Life continues to be interesting, meaningful and pleasant. Last month I described my routine activities. Those continue but I will focus on specific events and readings for this month.

Early in the month we received our $300 supplementary payments from the Government of Canada as coronavirus crisis assistance.

I read The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, the Ajijic Book Club selection for this month. I wrote my book report and published it on the ABC website. On the last Tuesday of July, ABC had another enjoyable Zoom meeting with six attendees.

Pat was reading Live Long And . . .: What I Learned Along the Way by William Shatner. During our early morning chats she would read certain passages which I enjoyed. I made a mental note that Shatner has some views about death that I would like to include in an essay about death that I hope to write in the future.

Pat lurks on my facebook page and lets me know about posts which she thinks would interest me. She knows that I am interested in the impact of conspiracy theories. I was saddened to learn that the wife of a nephew of mine is a True Believer in Donald Trump as the solution to every problem and, I suspect, she is heavily influenced by QAnon or something similar.

Pat and I again met via Zoom with our friends Ken and Trish and this is now a regularly monthly activity that we look forward to. I also met with my friend David Bryen on Zoom and we both miss our in person discussions. And I joined a couple of Zoom meetings organized by Peter Limberg, creator of The Stoa.

Feeling a desire to contribute to my local community, I wrote  An Open Letter to El Ojo del Lago.

Also in July, I started another new project. I wrote an open letter, On Baby Boomers and Millennials, and published it on the Letter platform. My objective is to engage in meaningful conversation with a Millennial. I reached out to family, friends and strangers seeking a response. My friend Rhona Frizzell connected me with Kate, who responded to my open letter. I am looking forward to what this conversation might bring. I also responded to an open letter, On Letter, Harper's Open Letter & Free Speech, posted by one of the platform's creators.

I wrote two short articles capturing very different aspects of my life in July, 2020 - NO WATER!!! and Donald Trump, Dictator?

Readings

A number of articles I read this month became the basis of two essays I wrote -  About a Liminal Time and About Cancel Culture. 

Bad News about the Pandemic: We’re Not Getting Back to Normal Any Time Soon by Gleb Tsipursky

As the vast majority of businesses and states have tried to reopen and people rush back to public life, they’ve run  headlong into the trap of “getting back to normal.” They didn’t realize we’re heading into a period of waves of restrictions once again, due to many states reopening too soon.

COVID-19 and Excess Deaths by Steven Novella

The pandemic is also not over yet, and in fact the worst may yet to be seen. There is a clear increase in anxiety and depression during the pandemic and the resulting economic hardships. Mental health experts are warning of a potential surge in suicides; although this has not manifested yet, the reporting and effects may simply be lagging.

It will likely be years before we can calculate the total impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the excess deaths we can calculate are already telling a pretty consistent story.

Entering the Bardo by Joanna Macy

In this op-ed, eco-philosopher and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy introduces us to the bardo—the Tibetan Buddhist concept of a gap between worlds where transition is possible. As the pandemic reveals ongoing collapse and holds a mirror to our collective ills, she writes, we have the opportunity to step into a space of reimagining.

Finnegas by Paul Kingsnorth

Now I will say what I believe: that this civilization will not learn anything from this virus. All this civilization wants to do is to get back to normal. Normal is cheap flights and cheap lattes, normal is Chinese girls sewing our T-shirts under armed guard, normal is biblical bushfires and barrels of oil, normal is city breaks and international conferences and African children poisoning their bodies sorting the plastic we have dumped on their coastlines, normal is nitrite pollution and burning stumps and the death of the seas.

We made this normal, and we do not know how to unmake it, or—whisper it—we do not want to.

But Earth does, and it will.

Numb by Charles Einsenstein

We are not the discrete, separate individuals that modernity narrates to us. We are interconnected. We are inter-existent. We are relationship. To live fully means to relate fully. Covid-19 is a further step in a long trend of disconnection from community, from nature, and from place. With each step of disconnection, although we may survive as separate selves, we become less and less alive.

3 questions to ask yourself next time you see a graph, chart or map by Carson MacPherson-Krutsky

During this pandemic, information is emerging hour by hour. Media consumers are inundated with facts, charts, graphs and maps every day. If you can take a moment to ask yourself a few questions about what you see in these data visualizations, you may walk away with a completely different conclusion than you might have had at first glance.

Going Under by Sharon English

Yet it’s clear now that the Covid-19 pandemic, which began its global sweep in late January, has taken us to a completely new place: a liminal place, a place of dusky in-betweeness. There is an attempt to keep normal life patterns on track, even while planning and scheduling have become hypothetical. Information keeps shifting; the crisis has no discernable end. We are asked to hold very difficult, painful contradictions, to give up much. It is frightening to do so, and frightening not to. 

Revisiting the White Swans of 2020 by Nouriel Roubini

At the start of the year, when COVID-19 was barely on anyone's radar outside of China, the global economy was entering a fraught phase, facing a range of potentially devastating tail risks. And though the pandemic has since turned the world on its head, all of these threats remain – and some have become more salient.

Three Predictable Covid Nightmares — and How Congress Can Help Prevent Them by YUVAL LEVIN

Three sets of such predictable problems stand out above all, and in all three cases there are measures that can be taken now that should be able to attract bipartisan support.