whole idea of being in communion in life-sustaining ways to Hestia.

So thinking about chosen family, or affinity groups, those are the smallest scale representation of the society we build with our choices and connections. The ways in which we care for and defend each other and create and sustain homes, that’s all hers. I care a lot about upholding standards in small bubbles and then just letting them grow and impact others and continually raise standards for adjacent bubbles and then their adjacent bubbles, etc. It’s not just a test of ideals to see if they can be implemented; I feel like it’s the most efficient use of social power and safest guarantee of actually creating change. It’s generally small, but it’s guaranteed and activism doesn’t have many guarantees so I take them where I can get them.

This whole idea of having a hearth space, defending and sustaining the people who are a part of it, that’s hers. The obligation of a space’s host to the tone and impact of the space? That’s a hospitality obligation to me. That’s hers. Seeing that a dangerous person is ejected from a space they’re abusing? That’s Hestia’s business. If you’re gonna host a space, you are responsible for how it gets used.

I’ve seen modern epithets for her be everything from “Hestia of the well-brewed coffee” to “Hestia of the shotgun on the porch.” And that whole… that whole energy. I love it. It’s important to me. And it’s all hers.

To Steal a Wife

the old coast is rocky and long, jagged and filled with colorful and tough things living half their lives in salt under the icy Labrador current out of Newfoundland, and half their lives under the sun in pools at low tide

if you see a girl at peace in the sun, on the rocks, in the pools at low tide, look for a warm comfortable skin, the only thing she owns in the world

for it is her power to transform:

to choose who and where to be

if you keep it, they say she makes an excellent wife
they also say she will be sad all her days but still they say
take it.

they say it to fishermen but men aren’t the only lonely beach walkers, are they?
take it.
what use is transformation, to an excellent wife? what use is leaving?
whose hands but yours could her stolen skin ever need to feel?

Important Essay About Ambient Trauma

I don’t do a lot of reblogging on here, but this felt really important and maybe it’ll resonate for others the way it does for me.

Healing from ambient trauma will require destroying the ideologies and systems that engender harm and in their place cultivating more just and caring ways of living.  CW: discussion of trauma in the general & abstract form (i.e. no specific details), with occasional reference to specific environmental disasters and general events By Jonathan Fisk Nobody is…

Ambient Trauma: Giving Name To The Burgeoning Pains Of Our Times — Wear Your Voice

Meeting Nemesis

If you’ve been following me for a little while, you remember me looking into the goddess Nemesis. (https://cobaltwtf.wordpress.com/2021/02/05/nemesis-then-and-now/) What I don’t think I ever elaborated on was why and how she popped up on my radar (or I on hers, who knows).

I was doing a curse-breaking work a friend helped me set up, and the candle flame was behaving pretty wildly. Flickery, splitting, jumping, flaring, just all over the place doing its thing. My friend said that that means something is trying to reach out to me, and it’d be a good time to try to make contact and see who it is and/or what they’re here for.

So I pulled out a deck of tarot cards and started just… making up a reading as I went, asking questions and then pulling cards, shuffling when it felt right. Asking more questions based on the answers to the previous ones. Here’s what came up. I’m going to include the specifics on the readings themselves, along with some of my thought process. This is going to be a little messy and scattered, but I hope if you are interested in Nemesis that you will be willing to humor me.

Reading One: Introduction

Me: 3W, reversed

Who is this? 1S, reversed

What called you? 9S, reversed

What do you think I should do? Sun

This is a lot of reversals and half swords, so I put the cards back and did a follow-up. I like to have a signifier in each new spread just so that I can keep things in a context, so you’ll see that multiple times.

Me: KnW

You: Sun

What do you want to tell me? 1C

What I need to do: 1P

Another spread:

Me: 4W, reversed

You: Magician

What can I do for you? World, reversed (So the world is fucked up and broken. Agreed. What can I offer YOU? 8S, reversed. So, nothing personally? Just bigger world-fixy things.)

What would make you proud? 2S

What would disappoint you? 5S. Balance my own fight with other people’s needs.

Where else can I look for help? 7C, reversed. People and orgs doing actual concrete things, not just hoping/dreaming. Briefly: praxis.

What can they do for me? KiC

What should I watch out for? 10P, reversed. People I can build relationship with by being proactive. Don’t count on just assuming I’ll have enough. Comfort and coasting aren’t safe yet.

What I haven’t tried: Tower

How do I call back when I want to talk? Is that something you want? Wheel of Fortune. So they’ll be by when they come back, just whenever.

The conclusions I came up with: I think I’m supposed to break something that’s fucking over me and others, instead of leveraging it in ways that make it stronger. So activist orgs versus going through the legal system, which does in fact make it stronger.

But who identifies THEMSELF as the reversed Ace of Swords? Either someone who got close to my goal but didn’t quite get there? Or someone who makes people fumble their own rules, ideas, or power. Someone who helps cause accidents.

They’re not willing to be relied upon if they can’t be, so they made no promises there. That’s actually super reassuring for me.

Sabotaging others is clearly a bridge too far, especially if they’re just fellow victims of this same problem. Either that or it’s just not something I specifically should be doing. Rather, I should build and invest with other people who are into that, and let people who fuck over others just fail on their own. Don’t drop them from the roof; just don’t catch them when they’re falling.

A common theme for me in my witchy work is figures who turn rules intended to restrict them into their own power and authority. (See also: Hel.) The rules imposed upon them are also their weapons. When I went looking for entities associated with misfortune, I found Tyche, and slid straight into Nemesis and Themis.

Reading Two: Reaching Back

I dug up a spread that I thought might help me dig a little deeper into what I’d found. (https://thiscrookedcrown.tumblr.com/post/89384338652/deity-dossier-this-spread-is-intended-to-answer) This was a really interesting one, and guided much of how I interact with Nemesis (to the extent that I do).

Spirit: 2W, taking responsibility for your power. Controlling power, not letting it control you.

Past Activities: Wheel of Fortune, turning the wheel if someone has stuck where they shouldn’t.

Past Influences/Experiences: PP, reversed. An opportunity for growth that never came.

Personality/How they Think: Hanged Man. Growth isn’t free. Knowledge requires focus and willingness.

Present Status: 5W, reversed. Things have been calm. A lack of (perhaps necessary) conflict.

Their Situation/Their Why: 9S, reversed. Paralysis by guilt or fear, unwillingness to move forward because it means going through a trial.

Their Health: 2C, reversed. Lack of counterpart, of a necessary intergrown partner.

Mental Health/Mood: 5S, reversed. Not interested in zero sum games.

Physical Health/Manifestation: KiC, reversed. Nobody to connect with? Maybe this just means Not Poseidon.

Things they Like to Do: PW, reversed. Ruining orchestrations, separating agents from their tools.

What to Know: Temperence. Big value on balance, especially by keeping opposing things in balance.

What do Avoid: Hierophant. Don’t do things just for the sake of tradition. Or! Don’t look to her for spiritual teaching or authority. Or maybe just don’t listen to traditions about her.

What Can I Do to Help/What Are Others Doing? 1S. Keep hold of it. Don’t drop it or elsewise be careless. Try something new, but responsibly.

What’s Not Helping Them? Strength. Being restrained by someone stronger even if that someone isn’t aggressive about it.

Conscious Desires: 2P, reversed. Tired of juggling, especially of doing it alone. Or do they feel they’ve dropped what they used to juggle? Maybe they just want one to finally win, but they also know what would be lost if it did. It’d be down to the Ace instead of forward to Three. Nothing to build on.

Unconscious Desires: 7W, reversed. Tired of fighting and being fought. Just want to enjoy what they’re protecting.

Hopes: 6P, reversed. Wants back what they give. Reciprocity. Ability to lean on what they’ve built, to be held by it.

Fears: 7C. Someone good falling because they were focused on wishes and not their real situation. Or! Possibly of someone getting so stuck on their suggested (assumed?) path that they miss the opportunity to find someplace new, someplace that isn’t on the map (yet). Choice paralysis.

UPG

She reeeaaally doesn’t seem to want to talk about herself here. I asked, “What do you need our relationship to look like?” and the reversed 10W fell out of the deck. Maybe… to not bear her burden alone? A break that she’s afraid to take because what if everything falls? Lots of reversals too. Maybe it’s easier for her to say what she doesn’t want than what she does. Does she have a clear sense of how else things could be? Or is she still at the diagnosis stage of observing problems?

A major question I was left with: Is Nemesis alone? Where is Themis? Worship of Nemesis seems to have outlived devotion to Themis, which is concerning. Does Nemesis have anyone like her, anymore? Maybe Themis did more for Nemesis than either of them realized. Does Nemesis have someone good and trustworthy to love her back?

I don’t know how to help with that but I’d like to try. I’ve been a What that was left alone to become a Who, and I hated it. How do you know what to do, how to even think, without a purpose? Without a worthy team? Without an easy objective reason? What if Nemesis doesn’t have to feel like I did? How do you allocate support to the god of allocating things?

I think all of this is why I find it concerning when other people immediately momzone Nemesis. For one thing, from what we know about her, she doesn’t leap onto anyone’s “side.” She has standards, and people who meet them and people who don’t. There is no need to take “sides.” Just because she may judge that land should be redistributed doesn’t mean she’s on the side of the recipient. This is why I find her trustworthy. She doesn’t pick a few people and say, “this is my ride or die mortal, this is mine and I will protect them from everything even if they are a colossal tool.” She has standards and people who are currently meeting them and people who are not. That’s trustworthy to me. That’s someone reliable.

Further….. not every powerful woman has to be related to as a mother, and if I am reading these signs correctly… what she needs is not yet another dependent to supervise and babysit and impart perspective and ethics to. What she needs is a peer, someone she can turn her back on for two seconds. Maybe even someone who helps with her work to lighten the load. I don’t know if I can be that, obviously, but I do very much feel like that’d be most helpful for her to get from someone somewhere. The best I can probably do as such a small fragment of the universe is to just… try my best not to add work to her queue. And if I can cross off a couple of minor things before she gets to them, even better.

Because she doesn’t necessarily need another child. The solution to all womanly discontent is not “Sad lady? Give babby.” What if some women just need to be able to rely on what they built for everyone else? I can’t fundamentally change how Nemesis is in the universe, but maybe I can pull out a small human-scale fork or two while I’m here.

Refusal to “Live in Fear” of Covid19

Most denialists are walking gish gallops waiting to happen, but one common bumper sticker catchphrase they fall back on sheds a lot of light on what is fundamentally wrong with their epistemology.

There’s seemingly always some variation of, “I refuse to live in fear.”

But here’s the thing. Deciding what you want to be feeling about a topic is not actually an approach to learning the facts about it. Motivated reasoning is a thing for everyone and nobody is totally immune to it, but denialists freely encourage and endorse it.

They don’t need to learn things, if learning those things would maybe make them feel a way that they suspect they won’t like feeling.

The fact that we associate fear with weakness and failure to be an adequately macho individualist hero is a separate problem. But even if denialists had healthier relationships to the full range of emotion, if they’re using what they want to feel as a way to determine what is factually true, their worldview is still fucked. Just… less fractally so.

They’d still have no tools for learning other than what, from an uninformed distance, they’d prefer to feel. Even the things they got right would be by accident.

“I’d be excited to learn there are oreos in my cupboard. That sounds nice! Therefore there are oreos in my cupboard.”

No??

Shave and a Haircut

If I were a toon, this would be easier.
My feelings could escape however
whenever
as whatever
they needed.

When you tell me nobody has called you adorable since 1999
but in 2000 I started carrying a torch for you and never stopped
I cannot prove you wrong.

Tamping the secret down inside
this well-worn bottle of mine
resistance of compromising confidences is unconscious
I cannot speak of this
but that’s all right,
because I cannot speak this.

As a secondary measure my body
gives way to strange impulses
it wants to split open and
spray joyous trilling organs from its cracks,
raining candied memories in your lap.

If I were a toon, this would be easier.

Autistic Apology

This post is going to be a little more personal, but hopefully it’ll be a useful window into how someone’s autisticness can change basic social needs.

I don’t really have any interest in apologies. Most of the steps of a “good” apology are entirely irrelevant to me. Expressing remorse? I don’t care; that’s no use to me. Asking forgiveness? First of all, I am not obligated to forgive anything and secondly… useless. The actual words, “I’m sorry” aren’t useful either.

“I’m sorry” is a great way to pacify someone who is upset without actually investing thought or effort in understanding, let alone doing better. And when “I’m sorry,” isn’t a conscious attempt to manipulate someone into putting their feelings away… they can be a result of a trauma reflex, the reflex to abase oneself to stave off disproportionate consequences. To show suffering so that hopefully it’ll be deemed adequate suffering by whomever is in a position to add more suffering on top.

This is also, to the person impacted by a screwup, entirely useless. (Worse than useless, if it turns into reassuring the person apologizing that actually everything is fine and they’re fine and nothing is wrong.) It’s primarily useful to abusers who want/need to see suffering in my experience, and to be entirely blunt… fuck those people. Suffering doesn’t actually have inherent value. How much someone is hurting is an entirely separate matter from whether they are going to do better.

So if none of that is useful to me, what should people do if they realize they’ve done something that’s… well, that wasn’t ideal. What should they do?

Accept this new information exactly as you would accept a new effort-saving way to do something in Excel. “Ohhh that makes sense. Thanks!” or to be even more informal, “Oh shit, good call, thanks.”

That’s it.

If you are going to add anything, you can do a comprehension check. Make sure you actually understand what someone is suggesting you learn, instead of assuming that the lesson is probably just that you are garbage that everyone should just exile to Cancelvania. It’s okay to be curious about how something you did may have caused harm.

Time for a fun tip! Get excited, because it’s good. Imagine this in a weird font atop those random gross images that show up in chumbucket ads at the bottom of websites:

One weird tip to grow from social mistakes!

Codependents hate it!

If you’ve ever seen one of those memes that suggests thanking people when you might reflexively apologize, that applies here! If, “sorry I’m late,” can become, “thank you for your patience,” then “I’m sorry I did the thing,” can become, “thank you for saying something.” Of course you have to actually mean it, you have to actually want people to tell you uncomfortable things.

Aside: Yes, you have to actually want it. I know that it’d be better for all of us to just never make a single suboptimal choice, and it’s easy to say that that’s the actual practical desired outcome of every interaction. But it’s not possible and as a benchmark this is only useful as a tool for self-punishment. Here are your real options.

1. Make suboptimal choices and have to learn a new thing about them.
2. Make suboptimal choices and have nobody dare to tell you, and learn no new thing.

You have to actually want option 1. If you can only grudgingly acknowledge that 1 is better you suppose, practice reminding yourself what your real options are and which one you prefer. Write it on your mirror if you have to; I don’t care how you do it as long as you do.

Once you have solidly consciously decided that it’s better to know unpleasant things so you can maintain a certain standard of behavior for yourself, it’ll be easier to thank people who trust you enough to actually engage with you in that way. They are helping you learn. The lesson may suck, but they’re still opting to be useful to your learning process instead of just writing you off. They are giving you the opportunity to practice your actual values and priorities. Thank them. MEAN IT WHEN YOU DO.

I know that for a lot of people, swapping in, “Oh that makes sense, thank you,” for the ritual of self-flagellation is going to be less satisfying. It’s going to feel too small a response to a wrongdoing. If this is you, please remember: your misery has no inherent value. You do not need to preserve it or perform it or induce it. Misery and being better are not actually causally linked; I’d argue they aren’t even correlated.

As an autistic person, I don’t care about anything other than what’s actually going to happen to the pattern of our interactions. People say a lot of nonsense for a lot of reasons other than its accuracy, and I’m done pretending to believe all of it just because it’s impolite to consciously know how much of it is nonsense. I don’t care about hearing the words, “I’m sorry.”

I’m not pointing out an area for improvement to hear, “I’m sorry.” I just want it improved. I’m not rejecting an apology to be terse or mean or unforgiving or punishing. I just literally don’t care about anything but how things are going to be in the future. If things improve, the conversation is over and the matter is closed.

I guarantee you that as an autistic person I am aware that we are all social works in progress. We are all going to do things that we don’t realize in the moment are beneath our standards for ourselves, and we are all going to have to choose whether we learn from those situations.

Go write down somewhere that your actual options are for people to tell you uncomfortable things or not to tell you uncomfortable things. Your wish for there to simply be no uncomfortable things is a silly trap you are locking around your own foot and you can just not do it. Know your real options. Either you learn and do better or you don’t. Everything else is just noise.

Feel free to be very suspicious of anyone who “needs” to see your misery over a thing you did that in retrospect you could have done better. Your misery has no inherent value; only your continuing evolution has value.

If instead someone helps you learn that you hurt them, they are investing in your evolution. Appreciate them. Thank them once you do appreciate them. They took a risk being real with you and they deserve to know it was and will be a safe thing to do.

That’s how you use a screwup to rise in the esteem of whomever you hurt. That’s how you use a screwup to learn. “I’m sorry,” doesn’t do the work; a genuine, “thank you,” absolutely can.

Fitting into Autistic Culture and Values

First off, I’m going to use identity-first language here and not person-first because being autistic isn’t about having a condition; it’s a kind of brain wiring that creates a culture. This is why, for example, we don’t say “person with Deafness” when we mean “Deaf person.” Because being Deaf and being in a Deaf community is not the same as being in the broader world with a condition.

If you are not personally autistic and you want to argue with me about this, please instead look up “identity first language” and deal with your feelings about that yourself.

ANYWAY

A lot of people don’t really understand autistic culture, or why people who thrive in autistic culture would find broader allistic norms so profoundly traumatizing. Personally I think that autistic culture has fixed a lot of the problems in allistic culture that harm everyone (allistics included). But I suppose I would, because I’m autistic, and I see a lot of what allistic people train and traumatize each other into as being totally unnecessary.

Here’s what’s possible instead, if you do things the way autistic people learn to do them amongst ourselves. Here’s some of what you need to do to interact smoothly with us, and to benefit from the norms we are building for our own survival.

Briefly:

• encourage interest and expertise
• be honest about your needs
• be receptive to honesty about our needs
• assume we are asking questions because we want the real answer
• ask questions because you want the answer
• choose your words with conscious intention, and assume we are doing this for you
• trust what we tell you more than what our body language may seem to be saying, or what the implicit meaning would be if an allistic person said it. We aren’t saying something carefully calibrated to take a certain form on the other side of your mental filters, so that you end up transforming what we said into what we want you to understand. We will say the thing we want you to understand. Any transformations you apply to it are transformations you applied to it. We say what we say.

The long version:

Much of what we do that makes allistic people uncomfortable falls into the broad category of making oneself vulnerable in ways allistics have been punished for being. We have been too, but hiding our loves or needs or questions costs us a lot more. We can be your opportunity to take a break from this costly pretense. You might like it! Being emotionally vulnerable can be good for you!

Vulnerability can also be dangerous. Having our loves and fears be obvious makes us low-hanging fruit for manipulative behavior. Abusers can learn our levers and switches especially efficiently. This is how ABA works, incidentally, by weaponizing our joy and fear to train more compliant and convenient property for whomever is perceived to own us. A lot of autists probably have trauma around being “allowed” to love or fear things openly, so we try not to reproduce it in our spaces.

Importantly: Some things are legitimately harder for us to learn. That’s just a thing. A lot of them are mostly harder to teach to us if you aren’t prepared to answer questions about your starting assumptions or values.

It’s been my experience that we have difficulty learning subjects in disconnected pieces. To understand a tree, we need the concept of its forest. This may be why we seem to learn in sudden giant leaps. We were learning the whole time, but it’s only when we can place our knowledge into patterns that we feel like we know any of the constituent pieces. We just need enough data points to solve for the pattern, and that’s why we ask so many questions. If we care about what you have to teach, we will look for the gaps in our idea of it, hunting for the vague or seemingly contradictory places on our map.

A good thing to remember is that if we aren’t asking you questions, we probably don’t respect you as a source of answers. I know that in allistic society, questions are seen and used as attacks. From us they are trust. We are trusting you with our map of the universe. Be as trustworthy as you can.

Tarot Spotlight: The Light of the Sun, Star, and Moon

A lot of cards prominently feature light as a Symbolic Element. The Hermit has a lantern. The Sun and Star get their own whole cards. The Tower is being hit by lightning. The Moon borrows light and uses it for its own purposes.

Light can bring clarity, but it behaves differently based on where it’s shining and how gently or harshly.

The Sun is warmth and easy joy for a lot of people, the kind of uncomplicated sincere unselfconscious happiness that a lot of us have drilled out of us as children. This is why there’s a child on a horse on the RWS version. This kid is out here, entirely naked as kids sometimes are determined to be, but contrary to what we’re taught… this happy and sincere and fully embodied kid is getting places. Growing out of who they are wasn’t necessary, nor was hiding anything. The most complete and sincerely-rooted version of themselves can also ride the always-symbolically-relevant horse, just as they are.

There is a caution here sometimes.

The Sun is a very vulnerable card, because sincerity is vulnerable. Being willing to be seen is extremely vulnerable. Being willing to pursue things as yourself allows other people the opportunity to form opinions about it, and other people’s opinions can turn into problems. The Sun is not just carefree and innocent; it’s very brave. The Sun goes unprotected by shade or shelter, choosing to be seen for its whole self rather than hide behind defenses.

Not everyone can be The Sun all the time. Sometimes, there are more important things than being accurately seen and understood. Honesty is a risk, and we can’t always take that risk.

The Star is less glaring, and to me implies an external source of guidance or support, tailored to your circumstances. It’s a glimpse that things are changing for the better, or perhaps most of all that YOU can change them, without the overwhelming detail coming down on you like a load of obligation bricks.

The Sun shows all the details. The world is blasted with the unforgiving glare that shows every part of it for what it is, and so are the people in it. The star is more like, “just wanted to remind you that there is a forward, we’ll talk about specifics later, xoxo”

It comes after Tower for that reason. After lightning has hit something you relied on, the last thing that’ll reassure you is GIANT FLASH OF OVERWHELMING LIGHT! HOPE THAT HELPS!! FOR GOOD MEASURE IT WILL ALSO BE LOUD!

instead it’s “light can be safe, take your time and we’ll hang out soon”

The Moon is a different illumination, in that it sort of…. doesn’t illuminate very much? You can see more, but not necessarily in a way that brings clarity. Moonlight tells you where the deep shadows are but does not dispel them. A lot of the destructive potential of water is there too, in the scorpion sort of sneaking out from the symbolically important river.

Personal discernment and judgment become really important when the Moon shows up in a reading. The Moon paints hazards vaguely, often just shrouding them in a vague dread, and you could avoid the worst of them if you avoid all of them. But can you?

I hope this makes it a little easier to see why it’s not enough to say that light is a symbol for revelation and guidance. There are types of revelation, and times for guidance, and those specifics matter.

The Secrets of Sphagnum

For the past few centuries peat bogs (or mosslands as we call them here in Lancashire) have been considered god-forsaken wastelands, impassable ‘by man or horse’, ‘too dry to farm, too wet fish’. Drained and excavated they have only been valued in so far as they provide land for farming and peat for energy and…

The Secrets of Sphagnum

Appreciate the complexity of moss! Appreciate it!