The Long, Hot Summer
We don’t yet know if it’s going to be long and hot, but judging from the experience of the last few years chances are it will be.
When cuddling up to the oven on endless winter nights it is natural to think, ponder, to take stock of things. Summer belongs more to having experiences, vibrant life, nature, moving, being attentive to the world outside. At least for us in the so-called temperate climates. I wonder what life in an eternal summer could be like. We might soon find out — a North German friend of mine has record fig harvests and people are planting olive trees in Hungary.
Source: Lucio Patone, Unsplash
In any case, the sun is high in the sky, and I am giving myself a holiday. That means I will not write every week during the summer, only when I feel the urge and have the time. Actually, I always like writing for Aldebaran, but it does take time to put all those thoughts branching in every direction into a relatively linear form. Then there is the finding of pictures, the checking of sources, the translating… In summer other things tend to come to the foreground.
But summer is good for reading. If you like to giggle while undergoing some personal development you can glance into the Happy Letters of Szűcs Tibi. They are in Hungarian but you can call Google Translate to your aid, it will enrich the writing with even more jokes. DeepL is usually better. With machine translation I like to copy about two paragraphs and then see if I can make sense of the resulting gobbledygook. Nowadays it’s usually actually quite comprehensible.
Or you can check out my favorite thinking guy, Daniel Schmachtenberger, who is working at figuring out how a balanced future civilization might function. While the text is not exactly lightweight, it is positively fascinating.
Source: Drew Beamer, Unsplash
If you are interested in the wider context of the war, its consequences and other political issues, I can recommend Aurelien. Or also Big Serge who writes specifically about war. The first one is more pro-Western, the other could be a bit pro-Russian, and both are very intelligent, knowledgeable and balanced in their judgments.
By the way, if you want to develop your skills in some language, Substack offers a great deal of original stuff. I haven’t yet explored the possibilities, but I do plan to find stuff to balance all the English articles I read. I’ll let you know what I discovered.
Regarding summer activities in Hungary Gyüttment-találkozó definitely takes the palm for me. It started out as a forum for people moving out of the city, but it has become much more, bringing together different subcultures that have gotten over the false glamour of consumption: greens, hippies, traditionalists, handypeople, folk artists, social experimenters, unclassifiable, interesting people. Everything from building straw houses to community, all with organic food, without a single discarded cigarette butt, and a great atmosphere. The talks are in Hungarian but there are always foreigners and people happy to translate.
And not to miss out on self-promotion, we're having a week-long creative writing course with the aforementioned Szűcs Tibi in August. It is for anyone who (wants to) write texts (even better). Tell your Hungarian friends. And I’ll have a talk in Ozora in English about how to pick up languages.
Source: Jon Hoefer, Pixabay.
Our newsletter has just turned six months old, so I will share some trade secrets with you. One is that the pictures are much more visible on a computer screen. I got feedback as to why such and such an illustration was there, and then it turned out that the phone screen was too small to see the point of the image.
Another thing: roughly twice as many people read the articles as are subscribed. So if you haven't already, consider putting your email address here. It will increase Aldebaran's popularity on Substack which will help getting this wonderful world-saving thing to more people.
Also, articles that a reader shares in some group or other medium sometimes have ten times more readings than the average. I happen to be a fossil, not even having a smartphone and practically not being on any social media. You, however, can make quite a difference by sharing something you found useful. It can even be an earlier post that you liked. After all, we are participants in an experiment. There is enormous noise and breast-beating in the world today. Can the voice of an unknown author, pondering the connections between things, be heard?
Source: Gerd Altmann, Pixabay
Thanks. Go out in nature as much as you can, and get together with people. Allow yourself to feel good without a screen. Have a nice summer on this fascinating planet.
Or somewhere else?