Words from people who have worked with me, alongside me, and have left their mark on me, and me, mine on them too.
Education, from the Latin, educare, or, educere, to bring forth, to nurture, to bring out the inherent potential within the person.
My thanks goes to these people and to the various breezes and mysteries that blew and nudged me towards them.
“I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our
once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask.”
“There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.”
“Falling might very well be flying –
without the tyranny of coordinates.
In order to find your way, you must lose it. Generously.”
“The idea of an individual moral actor who stands outside history, wielding agency and intention like a sovereign, echoes colonising sentiments implicated in the turbulences of our so-called late capitalist times.”
“…the end of the usual is not catastrophe, but a stranger choreography where every collapse composes
a new rhythm, a fugitive score for those willing to dance offbeat.”
These words above from Bayo Akomolafe… having read his books and joined in with online groups that included Bayo… his capacity to bend and twist and dismantle… so often leave me in new shapes.
More here.
The words below are from a mix of bits from Sophie Strand.
One of my fave writers.
“Myths were once the maps of communities intimately dialoguing with their environment. But the rise of empire depended on the uprooting of these life-giving stories. Deracinated from their context and from the renewing respiration of communal storytelling, these stories ossified into abstraction and reinforced the anthropocentric hyper-individuality and colonial capitalism of today.”
“In the world of artificial lights and fossil fuels, quantum physics and rationalism, how do we read fairy stories as true?”
“Has the age of science overtaken the magical mind?”
“Viruses can invisibly shut down the whole globe, taking out millions of human lives without ever physically appearing. But they are also responsible for the development of the human placenta. The gene of retroviral origin, syncytin, in mammals that establishes a placenta, is a retroviral gene that was incorporated millions of years ago.”
“90 percent of plants on earth depend on symbiotic fungi that weave them into complex relationships with other trees and vegetation…. This isn’t like magic. It is magic…. They embody the tricky, morally ambiguous realm of fairies.
Sometimes they are helpful, sometimes they are mischievous to the point of being harmful.
Mostly they are more interested in their own wild, inhuman lives than they are in our macroscopic, lumbering linear stories.
We are not separate. We are overlapping, symbiotic, inextricable. If we understand this, we will understand that our survival is contingent upon them [viruses and fungi].”
Traditionally, the Hanged Man [Tarot card] represents a pause, perhaps tinged with discomfort, that holds the possibility of enlightenment
The Hanged Man, for me, is the rooted one… He represents more than a physical inversion. The Rooted One initiates a perspectival shift.
The brain is not abstracted in the head. It lives and is constituted by the roots.
Our bodies are deeply. intelligent. They hold useful information.
How can we honour bodies wisdom?
Our bodies, when we ge to know them intimately, have a lot to tell us about what kind of medicine and movement might really benefit us.”
This is from Sophie’s book The Flowering Wand, Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.
The words below from James Baldwin. On of my go to sources of wisdom and humanity.
“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”
From the book; The Devil Finds Work.
“Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.”
From Notes of a Native Son.
“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
From Giovanni’s Room
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony.”
From No Name in the Street
“Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.”
From Conversations with James Baldwin
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.”
from The Fire Next Time
Will add more as I go… meanwhile, one of my personal faves,
“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it Mark.”
From my Dad.