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Oct 10, 2023Liked by Cass Hebron, Isabelle Drury

I'm so invested in knowing what you did with your slacks. Visible mending? As a mother of two farm kids - one of our first homeschool lessons during lockdown was 'how to patch pants using Japanese sashiko' aka let's tackle Mum's mending pile.

To your questions about Utopia I offer you this quote from the epigraph of Huxley's Brave New World as food for thought :

"Utopias appear to be a good deal more realizable than was previously thought. And today we are faced with an alarming question of a different nature: How to avoid their complete realization? Utopias are realizable. Life moves towards utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century when intellectuals and the cultured class will dream of ways of avoiding utopias and of returning to a non-utopic society, less "perfect" and more "free." Nicholas Berdiaeff

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Thanks for taking the time to share! I love that quote from Huxley, it resonates a lot.

Regarding the jeans - I ended up cutting them into shorts but they were skinny jeans so it looked a little odd. They've been recycled and I got a new secondhand pair from a charity shop in Gent when I returned :)

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Thanks for a great read! This: “devote hours of the day to mitigating the decisions of the people in power” is the NGO experience in a nutshell. 😱

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much to chew on here! what cass writes abt utopia reminds me of a piece i recently read on stacie langford’s “slow folk” newsletter--making goals not toward outcomes or achievements but on what we want the day to day to look like. how to build a good life and a good “means” rather than focusing on ends. thanks for writing and sharing!!

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Thanks for sharing this! I love the concept of focusing on what we want our day to look like, more than the outcomes.

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