Journal
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Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira
In May 1985, Hermeto Pascoal was invited to compose a score for a documentary drawing attention to Parque Estadual do Alto da Ribeira (High Creek State Park), a park near the southern border of São Paulo, which is now a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, a stunning and important remnant of Atlantic rain forest.
A Meditation on the Cold Plunge
Of the elements at The Springs, the cold plunge is the one about which people are the most curious. It's the most talked about, the most asked about, the most polarizing. It’s maybe, hmmm, divisive?
Really what we’re doing is replicating jumping into a cold body of water, whether it’s a lake or a river or an ocean, and damn if that isn’t always a bit thrilling. We’re kinda wired for that to be thrilling (it’s an inhospitable climate! if we stayed in, it would kill us!!!). It’s kinda an audacious thing, to stimulate an unsurvivable environment.
This is All Kind of Silly
Let’s be honest: we’re a pretty absurd species. We live funny, over-engineered lifestyles that (with any real perspective) make absolutely zero sense.
Type 2 Fun
Some people seem to be attracted to “type 2” fun, that is to say, activities which require hard work or fortitude, and which don’t always result in an obvious payoff for the efforts expended. For these people, the joy is found in the process as much as in the results. For some, that process is months or even years long: day in and day out, putting in the miles on the court, or the trail, or the road, embracing the long game, accepting that often the activity just feels hard, no matter how much preparation has gone into it.
Roman Baths
I’ve always been drawn to activities that humans have been doing for millennia. I love so-called “trowel trades:” plaster, tile, stone masonry, etc., that still use elemental materials and ancient techniques. When Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered in the 1920s, the plasterwork was so well-preserved that you could still see the trowel strokes, as if the workers had just completed construction days before.