You can’t just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.
To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall.
Don’t dare presume there’s shame in the lot of a woman who carries on.
The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know. Underneath.
An animal is the sum of its behaviors, its community dynamics. Not just the physical body.
If trained to nature from an early age, could a mind be freed from its vendetta against the world’s creatures?
Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It’s a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.
With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history’s broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can’t live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation.
I read in a book that they cut off the workers’ hands if they hadn’t collected enough rubber by the end of the day. The Belgian foremen would bring baskets full of brown hands back to the boss, piled up like a mess of fish. Could this be true of civilized white Christians?
It’s the worst of bad manners to ridicule the small gesture... Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.
Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.
My heart had grown older, with more in it to break.
I shrugged. “I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can’t remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench.
Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.
The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is almost so simple I can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.
The women of his family would become one with the earth’s creatures only by pressing the bones of whales against their rib cages until breathless.
Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable. Cooking and eating at home – even with quality ingredients – costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory.
I don’t know how you go on, but I really hope you’ll keep doing it. That you won’t give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is try and think of reasons to stick it out.
A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.
You from out of town?” he asked after a while, eying my car. “No,” I said. “I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate.” I didn’t like his looks.