Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.
We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
You get lost out of a desire to be lost. But in the place called lost strange things are found...
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?
Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be “apolitical” is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.
Given a choice between their worldview and the facts, it’s always interesting how many people toss the facts.
What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity – seeing the troubles in this world – and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.
We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.
Credibility is a basic survival tool.
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.
Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
"Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter,” says an African proverb. But what if the lionesses write eloquently but the editors prefer the hunters’ version?
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.
Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.
We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.
A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.
To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.
There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.
The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.
They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.
I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.
The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we can not save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.
To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
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