This Week: Curating an Earthly Book of Hours

Taking a week away from the species to make some progress on a side project.

I started this Lectio Terra project over the winter, after struggling to finish a short essay around the feelings that “we need new calendars” and/or “we need new clocks.” In the perpetual darkness of the snowy season, I was fed up with the constant stream of pings on my phone and events sprawled across my digital calendar.

But this time, instead of finding a print planner to physically jot down my reminders, obligations, and stray notes—my usual move—I went simultaneously medieval and digital. I treated my amateur nature blog as a type of devotional practice, loosely inspired by Christian techniques of attention and curation, that could serve as a new type of calendar for my scattered mind. Of course, I still have all the pings and calendar events, but these seem a little more shapely amidst my weekly cycle of reading and writing about a new (to me) aspect of nature.

In the background, I’ve also been working on a new version of the daily clock for my scattered mind. I put a poetic spin on the eight canonical hours (matins, vespers, etc.) and began collecting images and readings that evoke the different phases of the day: from the void of midnight through the chorus of morning and the doldrums of the afternoon to the gradual denouement of bedtime. With the help of several large language models, combined with my long-dormant high-school website-building interests, I compiled my materials into a fancy digital format based on my, again, medieval model.

The result, so far, is what I am calling “an earthly book of hours”: an ensemble of art and other images, literary or philosophical passages, and various natural phenomena for observing the passing of the day.* The site presents this material for the current hour, which you can refresh or “turn the page” on to view further; or you can wander to different times of the day or night. This “earthly” version of the book-of-hours form isn’t meant as a substitute for or comment on its more transcendent predecessors; it’s just a spin-off for the poetically or artistically inclined. Compiling it has helped attune me to my own daily rhythms, finding the present moment when I need to do that, or distracting me when I need a diversion. It’s a work in process that I expect to grow gradually as I collect more material.

I hope you’ll give it a look: The Earthly Book of Hours.

* Most of the site’s contents are drawn from the public domain, comprising works that are out of copyright. Any copyrighted materials are employed in the spirit of fair use, for educational, illustrative, and non-commercial purposes, in the belief that brief encounter leads to deeper reading.