In a cinder-block clinic in one of Rwanda's rural districts, a community health worker unlocks her phone, opens a chat window, and types a question that, two years ago, she would have been forced to answer alone. A child has a fever that has not broken in three days. The nearest doctor is hours away by road, and the road, in April, is mostly mud. She describes the symptoms in Kinyarwanda, then in English, then in the awkward hybrid that her training has taught her the machine prefers. A few seconds later, the model replies. It is confident. It suggests a differential diagnosis, a likely cause, a set of next steps. The worker reads it twice. Then she makes a decision.

Multiply that scene by thousands. Multiply it again by the 101 community health workers who, in a study published in Nature Health on 6 February 2026, submitted 5,609 real clinical questions across four Rwandan districts to five different large language models. Multiply it by the 58 physicians in Pakistan who, in a parallel randomised controlled trial published in the same issue, were handed GPT-4o and twenty hours of training in how to argue with it, and whose diagnostic reasoning scores then jumped from 43 per cent using conventional resources to 71 per cent with the chatbot in the loop. By the researchers' own account, the large language models did not merely match the local clinicians. They beat them. Across every metric the team measured, the models won.

This is the story that spread through the health-technology press in February like a minor religious revelation. Cheap AI chatbots, the headlines said, are transforming medical diagnosis in places where the alternative is often no diagnosis at all. It was presented as a vindication. Years of hand-wringing about bias, hallucination, and the hype cycle, and finally here was evidence: in the clinics the world forgot, in the districts where a stethoscope is a luxury and a paediatrician is a fable, the chatbot is helping. Not perfectly. But helping. And helping, the argument went, is the only honest baseline when the competing product is nothing.

It is a persuasive story. It is also, if you stop and turn it over in your hand, a deeply uncomfortable one. Because four days after those Rwanda and Pakistan findings appeared, the University of Oxford published a different study in Nature Medicine, led by a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute named Andrew Bean, that looked at what happens when the same class of models are handed to nearly 1,300 lay users and asked to help with the same basic task: figuring out what might be wrong and deciding where to go for care. In controlled benchmark tests, the chatbots identified relevant medical conditions around 94.9 per cent of the time and made the right call on disposition, whether a patient should stay home, see a GP, or go to A&E, in roughly 56.3 per cent of cases. Then the researchers let actual humans use the tools. The accuracy collapsed. Participants using an LLM identified at least one relevant condition in at most 34.5 per cent of cases, worse than the 47.0 per cent achieved by the control group left to its own devices with search engines and intuition. Only around 43 per cent of users made the correct disposition decision after consulting the model.

In the Oxford study, the bot offered one person with a suspected migraine the sensible advice to lie down in a dark room. Another person describing the same scenario was told to head immediately to an emergency department. Same condition. Same model. Different words, different outcomes, different versions of reality. Rebecca Payne, a GP and clinical senior lecturer at Bangor University who served as the study's clinical lead, told the British Medical Association's magazine The Doctor that the results were, in a word, disturbing. Bean, the lead author, described a two-way communication breakdown: people did not know what to tell the model, and the model did not know what to ask.

So here is the shape of the problem. Put in the hands of a trained community health worker in rural Rwanda, or a doctor in Karachi with twenty hours of prompting practice under her belt, a general-purpose AI chatbot apparently provides a genuine, measurable uplift. Put in the hands of an unsupervised patient in Oxford, or Bristol, or Manchester, and the same class of tool causes users to perform worse than they would have with a search engine. These are not contradictory findings. They are consistent findings. They are telling us that the value of an AI diagnostic tool depends almost entirely on the sophistication of the person holding it, the quality of the supervision around it, and the alternatives it is being compared against. And they are telling us that the populations with the least access to trained clinicians are the ones most likely to end up relying on these tools without any of those supports in place.

The Baseline Problem

The hardest thing to argue with, in the case for chatbot medicine in low-resource settings, is the counterfactual. What is the alternative? In Rwanda, the density of physicians is roughly one doctor per ten thousand people, and for obstetricians and paediatricians the figures are an order of magnitude worse. Community health workers, often women with a few months of formal training, handle the first, second, and sometimes only point of contact between a sick person and the idea of medicine. In Pakistan, the Human Resources for Health picture is uneven in a different way: urban specialists cluster in the big private hospitals, while vast rural districts operate with a skeleton of overworked generalists. If you are a parent of a feverish child in either country, the chain of escalation is short and the brakes are few. The question of whether a chatbot's advice is good enough is a luxury question, one that presumes you had a choice in the first place.

Set against that reality, the Rwanda findings are striking. The models evaluated, Gemini-2, GPT-4o, o3-mini, DeepSeek R1, and Meditron-70B, were scored across eleven metrics by expert reviewers against the kinds of questions community health workers actually ask. Gemini-2 and GPT-4o both averaged above 4.48 out of 5. All five models significantly outperformed the local clinicians against whom they were compared. That is not a throwaway result. It is a claim, peer-reviewed and published in one of the most scrutinised venues in medical science, that the best frontier models are now more useful than some of the humans they might one day replace, at least for the narrow slice of tasks they were measured on.

And yet. The phrase “at least for the narrow slice of tasks they were measured on” is where the whole argument starts to creak. Diagnostic reasoning in a benchmarked question-and-answer format is not the same thing as diagnostic reasoning in a room with a crying toddler, a frightened mother, a thermometer that may or may not be reliable, and a supply chain that may or may not have the drug the chatbot recommends. The Pakistan study, to its credit, was a randomised controlled trial with real clinicians handling real-looking cases, and it built in 20 hours of training on how to use the AI safely and critically. The physicians who used GPT-4o did better than those who did not, by a wide margin. But a secondary analysis noted that doctors still outperformed the model in 31 per cent of cases, typically those involving contextual “red flags”, the kinds of signs that only a human who has seen a thousand patients knows to take seriously. That residual 31 per cent is not a rounding error. It is the catalogue of cases where the chatbot is wrong and the doctor is right.

The uncomfortable question is what happens when you strip the twenty hours of training, the verified clinical context, the peer-review loop, and the research supervision, and you are left with the chatbot and the patient. The Oxford study is, in effect, a simulation of that stripped-down reality. It suggests that in the absence of the supports the Rwanda and Pakistan trials provided, the same tools degrade from diagnostic ally to confident misinformant. And it suggests that the degradation is worst precisely at the moment of highest stakes: deciding whether something is an emergency.

Who Pays for the Errors

Every health technology has a theory of accountability. When a drug fails, the regulator is supposed to catch it, the manufacturer is supposed to pay for the harm, the doctor is supposed to have exercised judgment in prescribing it, and the patient is supposed to be protected. The arrangement is imperfect, but it is at least legible. You can point at who is meant to carry the burden of an error.

AI diagnosis in under-resourced clinics does not yet have a theory of accountability. It has, at best, a set of competing rhetorical gestures. The model developer gestures toward the disclaimer in the terms of service that says the output is not medical advice. The clinic manager, if there is a clinic manager, gestures toward the fact that the health worker made the final call. The funder, often an NGO or a philanthropic arm of a wealthy-world foundation, gestures toward the pilot nature of the project and the counterfactual of no care at all. The regulator, in many of the countries where these tools are being deployed, is either absent, under-resourced, or, in the most honest assessment, unable to audit models whose weights live on servers in another hemisphere. The patient, in whose body the error is ultimately expressed, is left carrying a risk she did not choose and cannot price.

Compare this with the theory of accountability that wealthy-world health systems have evolved for their own medical AI deployments. The US Food and Drug Administration maintains a list of AI/ML-enabled medical devices that have been through some form of regulatory clearance. The European Union's AI Act, which began coming into force through 2025 and 2026, classifies clinical decision support tools as high-risk systems subject to post-market monitoring, human-oversight requirements, and documentation obligations. The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has spent years building a Software and AI as a Medical Device programme. These regimes are not perfect, and a general-purpose chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini is not licensed as a medical device anywhere: the whole point of a general-purpose model is that it evades that classification. But there is at least a framework, and an expectation that someone in a suit will eventually be called to account if things go badly wrong.

In the rural districts of Rwanda or the secondary hospitals of Sindh, there is no equivalent framework. There is nothing meaningful in place to tell a community health worker whether the model she is consulting was last updated yesterday or last year, whether it was fine-tuned on data relevant to her patient population, whether the version number she is typing into has been quietly deprecated by the provider, whether the sycophancy tuning that makes it so pleasant to argue with is also making it less likely to push back when she is about to make a mistake. The World Health Organization's January 2024 guidance on large multi-modal models in health, updated in March 2025, runs to more than forty recommendations, many of them sensible. But guidance is not regulation, and the WHO has neither the authority nor the enforcement mechanism to hold a model provider in California accountable for an outcome in a clinic in Nyagatare.

This asymmetry is what the language of “digital colonialism” is trying, sometimes clumsily, to name. The phrase was popularised by the scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias in 2019, and it has since spread through global-health and governance discourse as a way of describing the extractive dynamic in which data, users, and risk flow from the global South while capital, intellectual property, and control remain in the global North. At a UN briefing in 2024, the Senegalese AI expert Seydina Moussa Ndiaye warned that the continent risks a new form of colonisation by foreign companies that feed on African data without involving local actors in governance. You do not have to accept the full vocabulary of the critique to notice that something in the structure is badly off. When the tool is built in one place, deployed in another, regulated in neither, and breaks in a third, the burden of the break falls by default on whoever is physically closest to it. That, in almost every case, is the patient.

The Pharmaceutical Shadow

There is a particular history that hovers over this conversation, and pretending it does not is a form of intellectual cowardice. From the 1980s onwards, pharmaceutical companies based in the global North began conducting an increasing share of their clinical trials in low- and middle-income countries, often citing faster recruitment, lower costs, and less demanding regulatory environments as advantages. Some of those trials were conducted with genuine scientific rigour and produced treatments that benefited the populations who participated. Others did not.

The case that sits most heavily in the medical-ethics literature is Pfizer's 1996 trial of the experimental antibiotic trovafloxacin, marketed as Trovan, during a meningococcal meningitis outbreak in Kano, Nigeria. Pfizer enrolled roughly 200 children: 100 received Trovan, 100 received the existing standard of care, ceftriaxone. Eleven of the children died. Others were left with paralysis, deafness, liver failure. A secret Nigerian government report later concluded that Pfizer had conducted an illegal trial of an unregistered drug, and that crucial elements of informed consent and ethical oversight were either missing or falsified. The hospital's medical director stated that the letter granting ethical approval was a fabrication and that no ethics committee existed at the institution at the time. In 2009, after years of litigation, Pfizer agreed to a settlement of around 75 million US dollars with the Kano state government. The case is still taught in medical-ethics seminars as a textbook illustration of what happens when the protections meant to govern research on human subjects exist only as paperwork.

The analogy between Trovan and the current deployment of general-purpose AI in under-resourced clinics is imperfect. The Rwanda and Pakistan studies did not run experimental treatments on vulnerable populations without consent; they tested whether these tools might be useful to frontline workers, with expert review, peer publication, and clinician consent built into the protocols. The builders of the foundation models, meanwhile, are not pharmaceutical companies pushing a specific drug at a specific dose; they are providing a general-purpose tool whose medical use is an emergent application rather than a designed one. To equate the two cases directly would be lazy.

But the structural parallel is harder to dismiss. Both cases involve a technology developed with the global North in mind, deployed at scale in the global South while still being validated, where the regulatory architecture of the deployment country is not equipped to audit it, and where the population whose bodies become the site of validation has neither the information nor the institutional power to negotiate the terms. Both rely on a counterfactual argument: without the intervention, people would die. Both raise the same uncomfortable question about whose risk it is to take.

The Rwanda and Pakistan researchers would, I think, be the first to insist that their work is not a Trovan analogue. They are right to insist on it. But the global deployment of foundation models for diagnostic support is not, in practice, constrained to peer-reviewed research programmes. For every carefully designed Nature Health study, there are an unknown number of informal deployments: an NGO that bolts GPT into a WhatsApp triage line, a start-up that licenses a fine-tuned model to a chain of rural clinics, a district health authority that quietly rolls out a chatbot to its community health worker cadre because the phones were already there and the subscription was cheap. The published studies are the visible tip. The iceberg underneath is what ought to worry us.

The Reddit Evidence

Some of the best real-time reporting on the edges of this iceberg is happening not in medical journals but on Reddit. Subreddits like r/medicine and r/AskDocs, which verify credentials for physician posters, have become an accidental sentinel network for AI harms: places where doctors and patients alike surface the cases in which a chatbot has given advice that turned out to be dangerous, missed a red flag, or confabulated a reassuring explanation for a symptom that should have sent someone to hospital. The evidence on Reddit is anecdotal and unsystematic by design. It is also, because the posters are often trained clinicians describing what they are seeing in their own practices, unusually valuable.

A 2025 study in a health informatics journal examined endometriosis questions posted to r/AskDocs, comparing answers from verified physicians with answers generated by ChatGPT. On measures like clarity, empathy, and the selection of “most pertinent” response, the chatbot beat the humans in the majority of cases. On a parallel measure, a non-negligible proportion of the chatbot answers were flagged by expert reviewers as potentially dangerous. Other research has found that AI systems under-triaged emergency cases in more than half of tested scenarios, in one example failing to direct a patient with symptoms consistent with diabetic ketoacidosis and impending respiratory failure to the emergency department. Moderators of the medical subreddits have also documented the ingenuity with which users circumvent the safety rails of consumer chatbots: tricks involving framing medical images as part of a film script, or asking for a “hypothetical” differential diagnosis, or loading the prompt with enough fictive cover that the model forgets it is supposed to decline.

What the Reddit corpus captures, in a way that peer-reviewed studies struggle to, is the texture of chatbot medicine as it is actually practised by the unsupervised end user. It is the register of the late-night query, the frightened self-diagnoser, the patient who has been dismissed by one too many GPs and is now turning to an AI because the AI, unlike the receptionist, will listen for as long as it takes. It is also the register in which the Oxford findings become legible: the two-way communication breakdown, the wild swings in advice depending on how a symptom is described, the mix of good and bad information that the user has no way to separate. If the Nature Health studies are the controlled experiment, Reddit is the uncontrolled one. The uncontrolled one has millions of participants, no consent process, and no investigator taking notes.

One of the eeriest findings in the Reddit corpus is how readily the chatbots adapt to whatever framing the user provides. Ask about migraine symptoms in the confident voice of someone who wants reassurance and you will be told to lie down in a dark room. Ask in the anxious voice of someone who has been Googling brain tumours for an hour, and you may be told to head for the emergency department. Neither answer is exactly wrong. Both answers depend on information about the user, not the disease. The model is treating the conversation as a social exchange in which its job is to match the emotional register of the person on the other side. In a clinic, that might be called bedside manner. On an unsupervised chatbot with no training in clinical reasoning, it is called something considerably worse.

The Wealthy World's Alibi

The argument that frames AI diagnosis in the global South as an advance because it beats the baseline of nothing is true. It is also, I would argue, incomplete in a way that flatters the people doing the deploying. The counterfactual of “no care at all” does a lot of moral work in this debate. It reframes what would otherwise be understood as under-validated technology aimed at a vulnerable population into a charitable intervention. It converts the question “is this good enough?” into the different, easier question “is this better than nothing?”. It allows developers, funders, and policymakers in high-income countries to feel that they are doing something constructive without having to confront the deeper fact that the shortage of human clinicians in Rwanda and Pakistan is not a natural disaster. It is the result of a global labour market that has for decades drained trained doctors and nurses from low-income countries into the hospitals of Europe, North America, and the Gulf states. It is the result of public-health underfunding, of structural adjustment programmes, of brain drain actively subsidised by the recruitment pipelines of richer countries. The absence of a doctor in that Rwandan clinic is not an act of God. It is an act of policy, and much of that policy was written in capitals that also happen to host the major AI labs now offering the chatbot as a solution.

None of this is an argument against the Rwanda and Pakistan deployments as such. The community health workers who participated in those studies are not better off because a Western commentator is worried about their position in a global labour market. They are better off, if the data is to be believed, because the chatbot helped them give better answers to patients who needed answers. That is a real good, and refusing to count it because it is entangled with a larger injustice is its own kind of bad faith. But the existence of the real good does not cancel the larger injustice. It coexists with it. The wealthy world gets to sell itself a story in which it is closing the gap in global health through the deployment of frontier AI, while quietly continuing to benefit from the structural forces that made the gap what it is.

That asymmetry is what a new form of medical inequality looks like. It is not the crude inequality of having care versus not having care. It is the subtler inequality of having care that is under-regulated, under-validated, and structured so that the costs of its failures flow in one direction and the benefits of its successes flow in another. It is care delivered by a system whose architects and whose accountable parties live in a different jurisdiction from the people whose bodies supply the test data. It is the same logic that structured the pharmaceutical trials of the 1990s, updated for a world in which the drug is software and the side effects are bad advice.

Holding the Contradiction

None of the serious people in this story are villains. The researchers who ran the Rwanda and Pakistan studies believe, with good reason, that AI tools can extend basic diagnostic capacity to populations systematically underserved for generations. They are probably right. The Oxford team is not arguing that chatbots should be banned from clinical use; they are arguing that benchmark tests rather than human-in-the-loop studies underestimate the failure modes that actually matter. They are probably right too. The WHO's 2024 and 2025 guidance on large multi-modal models tries to hold the genuine promise and the genuine risk in the same frame. It is also, like most WHO guidance, advisory rather than binding.

Both things are real at once. It is real that in a rural clinic where the counterfactual is silence, a chatbot giving useful advice 80 per cent of the time is a revolution. It is also real that an unvalidated chatbot deployed at scale across populations who lack the institutional power to audit it or seek redress creates a risk with no historical precedent and no settled framework of accountability. The Rwandan community health worker who consults a model to help diagnose a feverish child is, on the evidence, improving her care. The same model, used the same way, by a frightened patient in Birmingham the next morning, causes worse decisions than she would have made with a search engine. These are not two stories. They are one story, viewed from two angles.

In January 2024, when the WHO published its first major guidance on large multi-modal models in health, it urged governments and technology companies to ensure that the deployment of these tools did not widen existing health inequities. Two years on, the Nature Health and Nature Medicine studies together are giving us a map of what that widening might actually look like. It does not look like withholding the technology from the poor. It looks, instead, like deploying the technology to the poor under one set of conditions and to the rich under another, and allowing the differences between those conditions to do the work of quiet structural harm. The rich get the chatbot plus the regulator. The poor get the chatbot plus a hope that someone, somewhere, is watching the aggregate outcomes carefully enough to notice if something is going wrong.

Back in the Rwandan clinic, the community health worker puts down her phone. The child is still feverish, but she has a plan now. Whether the plan is the right one depends on a chain of assumptions she cannot directly verify: that the model she consulted was the model she thought she was consulting, that the fine-tuning was appropriate for her context, that the training data did not carry some invisible bias against children who look like the one on her lap, that the confidence in the model's reply reflects an actual epistemic state rather than the trained conversational habit of a system that has learned to sound sure. She does not know any of that. She is not meant to know it. Somewhere, in principle, there is meant to be a grown-up who knows it on her behalf.

Who, in this system, is that grown-up? Who is meant to be watching, with authority, with enforcement powers, with the mandate to pull the plug when the signal goes bad? The developer in Menlo Park? The regulator in Kigali? The ministry in Islamabad? The WHO in Geneva? The researchers who ran the Nature Health studies and who have already gone on to the next project? The philanthropic funder who paid for the initial pilot and whose annual report, next year, will list it as a success? Each of these actors can give a coherent account of what they are doing and why. None of them can give a coherent account of who is holding the whole thing together.

That is the shape the new medical inequality takes. Not the old, blunt kind where the poor get nothing and the rich get everything, though there is still plenty of that. A different kind, more modern, more subtle, and in some ways more dangerous for being so easy to mistake for progress. The poor get the tool, and the rich get the framework within which the tool is allowed to exist. The poor carry the risk of the errors. The rich carry the intellectual property and the option, should they need it, of pulling the plug. Whether this counts as an advance depends, in the end, on whether you believe a bad system with a good heart is closer to the right answer than a slow system with a functioning memory of what it is for.

So here is the question, sharpened. If the answer in Rwanda is that the chatbot helps, and the answer in Oxford is that the chatbot harms, and the answer in both places is that almost nobody in a position of authority can tell you with any precision who is responsible if it goes wrong, then what, exactly, have we built? A bridge, or a gap with a very convincing surface?

References

1. Simms, C. (2026, February 6). Cheap AI chatbots transform medical diagnoses in places with limited care. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00345-x
2. Large language models for frontline healthcare support in low-resource settings. (2026). Nature Health, 1(2). https://www.nature.com/articles/s44360-025-00038-1
3. University of Oxford. (2026, February 10). New study warns of risks in AI chatbots giving medical advice. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-02-10-new-study-warns-risks-ai-chatbots-giving-medical-advice
4. Bean, A., et al. (2026). Clinical knowledge in LLMs does not translate to human interactions. Nature Medicine.
5. The Doctor (British Medical Association). Bot-ched advice, disturbing results in AI study. https://thedoctor.bma.org.uk/articles/health-society/bot-ched-advice-disturbing-results-in-ai-study/
6. VentureBeat. Just add humans, Oxford medical study underscores the missing link in chatbot testing. https://venturebeat.com/ai/just-add-humans-oxford-medical-study-underscores-the-missing-link-in-chatbot-testing
7. World Health Organization. (2024, January 18). WHO releases AI ethics and governance guidance for large multi-modal models. https://www.who.int/news/item/18-01-2024-who-releases-ai-ethics-and-governance-guidance-for-large-multi-modal-models
8. World Health Organization. (2024). Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health, guidance on large multi-modal models. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240084759
9. Abdullahi v. Pfizer, Inc. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullahi_v._Pfizer,_Inc.
10. BMJ / PMC. Pfizer accused of testing new drug without ethical approval. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1119465/
11. BMJ / PMC. Secret report surfaces showing that Pfizer was at fault in Nigerian drug tests. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1471980/
12. Brookings. What do Pfizer's 1996 drug trials in Nigeria teach us about vaccine hesitancy? https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-do-pfizers-1996-drug-trials-in-nigeria-teach-us-about-vaccine-hesitancy/
13. Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The costs of connection, how data is colonising human life and appropriating it for capitalism. Stanford University Press.
14. UN News. (2024, January). AI expert warns of digital colonisation in Africa. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1144342
15. Tech Policy Press. Lessons from Nigeria and Kenya on digital colonialism in AI health messaging. https://www.techpolicy.press/lessons-from-nigeria-and-kenya-on-digital-colonialism-in-ai-health-messaging/
16. PMC. Colonialism in the new digital health agenda. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10900325/
17. Comparing ChatGPT and physicians' answers to endometriosis questions on Reddit, a blind expert evaluation. International Journal of Medical Informatics. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1386505625002515
18. MIT Technology Review. (2025, July 21). AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren't doctors. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/21/1120522/ai-companies-have-stopped-warning-you-that-their-chatbots-arent-doctors/
19. NPR. (2026, March 11). ChatGPT is not always reliable on medical advice, new research suggests. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/11/nx-s1-5744035/chatgpt-might-give-you-bad-medical-advice-studies-warn
20. Nteasee, understanding needs in AI for health in Africa. (2024). arXiv. https://arxiv.org/html/2409.12197v4

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

In Summary: * More yard work today. All mowing on the front lawn. Did more then I intended to do, not yet finished but what's left can wait a bit longer. Everything visible from the street or the sidewalk looks way better than it has for awhile.

No score yet in tonight's baseball game, 0 to 0 in the 3rd inning. Night prayers after the game, then bedtime. That's the plan.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 229.94 lbs. * bp= 121/78 (76)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 chocolate chip cookie, 1 banana * 06:50 – 1 ham sandwich * 08:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 14:00 – pancakes, sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, biscuits & jam * 15:00 – 1 chocolate chip cookie * 17:00 – garden salad * 19:05 – small dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:40 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 11:00 to 12:15 – yard work, more mowing on front lawn * 13:15 to 14:30 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:00 – watching Intentional Talk on MLB Network * 16:40 – listening to the Cleveland Guardians pregame show ahead of their game tonight vs the Tampa Bay Rays

Chess: * 07:40 – moved in all pending CC games

2nd Day in a Row

Tuesday's MLB Game of Choice in the Roscoe-verse once gain features the Tampa Bay Rays vs the Cleveland Guardians. Its scheduled start time of 5:10 PM CDT fits comfortably into my night's routine. As yesterday, I'll be following the radio call of the game tonight on the Cleveland Clinic Radio Network.

And the adventure continues.

Everything you do matters. There is not a breath you take which doesn’t make the world a better place. Every act of creativity, every kindness you do, every drop of compassion you feel fixes a shattered world, piece by piece. Humans are beautiful beings remarkably capable of mending what’s broken in a way that makes it better than it was before.

Have you ever looked at a starry sky and marveled at the specks of light unimaginably far away? Have you ever been dazzled by skyline city lights? Have you ever walked among the trees and listened to birdsong? Have you ever been awed by the capacity to build skyscrapers and organize cities? You introduced feeling to a universe that wouldn’t feel that without you.

Carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen don’t feel, but you do. Carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen can’t appreciate themselves or each other, but humanity produced chemists who dedicate their lives to doing so. Humanity produced physicists who study the behavior of the gasses that these elements compose. Humanity produced children awed by elementary science experiments, demonstrating the foundations of existence. Humanity introduces so much good.

We strive, and struggle, and reach great heights, and fix problems, and astound ourselves with what we achieve.

It is unfortunate, then, that we will lose this all. Everyone we love and everyone who loves them will die. Every ripple we make will become irretrievably subsumed in the sea of consequences we fill. Entropy will destroy everything we build and the coldness of the universe will overcome every degree of warmth we generate. It is sad because what we’ve done and made matters. It is a tragedy.

Knowing tragedy is always impending doesn’t change the goodness of what we do. It means we’re on the clock. We have limited time to enjoy life and be there for each other. The situation is urgent. The fire is coming and it will consume everything; love now and love deeply.

You lose in the end, so win now, while you still can.

🙋‍♂️

I’ve been fixing some tickets to go see Placebo for their 30 yrs anniversary this fall/autumn, isn’t it fun how time flies like that?

Except when waiting for the microwave to finish these 2.5 minutes are very long

Or one night in my youth, I was having been drunk and I was with a friend and I slept in her little brother‘s room, right?

But problem was I woke up when the alcohol was out of my system, like at 03:00 and then I just lay there on the bed, looking at the gaming console, they had this goldeneye game, is it for the x-box? Doesn’t matter

I just lay there waiting for the others to wake up, because it wasn’t that known, the place… her parents were in there somewhere in some room, no clue which one, and I didn’t want to wake anyone, not wanting to bother anyone so I lay there waiting until the others were up, but they‘d been drinking too and it wasn’t until around 10.00 I started hearing some sounds and then I went down they had cereal, I’m pretty sure we had cereal

And that her mother liked me,

And that was something about me which made me seem lost like I was clueless or something, like a puppy or even a child? (Innocence?)

Anyway, That night I remember as having been incredibly long some reason felt incredibly slow, like incredibly slow

But

I had my friend whose jaw got broken because he encountered a football/(soccer) hooligan who just punched him for wearing the wrong colours.

And he was drunk, so he had to lay at the hospital for a very long time before they could sedate him, he just lay there with increasing pain also just letting time pass

And that was on new years eve. What a way to spend New Year’s Eve

They finally had some sort of metal to fix his jaw so he had to go for a very long time drinking soup with a straw, cause he couldn’t open his jaw or speak much

Goulash soup except he had to put it in the blender first, do you know?

Well anyway this all feels like it’s yesterday

An I am eager to see this Placebo of course, with some good friends I collected throughout these years

The proprietor of the Music One record shop in Abergavenny, which closed after the flooding there last November, now has a stall in the town's indoor market. His stock, though less extensive in this new venue, remains good, just as the prices are still on high side. Even so, one of his less expensive LPs caught my eye when I was there the other weekend, and I was intrigued enough to hand over £15 for it: In The Townships by Dudu Pukwana, an '80s re-issue of an album first released in 1974.

I was delighted to find it's a marvellous record. Pukwana was an alto saxophonist, pianist and composer who had left his native South Africa for London in the ‘60s. In The Townships was recorded at Virgin Records’ ‘The Manor’ Studio. Also featured are Bizo Mngqikana on tenor sax, Mongezi Feza on trumpet, Harry Miller on bass, and Louis Moholo on drums. Its seven tracks are mostly built on buoyant, repetitive grooves over which there's a good deal of unison horn playing, augmented on some of the tracks by chanted vocals. Try 'Baloyi' or 'Sonia' for example, the opening salvoes on sides A & B respectively.

I bought myself a copy of Attila Veres’ The Black Maybe last month, the debut short story collection in English by this Hungarian author. I'd seen it often and enthusiastically recommended, and can now throw one more hearty recommendation on to the pile after finishing it on Sunday. It's as good a set of horror stories as I've read in many years, building on genre conventions (and sometimes undermining them) in original & surprising ways. Veres can layer on the lurid nastiness with the best of them but can do subtlety too, meanwhile leavening his prose with sardonic humour. His characters feel like proper individuals and not merely unfortunate puppets. A second collection of his stories (This'll Make Things a Little Easier) has recently been issued by Valancourt Books: I shall have to get a copy of it soon.

The cheese of the week (not for the first time) has been Gorwydd Caerphilly. It's one whose virtues I extolled in a post on my previous blog. With the local Sainsbury's now stocking it, I've lately been enjoying this excellent foodstuff on a more regular basis.

I reside in the high and holy place, but also with those crushed and lowly in spirit.

This is what Jehovah says:

“Uphold justice, and do what is righteous, For my salvation will soon come And my righteousness will be revealed.

Happy is the man who does this And the son of man who holds fast to it, Who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it And who holds his hand back from any kind of evil.

The foreigner who joins himself to Jehovah should not say, ‘Jehovah will surely separate me from his people.’ And the eunuch should not say, ‘Look! I am a dried-up tree.’

For this is what Jehovah says to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths and who choose what I delight in and who hold fast to my covenant:

“I will give to them in my house and within my walls a monument and a name, Something better than sons and daughters. An everlasting name I will give them, One that will not perish.

As for the foreigners who join themselves to Jehovah to minister to him, To love the name of Jehovah And to be his servants, All those who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it And who hold fast to my covenant,

I will also bring them to my holy mountain And make them rejoice inside my house of prayer. Their whole burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar. For my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples.”

The Sovereign Lord Jehovah, who is gathering the dispersed ones of Israel, declares: “I will gather to him others besides those already gathered.”

All you wild animals of the field, come to eat, All you wild animals in the forest.

His watchmen are blind, none of them have taken note. All of them are speechless dogs, unable to bark. They are panting and lying down; they love to slumber.

They are dogs with a voracious appetite; They are never satisfied. They are shepherds who have no understanding. They have all gone their own way; Every last one of them seeks his own dishonest gain and says:

“Come, let me take some wine, And let us drink our fill of alcohol. And tomorrow will be like today, only far better!”

Isaiah 57

The righteous one has perished, But no one takes it to heart. Loyal men are taken away, With no one discerning that the righteous one has been taken away Because of the calamity.

He enters into peace. They rest on their beds, all who walk uprightly.

“But as for you, come closer, You sons of a sorceress, You children of an adulterer and a prostitute:

Whom are you making fun of? Against whom do you open your mouth wide and stick out your tongue? Are you not the children of transgression, The children of deceit,

Those who are inflamed with passion among big trees, Under every luxuriant tree, Who slaughter the children in the valleys, Under the clefts of the crags?

With the smooth stones of the valley is your portion. Yes, these are your lot. Even to them you pour out drink offerings and offer gifts. Should I be satisfied with these things?

On a mountain high and lofty you prepared your bed, And you went up there to offer sacrifice.

Behind the door and the doorpost you set up your memorial. You left me and uncovered yourself; You went up and made your bed spacious. And you made a covenant with them. You loved sharing their bed, And you gazed at the male organ.

You went down to Melech with oil And with an abundance of perfume. You sent your envoys far off, So that you descended to the Grave.

You have toiled in following your many ways, But you did not say, ‘It is hopeless!’ You found renewed strength. That is why you do not give up.

Whom did you dread and fear So that you started to lie? You did not remember me. You took nothing to heart. Have I not kept silent and withdrawn? So you showed no fear of me.

I will make known your ‘righteousness’ and your works, And they will not benefit you.

When you cry for help, Your collection of idols will not rescue you. A wind will carry all of them away, A mere breath will blow them away, But the one who takes refuge in me will inherit the land And will take possession of my holy mountain.

It will be said, ‘Build up, build up a road! Prepare the way! Remove any obstacle from the way of my people.’”

For this is what the High and Lofty One says, Who lives forever and whose name is holy:

“I reside in the high and holy place, But also with those crushed and lowly in spirit, To revive the spirit of the lowly And to revive the heart of those being crushed.

For I will not oppose them forever Or always remain indignant; For a man’s spirit would grow feeble because of me, Even the breathing creatures that I have made.

I was indignant at his sinful pursuit of dishonest gain, So I struck him, I hid my face, and I was indignant. But he kept walking as a renegade, following the way of his heart.

I have seen his ways, But I will heal him and lead him And restore comfort to him and to his mourning ones.”

“I am creating the fruit of the lips. Continuous peace will be given to the one who is far away and the one who is near,” says Jehovah, “And I will heal him.”

“But the wicked are like the restless sea that cannot calm down, And its waters keep tossing up seaweed and mire.

There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.”

Flavour Town – Part 1

Tuesday is always leg day, and it’s something Sev looked forward to. There was something special about it, and it definitely wasn’t something he would have thought he’d enjoy when he started his gym journey. But now here he was, carefully planning out his program to make sure it was built around a heavy compound movement, a squat or deadlift, then a couple of isolation exercises, and finally a small abdominal routine before heading home and finishing the day with 30 minutes of cardio. This whole experiment with the gym still felt surreal to Sev, and often, he still couldn’t believe he was being a “gym guy”. Primarily because there were so many parts of the gym he didn’t like, first and foremost, he wasn’t a fan of crowds – they made him uncomfortable, and he still wasn’t a fan of the more revealing gym clothing.

So, he preferred going to the gym later in the evening, where he could be alone and not have to deal with other people in the weight room. Luckily, the evenings at Living Good Gym were quiet, a place of solitude and sweat where Sev could feel comfortable. Indeed, these last 6 months of initiation into the church of iron had been surprisingly enjoyable, and it was getting to the point where Sev couldn’t imagine his life without it. There was something soothing about the rhythmic pattern of contraction and extension that accompanied weight training. He liked the exertion of pushing weight against the tyranny of gravity and the feeling of triumph as he stood tall in front of the mirror, the barbell quivering in submission to his strength and power.

Stepping into the elevator that led up to the gym, Sev pressed the second-floor button and casually rested his head against the back wall. Turning to the side, his reflection on the mirrored side panels showed a figure he almost didn’t recognize. Sev looked himself up and down, still occasionally in disbelief at the physical changes that had occurred. His normal black joggers seemed to fit snugly around his legs and hips, and his shirts now felt tight around his arms and chest. After years of being skinny, it felt like he was finally beginning to fill out his frame and find some mass. Over 6 feet tall, Sev was a handsome young man with distinct dark features, sharp cheeks bones from his mother and curly hair from his father. The contrast of facial features that his parents had given him gave him a certain ethnic ambiguity that allowed him to blend in wherever he went while simultaneously being rejected by the cultures he had grown up in.

Even speaking Japanese, Sev had always felt excluded, though the exclusion was rarely from overt xenophobia but often expressed in subtle and unintentional ways. Because people could never really tell what he was ethnically, they always felt safe to express their thoughts around him, and through his last 30 years on the planet, Sev had realized that when people feel comfortable around you, they generally start telling you why they dislike other people. It’s even worse when they don’t realize you have a cultural connection to the people they are speaking about. But that had been the story of Sev’s life for as long as he could remember, he was constantly in a cultural limbo, trapped between two parts of who he was and never quite being able to ground himself in either.

He would be lying if he said he didn’t find it extremely frustrating to be outside of every group, not really having a place where he just fit in. It made him feel isolated and alone, even when he had never suffered for friends, it was more the need to find people like him. That was before he discovered the gym, and since then, the lonely dark thoughts that often seemed to plague his mind have not come as frequently. It was what his therapist had actually recommended.

‘What did you like to do in high school?’ his therapist had asked during their second session. Sev had taken a moment to answer this, it had seemed like forever since he had attended Trudeau High, and even longer since he had given it any thought at all.

‘I was on the senior badminton team’, Sev had recounted. ‘I also practiced Kendo, and I used to like to doodle a lot. But I think that was just because I would get bored in class and it was the only thing I could do.’

‘Do you still do any of those things?’

‘No, I don’t really have a lot of time. Most of my time now is spent in the lab’

‘What do you do in the lab?’

Sev leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. He had been asked this question on several occasions, and each time ended in awkward silence and no second date. Not that Sev was delusional enough to think that his therapist would be romantically interested in him, but the social conditioning from past experience still gave him pause.

‘I do experiments on Rats’, Sev finally answered. ‘I am trying to understand the impacts of dreams on perceived reality.’

‘Rats have dreams?’ his therapist responded, a subtle note of curiosity playing in their inflexion.

‘Yah, they do.’ Sev paused before continuing. This was usually the part of the conversation that had historically taken an already average date to the point of no return. ‘We use electric shocks to stimulate parts of their brains and trigger certain types of dreams’

‘You can make them have specific dreams?’

She seemed genuinely curious and interested, though Sev quickly concluded that it was probably because it would encourage him to continue opening up. That was her job after all, to head shrink, and what better way to do that than to get him to open up about his research. She was, after all, the only person besides his supervisor who seemed interested. Even his RAs seemed to be only marginally interested in the work they were assisting with, and Sev could rarely get them to seriously engage with the project.

‘Well, specific types of emotions,’ Sev clarified. ‘Fear, anxiety, happiness, curiosity, things like that. Once we trigger the emotion, the rat’s brain fills in the rest and creates a dream around those emotions. It’s their attempt at trying to explain and make sense of what they are experiencing. Humans do the same thing, though our imaginative process is a lot more complex, fundamentally it’s the same.’

The therapy conversation concluded with her recommending that Sev pursue hobbies outside his research, and he decided he might give the gym a go. It seemed like a simple enough hobby, and the decision to join Living Good Gym was easy because they were having a sale at the time and were open 24 hours a day. He had been pleasantly surprised when he had found out he actually enjoyed working out, and the body transformation was just a bonus.

‘Good to see you again Sev,’ the front desk attendant said, jolting Sev out of his mind and back into reality. ‘Good day so far?’

Sev moved towards the automatic gates that guarded the weight room floor and scanned his membership card.

‘Just another day in paradise, even better now that I am here.’

‘That's my man!’ the attendant said, smiling broadly and pressing the button to swing the gate open. ‘Hope you enjoy your workout and make sure you try the new equipment we special ordered in from Ohio for the booty buzz zone’

‘Ohio? What’s so special about Ohio?’ Sev asked as he glanced towards the back corner of the gym. Straining to see the equipment that made up the small area the gym had set aside for glute development.

‘It’s from this new company called Fieri Strength, they make all types of equipment, but they’re best known for their twin hip thruster machine. It's supposed to help your glute development by evenly distributing the strength curve through the whole movement’, the front desk attendant proudly recited as he returned to absent mindedly folding towels.

‘Rumour is that it’s an old prototype from the West Side professor. Something he found in an old Soviet strength manual.’

Sev tried to hide his excitement at the prospect of properly stimulated glutes, but couldn’t help a small smile from creeping out at the thought of this mysterious new contraption.

‘I might just have to give it a go’, he said, pushing through the gym turnstile and giving the desk attendant a courteous farewell before steeling his mind ahead of the ravaging he was about to inflict on his body.

‘I could substitute out the goblet squats I was going to do, so I can try out the new machine’, Sev thought as he made his way towards the astroturf area to begin warming up his lower body.

Setting his gym bag down, Sev was already lost in thought, systematically thinking about how he would force his body to sweat and grind out the next hour or so. Going down into a soft lunge, Sev closed his eyes and took a deep breath, feeling the astroturf on his knee, and slowly pushed his hips forward into a deep stretch. Sev focused on feeling his body respond to the new exertion on his tendons and muscles, bringing his hips down and forward, making sure to maintain proper alignment between his front ankle and knee. Pushing off from his half-kneeling position, he began moving through a walking lunge complex to warm up his legs, butt, hips, and joints.

He planned to put his lower body through a punishing gym session and needed his joints warm and loose so that the strain wouldn’t put him out of commission and delay his gains or even worse make standing in a lab all day excruciatingly painful. Midway through the warmup, Sev stripped off his shirt and took a second to catch his breath, enjoying the inklings of sweat that were beginning to percolate across his body. 6 Months ago, Sev would have been horrified at the prospect of standing in a public place half naked, but the gym had instilled a newfound confidence in his corporeal form and as long as he had his legs covered the empty gym felt oddly at home despite his nakedness. Taking a deep breath in and slowly beginning to stretch his neck, Sev drank in the smells that permeated this sacred place. He had come to love the sweet, vulgar smell that hundreds of sweating bodies left in the air and ground around him. This pleasure still didn't quite make sense to him, it was a gnarly smell, but there was something about it which felt intoxicating and alluring.

Maybe it was because of what it represented, every drop of sweat that fell on this floor was the result of some sort of exertion. A memento of the force needed to overpower the weight of an object, brutally subjecting it to your will despite its efforts to crush you. He had come to love the grind, as cringy as that sounds, but it wasn't because of his newly toned back and legs or even the attention it seemed to occasionally bring him. There was a sense of pride that accompanied hard work, and the gym was a temple to it. A mecca of strength gained through exertion and pain, it was a sacred place where everyone was equal, no matter who they were, they were all striving for improvement and embracing pain to accomplish it.

Sev realized that there was a tinge of sadomasochism that was sprinkled through his new outlook on life, but it was so much more than that. Not that he was a philosopher, as a career scientist he had little use for long winded pontifications, but long hours spent on the stairmaster or treadmill often allowed his mind to wander freely through the ether of his thoughts, unrestrained by the confines of the lab. And indeed there was something confining about the lab, with its rigid procedures and formulas. Of course, Sev recognised the necessity of these strict rules, both for safety and experimental consistency, but there was no freedom there. Often, he would look at the rats and wonder if he was any different from them, merely trapped in a small box being played with by some other apathetic being simply trying to find something new to publish so he could make tenure.

‘What a lame idea’, Sev thought to himself, using his now discarded shirt to swipe the sweat from his forehead.

‘I am beginning to sound like a 15-year-old kid who just discovered Reddit.’

But there was an air of truth to the uncertainty and lack of purpose that highlighted the reflective ramble his mind had taken during his warm up. He did feel hollow and apathetic, like his life was devoid of colour and emotion. A life that was constructed of white sterile tiles and eggshell coloured walls, where everything was just a little too shiny but still dull in the absence of any real lustre. Even his thoughts at times felt oddly linear in their logic and need for concise clarity. There was no room for ambiguity or uncertainty within the tyrannical regime of the scientific method, they were a chaotic force which needed to be subdued and carefully reorganized till they could hold a single form of truth.

Gently turning his neck to look to the right, Sev glanced at the new equipment from Ohio that the front desk attendant had mentioned. If his life was just a solid mass of offwhite, strictly regimented and ordered, the gym was the small splash of colour and chaos that he had so desperately needed. And right now, what he needed most was to feel his butt strain against some heavy weight. The booty buzz zone was placed in the far corner of the gym and was always a busy section, with the precious glute-specific equipment occupied by every shmo who thought they could obfuscate their intolerable personalities with dumps the size of trucks. Sev wasn’t one of those types, he knew that strong glutes were at the foundation of a healthy body, but would never be caught intentionally showing them off. Taking his shirt off was one thing, his right bestowed by hours of exertion and commitment to developing and moulding his body, but he hated the idea of showing off his glutes in a similar way. Glutes were to be respected, not simply flaunted.

‘Strong glutes, strong mind’, Sev thought as he bent forward at the hips, continuing his warm up.

Pushing his butt back and engaging his hamstrings, Sev lets his hands hang down, moving his head from side to side to continue stretching out his neck. Closing his eyes again and focusing on stretching, his tranquillity was briefly interrupted by what felt like the sudden ignition of the gym's AC. Shivering at the sudden rush of cool air that seemed to creep over his toned and naked torso, caressing his body and leaving in its wake thousands of goosebumps, Sev opened up his eyes and slowly eased out of his bent over position. Coming upright, he caught a glimpse of an individual at the far end of the astroturf on his left.

Facing away from Sev, this enigma was dressed in a baggy dark hoodie with the hood pulled up, white Nike blazers, and very revealing booty shorts with the words “Heat” across them.

Previously, I wrote about how my rule of life serves as a trellis for my spiritual life, comparing it to the structures I erected in the garden to support the flexible growth and health of the raspberry patch.

The patch of course, left to its own devices would simply wander, grow, and spread all on its own. The sun, rain, and soil provide the nourishment and energy needed for growth, leaves, and flowers; and the local crew of bumblebees, honeybees, and other pollinators take care of bringing the patch to fruition. There isn’t much I can do to help with any of these processes.

What the trellis allows for is protection, partnership, and containment. Gathering and training the canes into one space keeps them from being stepped on or mowed over. Providing access to the base of the plant means that we can feed the soil and provide protective mulch to keep down weeds and promote the health of the raspberry plants. Containment allows for the plant to grow vigorously without overrunning the rest of the garden.

The past few years of intense weather and some less sturdy construction choices led to the slow and steady collapse of the first trellis. The patchwork of extra hooks, ground stakes, and ratchet straps that held it up for the past year seemed almost relieved to be released from their duty this spring.

In its place, I constructed a trellis that was both similar and different. The shapes, guide wires, and positioning mirrored the first structure. The materials and methods shifted. The lumber was replaced with pressure treated material to promote longer life out in the elements. The guide wires used a heavy gauge braided wire and tensioners to replace clothesline and clamps. The posts were sunk two feet into the earth and stabilized with post fixing foam. I even added the solar lantern post caps for beauty and to add an illuminating and reflective quality to the structure.

This major upgrade and repair to this portion of the garden reminds me of the importance of revising, updating, and refreshing my rule of life. While I expect this garden repair to last for many years before it needs to be rebuilt, I try to bring my rule of life under review quarterly as I meet with my own spiritual director and engage with my companion from the order. Furthermore, I make an effort to explore revisions, renovations, and updates to my rule.

Sometimes this can be quite concrete, because there are geographic, vocational, or family and friend changes that need to be reflected in what I hope to do and the values I want to embody in the year ahead. Other times, there are subtle adjustments and changes to strengthen, refocus, or reframe my current answers to the two core pillars of a rule of life: “Who am I called to be?” “How do I want to be in the world?” The awareness of these shifts is at the heart of contemplative practice and noticing when a shift fits within the existing trellis versus when a repair or renovation is needed to protect, cooperate with Spirit, and keep my spiritual practice from overgrowing the garden of my soul.

Practice

If you are living under a rule of life, when was the last time you:

• Read it slowly with curiosity and attentiveness?
• Reviewed whether it accurately matches the circumstances of your present life?
• Considered if there are things to prune (let go with loving gratitude), mulch (protect and strengthen), or plant (test and try to see what grows)?
• Rebuild, revise, or rewrite some or all of it?

Unweit des Stadtzentrums bin ich einem Unverpacktladen begegnet “Hola Retschka”. Mit viel Ausdauer wurde mir auf ukrainisch erklärt wo und wie die verschiedenen Waren hergestellt werden, vieles kommt aus der Ukraine, und wird genau wie in den unverpackt Läden in Deutschland verkauft. Die Preise sind definitiv teurer als im Supermarkt, aber es variiert stark je nach Produkt und Herkunft. Außerdem gibt es ein Regal, wo noch brauchbare Dinge hingebracht werden, die andere gegen eine Spende ans Militär kaufen können. Ein sehr süßer Laden, mit sehr netter Verkäuferin :)

https://holahrechka.com.ua/

https://www.instagram.com/hola.hrechka/

In Lviv gibt es immer wieder große Straßen, mit viel grünem Platz für Fußgängis in der Mitte. Da merke ich sehr, dass deutsche Städte vor allem für Autos gemacht sind. Hier ist auch Platz um zu Fuß durch die Stadt zu kommen, teilweise auch mit Radwegen (wobei Fahrräder das Stadtbild nicht unbedingt prägen, eher E-Scooter).

Beim genaueren Hinschauen kann mensch auch in Lviv den Krieg sehen. Darin, dass Statuen und z.B. Kirchenfenster verhüllt, verbarrikadiert, oder in Sicherheit gebracht worden sind.

In einem Café war außerdem ein German und ein Italian Speaking Club angekündigt. Das gibt es hier im Land oft, und auch zu Themen wie Kunst, Kino, Film, Musik treffen sich junge Leute regelmäßig um sich auszutauschen. Solche Formate habe ich in Deutschland nie in diesem Maß gesehen, aber finde ich sehr sympathisch.

———

Not far from the city center I came across a zero-waste shop called “Hola Retchka”. With a lot of patience, I was explained in Ukrainian where and how the various goods are made — a lot of it comes from Ukraine and is sold just like in zero-waste shops in Germany. The prices are definitely higher than in the supermarket, but it varies a lot depending on the product and its origin. There's also a shelf where people can drop off things that are still useful, which others can take in exchange for a donation to the military. A really sweet shop with a very friendly shopkeeper :)

https://holahrechka.com.ua/

https://www.instagram.com/hola.hrechka/

In Lviv you keep coming across wide streets with lots of green space for pedestrians in the middle. It really makes me notice how German cities are built primarily for cars. Here there's actually room to get around on foot, and sometimes even with bike lanes (though bikes don't really define the streetscape — e-scooters are more of a thing).

If you look more closely, you can also see the war in Lviv. In the way that statues and things like church windows have been covered, barricaded, or moved to safety.

In one café “te amo Lviv” there was also a German and an Italian Speaking Club advertised. This kind of thing is common across the country — young people regularly meet up around topics like art, cinema, film and music to exchange ideas. I've never seen formats like this to the same extent in Germany, but I find it really lovely.

Einige Cafés hier bieten neben Seife zum Hände waschen auch Handcreme an <3

Unverpackt Laden:

dort steht: Das Original werden wir nach dem Sieg bewundern