Maybe freedom really is nothing left to lose. You had it once in childhood, when it was okay to climb a tree, to paint a crazy picture and wipe out on your bike, to get hurt. The spirit of risk gradually takes its leave. It follows the wild cries of joy and pain down the wind, through the hedgerow, growing ever fainter. What was that sound? A dog barking far off? That was our life calling to us, the one that was vigorous and undefended and curious.
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Peter Heller (Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River)
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You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.
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Adrienne Rich: Women and Honor
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I have never believed in a single truth. Neither my own, nor those of others. I believe in all schools, all theories can be useful in some place, at some time. But I have discovered that one can only live by a passionate, and absolute, identification with a point of view…. As time goes by, as we change, as the world changes, targets alter and the viewpoint shifts…. For a point of view to be of any use at all, one must commit oneself totally to it, one must defend it to the very death. Yet, at the same time, there is an inner voice that murmurs: ‘Don’t take it too seriously. Hold on tightly, let go lightly.’
[I]t is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it…
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Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (This one’s for you, Jill.)
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We don’t need to have all six billion of us living like environmental saints tomorrow—or ever, for that matter. To take such a thing as our objective would merely assure failure…. We simply can’t, as Gorbachev suggests, wait for ‘all members of the world community’ to ‘resolutely discard old stereotypes.’… These are will-o-the-wisps, vain expectations that keep us rooted in hopelessness, year after year, decade after decade….
Because we don’t expected to overthrow governments, abolish world capitalism, make civilization vanish, or turn everyone in the world into walking buddhas, we don’t have to wait for ANYTHING. But I have to warn you that many people will tell you the opposite, that we have to wait until we have a world that is ALREADY perfect. They feel absolutely nothing should happen until we’ve banished social inequality, racism, sexism, poverty, and every other bad thing you can think of….
People who think like this would wait for the cut to heal before applying a bandage, would wait till daybreak to light a candle, would wait for the sinking ship to rise before getting in the lifeboat.
You MUST have a revolution if you’re going to survive, Julie. If you go on the way you’re presently going, it’s hard to imagine your living through another century. But you can’t have a negative revolution. Any revolution that thinks of ‘going back’ to some ‘good old days’ of imagined simplicity… is founded on dreams. Any revolution that depends on people voluntarily giving up things they want for things they don’t want is mere utopianism and will fail. You must have a positive revolution, a revolution that brings people MORE of what they REALLY want, not LESS of what they DON’T really want. They don’t really want sixteen-bit electronic games, but if that’s the best they can get, they’ll take it…. If you want them to lose interest in toys, then you must give them something EVEN BETTER than toys.
That must be the watchword of your revolution, Julie—not voluntary poverty, but rather voluntary wealth. But REAL wealth this time. Not toys, not gadgets, not ‘amenities.’ Not stuff you can put in bank vaults. Real wealth of the kind that humans were born with. Real wealth of the kind that humans enjoyed here for hundreds of thousands of years…. And this is wealth you can enjoy without feeling guilty, Julie, because it isn’t something stolen from the world.
There is nothing you must be, and there is nothing you must do. There is nothing you must have, and there is nothing you must know. There is nothing you must become. However, it helps to understand fire burns, and when it rains, the earth gets wet.
Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.’
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Mark Z. Danielewski, House Of Leaves
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One of the hardest things for me in dealing with my mental health condition is my very strong theory that everyone else is having exactly the same problems that I am, but they’re just 8 million times better at dealing with them, and hiding them from everyone else. And thus, I don’t talk about my mental health, much, because everyone else is obviously coping with the same thing, and I’m just a big whiner who can’t cope and fails at everything and is useless and should just run away and everyone will be better…
[W]e merge our myths with our facts according to our feelings, we tell ourselves our own story. And no matter what we are told, we choose what we believe. All ‘truths’ are only our truths, because we bring to the ‘facts’ our feelings, our experiences, our wishes. Thus, storytelling—from wherever it comes—forms a layer in the foundation of the world; and glinting in it we see the trace elements of every tribe on earth.
The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
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G. K. Chesterton (thanks Matt)
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I’ve never been double-crossed by a sweet puppy or a lion in the jungle.
