Chimbly
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chimbly.bsky.social
Chimbly
@chimbly.bsky.social
Vermont Liberal, Aspiring Minimalist
Philosophy, Applied Mathematics
ANTIFA Maximus
Vegetarian since 1978, ~99% Vegan
🇨🇭🇩🇪🇺🇦🇵🇸

Currently having a lover’s quarrel with the world
Pinned
Trump is a litmus test, a stress test, for human decency, integrity, honesty, empathy and compassion.

For better and for worse, I’ve learned more about the people in my life this past decade than in the preceding five decades combined.
Met my nephew this AM for breakfast on his way home to Portland for the TG break.

Stubborn kid was determined to make the four and a half hour trip to the sea coast on his beloved Triumph in spitting snow at +1C.

As hard-headed as his uncle…
and possibly loved all the more by me for it.
November 23, 2025 at 10:56 PM
Up and treading the Vermont hills before sunrise this Sunday morning. Absolutely still and yet profoundly moving. At least it was for this bashed about pilgrim.

“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.” Alain de Botton
November 23, 2025 at 8:57 PM
I’m not at all religious although I was raised and schooled in Catholicism.

MAGA Jesus is as alien to the Jesus that I was taught as the USA is foreign to the America that I was born in.

Mind you, their symbols remain the same, only they’re larger and increasingly everpresent. That’s by design.
They’re doing to America what they did to Christianity | Bill McKibben
Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to America has a precedent: the evangelical perversion of Jesus’s message of radical love to one of hate and aggression
www.theguardian.com
November 23, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Reposted by Chimbly
November 23, 2025 at 9:18 AM
“The constant challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.” Alain de Botton
November 22, 2025 at 7:22 PM
On a lark, I searched online for my maternal great-great grandfather’s enlistment paper last evening. Found it!

Turns out, he’d joined the Union Army as a Private only eleven days after the Civil War had begun.

Born in Switzerland in 1845, Opa Amsler would have been 16 years old when he signed up.
November 22, 2025 at 2:08 AM
Reposted by Chimbly
The saving grace, 2024 - by Dmitry Ersler, Russian/Thai
November 9, 2025 at 7:19 AM
“The mark of a civilization is that it does leave something behind. It creates in its time and then it leaves behind something better for others to build upon. That’s what we thought the United States was…”

The USA was always flawed, but I believed, up till now, that we sought to do better.
The End of the American Empire
The historian Margaret MacMillan on the impact of the Trump-led American withdrawal from world leadership. Plus: David on the corrupting effects of lavish foreign gifts to Trump, and Charles Dickens’s...
www.theatlantic.com
November 21, 2025 at 12:24 PM
If the stars were to appear only one night in a thousand years, R. W. Emerson imagined those lucky few to see them would be dumbstruck. If anything, I believe their nightly appearance is all the more reason for awe. It’s not some freakish anomaly. This truly is the wondrous universe that we inhabit.
A New View of the Moon
YouTube video by To Scale:
youtu.be
November 5, 2025 at 10:38 PM
“…he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections. No one can prevent him from remaining president of the United States for a constitutionally prohibited third term—except the American people, in whom ultimate power resides under the Constitution of the United States.”

J. Michael Luttig
President for Life
Donald Trump is trying to amass the powers of a king.
www.theatlantic.com
October 28, 2025 at 11:41 AM
Peder Severin Krøyer: The Mozart of Color
YouTube video by Gammell Lack Institute of American Art
youtu.be
October 27, 2025 at 1:01 PM
“Being an artist…comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.” ~ R. M. Rilke
A bumblebee´s Paradise
YouTube video by Tor-Arne Moen
youtu.be
October 26, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Symbol of our national disgrace
Symbol of our disrespect, apathy and cowardice
October 25, 2025 at 6:35 PM
Yes, and thus far we’re failing the test miserably.

“This is a character test for our country.”

David Ignatius
“Washington Week with the Atlantic”
October 24, 2025
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Our Dahlia 'Procyon'. Beautiful whilst it lasted.

“As it is with a play, so it is with life - what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “Letters From A Stoic,” 65 CE
October 24, 2025 at 7:47 PM
"Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction...no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow."

Kurt Vonnegut.
October 24, 2025 at 6:38 PM
“And when a philosopher looks to poets...he soon becomes convinced that the world is not so much a noun as an adjective.”

Gaston Bachelard, "The Poetics of Space"
Where is home?
More and more people worldwide are living in countries not considered their own. Writer Pico Iyer -- who himself has three or four “origins” -- meditates on the meaning of home, the joy of traveling ...
www.ted.com
October 23, 2025 at 10:37 PM
James Nolan Gandy builds intricate mechanical harmonographs in order to create moiré patterns.

www.jamesnolangandy.com
October 23, 2025 at 9:02 PM
Among the few constants in my life is a love for J.S. Bach's six Sonatas and Partitas (Partia) for solo violin.

Shunsuke Sato plays his "Booth," built by Antonio Stradivari in 1716. It's amazing to think this instrument was four years-old when Bach completed his Partia. The tone is extraordinary.
Bach - Violin Partita no. 2 in D minor BWV 1004 - Sato | Netherlands Bach Society
YouTube video by Netherlands Bach Society
www.youtube.com
October 23, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Chimbly
‘Two Friends on the Shore of Long Island.’ #Painting by Devin Leonardi (1981-2014) #art
October 12, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Why, then, have to be human?
...because being here means so much;
because everything here,
vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,
and strangely keeps calling to us...To have been
here once, completely, even if only once,
to have been at one with the earth--
this is beyond undoing.

~ R. M. Rilke ~
October 23, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Chimbly
Re-reposting this b/c I can't get enough
An ancient and magical amber bear. Carved some 10,000 years ago, it washed up on a beach at Fanø in Denmark from a submerged Mesolithic settlement under the North Sea.

✨Merry Christmas everyone✨

National Museum of Denmark 📷 by me

#Archaeology
May 3, 2025 at 7:04 PM
Alles in Ordnung

Via Matthew Anderson
October 23, 2025 at 2:23 PM
Swedish cow made me laugh. Beautiful creatures deserving of our love.
Cow plays fetch - 1005400
YouTube video by RM Videos
www.youtube.com
October 23, 2025 at 2:09 PM
It was dry enough this summer to wade/walk out to Law Island for picnics.

John Law was the first white inhabitant; c. 1780. An early 19th c. historical gazette characterized him as, "A man of liberal education, fine talents, but too liberal and high minded to be otherwise than poor." My kinda guy.
October 23, 2025 at 2:03 PM