Had a conversation with a bunch of burr oaks yesterday. We talked about how life is a constant weighing of trade-offs. Attention = how you spend your life. You are always choosing one thing over others. And if you can figure out what you desire, you can do this intentionally. 1/?

As someone interested in LOTS of critters and people and ideas, I'm always letting folks down: myself, my pals, my family. Attention is finite. I'm like a goddamn moth drawn to a bug-zapper. But again, if you can understand that you have choices, you can transform this guilt 2/?

The idea is to have knowledge of your desires and knowledge of the effects of your choices. What do you want, or decide is important? Not choosing is a kind of choice that leads to certain anxiety. Wild to come to this in my 40s, but here we are. But letting go of inadvertent 3/?

harms, or more accurately, accepting harm or hardship or pain as a byproduct of your choice, is super freeing. And you are less likely to cause that "inadvertent" harm to the people (yourself or others) if you look at it as something you can direct, or at least own responsibility

for that harm or disappointment. Good example is moving. I've moved a lot. Formed relationships. Moved. I have friends and family all over the damn place, and guilt at having 'abandoned' them. But instead of ignoring any pain from loss of connection, and letting it fester...

In an unarticulated resentment, I can own the choice. Anyway, this is going into a wormhole of my weird guilt issues. But my message here is own your desires and talk to trees. Not sure why the burr oaks had this as a thing they wanted to talk about, but I'm glad we did. End rant

Well one more thing. I think the burr oaks wanted to talk about this because they grow EXACTLY how they want. They have crazy ass forms. They were breaking through huge boulders, spreading them apart. They were making choices as to how to grow. Anyway, thanks for reading.