Our book closes with the suggestion that ‘if you are lucky enough to drink wine by the sea, you are lucky enough’. We don’t know who first wrote down or uttered the mantra, but we chose to end our book with this simple sentence that combines, in the most poetic of images, several possible benchmarks for a fullfulled, contented life.

It implies that a person drinking wine by the sea has suficient income to purchase wine – so they are not experiencing income poverty. It implies that a person drinking wine by the sea is not so overwhelmed by work or care commitments that they cannot take time out for themselves – so they are not experiencing time poverty. It also implies that the seas are worth being near – so they are not polluted with industrial emissions or plastic waste, nor are they rising due to climate change.

In April 2018, the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, Bob Lutz, spoke at the annual meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers in Detroit with unwelcome news. “We are approaching the end of the automotive era,” he said. He predicted that vehicle autonomy will gradually take over more and more of the task of driving, and that “the end-state will be the fully autonomous module with no capacity for the driver to exercise command. You will call for it, it will arrive at your location, you’ll get in, input your destination and go to the freeway.” He continued that “people who like to drive, and car companies that rely on branding, have another 25 years at the most. After that, it’s all over.” Lutz admitted that this transition will bring “a vast improvement to national productivity.” Traffic jams and accidents will become rare events, and perhaps some 90% of the 40,000 annual traffic deaths in the U.S. will be eliminated.

All things deserve to be done well.

Whatever else art may mean to different people, at its core is the idea that human acts can be elegant in their expression, beautiful in form, resonant in relationship to people, materials, and community, and magical in their capacity to connect the part to the whole, whether that part is a brushstroke in a painting, a word in a poem, a piece of stone in a wall, a single note in a concert, a building in the city, a town in the landscape... Small, attentive steps combine to make an excellent whole.

When the sun rose for the first time in weeks and filtered gently through the kitchen window, I am startled. I pause at the morning dishes, soapy sponge in hand, and say aloud to no one in particular: look. Across the yard at the edge of the woods, tender light is setting the nubile leaves of alder, poplar and plum aglow. When had that happened, the unfurling of those deciduous photosynthesis factories? And the sun itself, hitting me smack dab on the forehead from the east - not the southeast of wintertime – rocketing straight upwards and over the tops of the firs. During the past two weeks of solid rainy grey, the earth had tilted. A lot.

Not far from our neighborhood, a road climbs a mountain.  It's not much fun to go up on a run, but it flattens out at the top and twists through tall old pines and picks itself up to go over little mountain creeks. There’s a quaint little cottage after the straight bit, and that seems to be the top, but if you’re willing to go all the way up to the cottage and stand just outside its driveway, then you can see that the gravel continues up to a nice gray gate with a NO TRESPASSING sign beside it.