When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel... Taking to the road – by which I mean letting the road take you – changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories – in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.
In Indian Country,” he says, “we have a different sense of time. I’m learning and you’re learning – and more will.
The travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our “need for distraction, our mania for the new.
Perhaps we’ll only be fully at ease with ourselves when we can appreciate scars as symbols of experience, often experiences that other women share, and see our bodies as unique chapters in a shared story.
Recently, an Ethiopian and several Kenyan drivers have sounded a bigger alarm. As one said, “I never thought I would see a second wave of colonialism, but there is one and it’s Chinese. Our countries are becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of China.
Altogether I’ve seen enough change to have faith that more will come.
This vertical history feels more intimate and sensory than written history. It’s been reaching out all along, I just wasn’t paying attention.
Now when I’m asked with condescension why I don’t drive, I just say: Beacause adventure starts the moment I leave my door.
I am left without answers. There are only questions I must answer for myself. What is the balance between home and the road? Hearth and horizon? Between what is and what could be?
Men would support us, we are told, if only we learned how to ask in the right way. It’s a subtle and effective way of not only blaming the victim, but making the victim blame herself.
Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it – and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.
I learned that the first stewardesses had been registered nurses hired to make passengers feel safe at a time when flying was new, airsickness was frequent, and passengers were fearful.
The older I get, the more intensely I feel about the world around me.
Also reporters kept asking Ferraro if a woman could be “tough enough” to “push the button,” meaning declare a war, though they didn’t ask male candidates if they could be wise enough not to.
If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.
When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.
Our grief is not a cry for war.
As Vita Sackville-West wrote: I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.
Looking at international economic life brings to mind the ancient image of the world riding on the back of a turtle – only in reality, the turtle is a woman. She inches along, laboring just beneath the level of economic visibility, often blaming herself for not being able to bear more weight. Occasionally, she retreats into her shell, as if withdrawal were the only form of rebellion. But only when she upsets its balance will the world roll off her back.
When you’re dependent, it’s very hard not to be worried about the approval of whoever and whatever you’re dependent on. For.