In that moment, we knew that we were all weird, all in this together, and that addressing our own suffering, while learning not to inflict it on others, is part of the work we’re all here to do. So is love, which comes in so many forms and can be directed at so many things.
In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got.
Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together. Surely the mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.
Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.
The art is not one of forgetting but letting go.
I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.
Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it.
Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won’t mark you out as special, though your response to it might.
The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society. They renew the reasons why we might want to belong and the feeling that we do.
I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...
We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were astonished every day.
A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways.
I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan.
What is the message that wild animals bring, the message that seems to say everything and nothing? What is this message that is wordless, that is nothing more or less than the animals themselves- that the world is wild, that life is unpredictable in its goodness and its danger, that the world is larger than your imagination.
Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.
The current President’s verbal abuse of language itself – with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he’s serving, he’s always serving meaninglessness.
Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.
Violence is the power of the state; imagination and non-violence the power of civil society.
We die all the time to avoid being killed.
Women’s work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together –.