We’ve been meditating in the morning, at the pool. “So different than meditating inside!” says one of the writers. Everyone agrees that meditation is somehow easier and more blissful amidst birdsong and gentle breezes.

The birds’ main competitors are dogs and tractors, but this morning in a moment of relative calm, we found ourselves sitting with a bumblebee on one side and our busy neighbor’s chainsaw on the other.

These two buzzing creatures represent alternative focus points for humanity at the moment: saving the bees while furiously trying to gain control over the chaos beget by our ancestors’ ambitions.

They also remind us of our personal alternatives: working attentively at human scale, or trying to accelerate our productivity with cyborg tools that dangerously dehumanize our economy and society.

We own three chainsaws here at Domaine Valent. We need them to cut fallen oaks into useful pieces for construction and fuel and to prune the old fruit trees.

This does not mean that we indulge the whims of every technology that young men want to sell us.

And we cherish the technologies of the old men and women.

Last week my best friend, farmer Arnaud, taught me something I didn’t know about the universal and ancient activity of folding bed linen. He has also taught me how to make mint syrup for my Thin Mint ice cream. He brings honey and quince candy and beautiful fertile eggs which no one can agree the color of – green, blue, or grey? The eggs are laid by Gascogne and Rhode Island chickens, chosen and valued for the eatability of the males alongside their eggy sisters, reducing in some way the quotient of cruelty. When a queen moved her hive to our garden table, Arnaud came over in the calm dawn, masterfully transporting her community to a safer and more nutritious field. This is the intelligence we should seek.