Joy Harjo: All Acts of Kindness Are Lights In the War For Justice

 Quotes by Joy Harjo

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

She exists in me now, just as I will already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams.

My father told me that some voices are so true they can be used as weapons, can maneuver the weather, change time. He said that a voice that powerful can walk away from the singer if it is shamed. After my father left us, I learned that some voices can deceive you. There is a top layer and there is a bottom, and they don't match. 

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul. 

If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned. 

In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol.

I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hate twin, but now, I don't know you as myself.

True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.

At least I've had to come to that in my life, to realize that this stuff called failure, this stuff, this debris of historical trauma, family trauma, you know, stuff that can kill your spirit, is actually raw material to make things with and to build a bridge. You can use those materials to build a bridge over that which would destroy you.

It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. 

It's possible to understand the world from studying a leaf. You can comprehend the laws of aerodynamics, mathematics, poetry and biology through the complex beauty of such a perfect structure. It's also possible to travel the whole globe and learn nothing.

There is no separation. We are all from the same place. As long as there is respect and acknowledgement of connections, things continue working. When that stops we all die. 

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds. 

A story matrix connects all of us. There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part. 

Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts.

Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world, nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm. 

The heart is a fist. It pockets prayer or holds rage. 

The saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then, you take a breath all the way from the center of the earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven. All that love we humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little. 

I was born with eyes that can never close.

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.

It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit.

All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice. 

Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you. 

Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning—We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love.