I’m committing to touching as little fiat as I can in 2025. So far today I’ve paid for an eSIM and groceries via @npub1m7r9...ny2w, Paid my credit card via @npub19mf4...kfu2 @Adam O’Brien Paid for my coffee and lunch with ⚡️ Ate that lunch while watching @npub10uth...xdlq on @primal at the restaurant and sending zaps 🫡

GM Nostr

Local, organic, farm to table lunch at Caoba Farms in Guatemala. Paid in bitcoin. No factory farms and no banks.

On a mission to spend sats today. Cold brew acquired. GM

Happy New Year

GM Viscerally felt the toxicity of my X feed this morning and came to Nostr for some relief.

GM

I recently returned to my home province for my first visit in18 years. I visited my grandfather’s old house in a small rural community where I lived with my mom when I was first born. I had not seen this house in probably 30+ years. Having only vague memories and pictures to go by, it was truly humbling to see how modest this structure is. The fact that it’s still standing and I was able to visit it, are gifts. Just up the hill (second photo) sits his old wood shop where he built many beautiful things. The house is now used as a tool shed for the property next door which was also my great grandmothers house. #stayhumble #stacksats

Some reflection: I left my home country of Canada one year ago to travel the world, and more importantly, research where I wanted to call home. Canada has stopped being a place where I feel welcome. The pandemic years, with the absolute vitriol spewing from the prime minister and his media has left a permanent impression on me. And even worse, the same vitriol that came from people I once called friends. I was labelled as dangerous. That and whatever flavour of bigot was popular to label someone that week for choosing to exercise autonomy over their medical decisions. This, not to mention the crippling level of taxation, and ever-rising costs of living, were enough to drive us out into the world to find another path. It felt as though there were no hope to purchase a home, or prepare for retirement. When the government extorts you out of more than a third of your income, and then expects you to happily stay on waiting lists for doctors for years at a time, what are you paying for? I don’t know where I’ll land for good, but I don’t feel like Canada is a place of opportunity for me anymore. Perhaps one day it will be again.

GM More Newfoundland. #newfoundland #travel

This account is temporarily a Newfoundland appreciation account. But I mean, just look at this place. Twillingate, Newfoundland. #travel #newfoundland #canada

GM Cape Spear, Newfoundland, Canada

GM Newfoundland, Canada

I currently live in a millennial trailer park in Costa Rica, otherwise known as a park full of shipping container “tiny homes”. One of the perks is almost all my neighbour’s have friendly dogs. This guy visits me almost every morning. GM.

But you’ll feel it.

The world is so beautiful. GM.

On gratitude: Why gratitude lists fall short. A friend recently pointed to the conditionality inherent in gratitude lists. While it is not fruitless to recognize your blessings, material or spiritual, it does not provide a steady ground to walk on. For if your gratitude is conditional on your house, your fridge being stocked, your family being present, then you will struggle to be grateful should those things come to not be. The awe and the wonder of being itself seems a more fruitful ground floor in the palace of gratitude. The absolute bewilderment at your existence. How intensely bizarre it is that you are here at all, and how wonderfully beautiful it is that you are. Engaging the world with your senses, however complete or incomplete they are. Letting the world in, and you into the world. Stepping back, in child like wonder at the sun hitting your skin on a warm beach, or the sub-zero winds stinging as it whips your face. How insane is it that you get to be here at all? What strange psychedelic trip have you been birthed into? This is where gratefulness starts for me. When I practice remembering it. You have to practice remembering it. Because the car breaks down. The rent is due. Yet another war breaks out, orchestrated by those who refuse to remember the gift of being. The world is not always aware of the wonderment we all carry and so it will pretend it does not exist, because the world has not practiced remembering. From this grounding in the gratefulness of being, everything layered on top of it is sacred. The coffee is sacred. The book. A smile. A moment of kindness. Even a moment of anger, and your recognition and examination of it, is sacred. It is natural that we will forget this. But it is imperative to continue to practice remembering. To encounter wonder at every opportunity. I aspire only to continue to remember. #gratitude #philosophy #writing

GM #media #invisibleenvironment #mcluhan

GM

Office for the day. A late GM. #costarica