[quotes] Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paulo Freire 1968

 

"The term conscientização refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality." 

"The rightist sectarian differs from his or her leftist counterpart in that the former attempts to domesticate the present so that (he or she hopes) the future will reproduce this domesticated present, while the latter considers the future pre-established - a kind of inevitable fate, fortune, or destiny." 

"The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the prisoner of a 'circle of certainty within which reality is also imprisoned.' On the contrary, the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it."

"From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and women, and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love."

"The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed." 

"This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well." 

"True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the 'rejects of life,' to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands - whether of individuals or entire peoples - need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world." 

"They will not gain this liberation by chance but through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to fight for it. And this fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors' violence, lovelessness even when clothed in false generosity." 

"It is a rare peasant who, once 'promoted' to overseer, does not become more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself. This is because the context of the peasant's situation, that is, oppression, remains unchanged." 

"One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual's choice upon another ,transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber's consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor. The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility." 

"... the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle." 

"However, the oppressed, who have adapted to the structure of domination in which they are immersed, and have become resigned to it, are inhibited from waging the struggle for freedom so long as they feel incapable of running the risks it requires. Moreover, their struggle for freedom threatens not only the oppressor, but also their own oppressed comrades who are fearful of still greater repression." 

"They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom." 

"The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. they are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account." 

"In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform." 

"Hence, the radical requirement - both for the individual who discovers himself or herself to be an oppressor and for the oppressed - that the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed." 

"One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings' consciousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: refection and action upon the world in order to transform it." 

"The pedagogy of the oppressed, which is the pedagogy of people engaged in the fight for their own liberation, has its roots here... The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption. The pedagogy of the oppressed, animated by authentic, humanist (not humanitarian) generosity, presents itself as a pedagogy of humankind. Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression."

"There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation... This violence, as a process, is perpetuated from generation to generation of oppressors, who become its heirs and are shaped in its climate." 

"But even when the contradiction is resolved authentically by a new situation established by the liberated laborers, the former oppressors do not feel liberated. On the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression."  

"For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more - always more - even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the 'have.' The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own 'effort,' with their 'courage to take risks.'"

"... trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust."

"The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection - true reflection - leads to action. On the other hand, when the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection. In this sense, the praxis is the new raison d'etre of the oppressed; and the revolution, which inaugurates the historical moment of this raison d'etre, it not viable apart from their concomitant conscious involvement. Otherwise, action is pure activism." 

"The correct method for a revolutionary leadership to employ in the task of liberation is, therefore, not 'libertarian propaganda.' Nor can the leadership merely 'implant' in the oppressed a belief in freedom, thus thinking to win their trust. The correct method lies in dialogue. The conviction of the oppressed that they must fight for their liberation is not a gift bestowed by the revolutionary leadership, but the result of their own conscientização."

chapter 2

"This is the 'banking' concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits."

"Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them'; for more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated."  

"Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly, fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But, sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation." 

"It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educators' role is to regulate the way the world 'enters into' the students. The teacher's task is to organize a process which already occurs spontaneously, to 'fill' students by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge... The educated individual is the adapted person, because he or she is better 'fit' for the world." 

"Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it. Those truly committed to the cause of liberation can accept neither the mechanistic concept of consciousness as an empty vessel to be filled, not the use of banking methods of domination (propaganda, slogans - deposits) in the name of liberation." 

"The role of the problem-posing educator is to create; together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos."

"Education as the practice of freedom - as opposed to education as the practice of domination - denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people."

"In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation... it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world." 

"Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming - as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality... The banking method emphasizes permanence and becomes reactionary; problem-posing education - which accepts neither a 'well-behaved' present not a predetermined future - roots itself in the dynamic present and becomes revolutionary."  

"Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects."

chapter 3

"Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people." 

"As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love. Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world - if I do not love life - if I do not love people - I cannot enter into dialogue."

"At the point of encounter there are neither utter ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only people who are attempting together, to learn more than they now know." 

"Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all). Faith in people is an a priori requirement for dialogue; the 'dialogical man' believes in others even before he meets them face to face."

"For the dialogical, problem-posing teaher-student, the program content of education is neither a gift nor an imposition - bits of information to be deposited in the students - but rather the organized, systematized, and developed 're-presentation' to individuals of the things about which they want to know more."

"The oppressors are the ones who act upon the people to indoctrinate them and adjust them to a reality which must remain untouched."

"It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation of the world. Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of 'banking' or of preaching in the desert."

"Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the people they address... In order to communicate effectively, educator and politician must understand the structural conditions in which the thought and language of the people are dialectically framed."

"... as they locate the seat of their decisions in themselves and in their relations with the world and others, people overcome the situations which limit them: the 'limit situations.'"

"Confronted by this 'universe of themes' in dialectical contradiction, persons take equally contradictory positions: some work to maintain the structures, others to change them. As antagonism deepens between the themes which are the expression of reality, there is a tendency for the themes and for reality itself to be mythicized, establishing a climate or irrationality and sectarianism."

"In sum, limit-situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated and curbed by them. Once the latter come to perceive these situations as the frontier between being and being more human, rather than the frontier between being and nothingness, they begin to direct their increasingly critical actions towards achieving the untested feasibility implicit in that perception. On the other hand, those who are served by the present limit-situation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limit-situation which must not be allowed to materialize, and act to maintain the status quo." 

"Human beings are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more they not only critically reflect upon their existence but critically act upon it."

"The task of the dialogical teacher in an interdisciplinary team working on the thematic universe revealed by their investigation is to 're-present' that universe to the people from whom she or he first received it - and 're-present' it not as a lecture, but as a problem." 

"The important thing, from the point of view of libertarian education, is for the people to come to feel like masters of their thinking by discussing the thinking and views of the world explicitly or implicitly manifest in their own suggestions and those of their comrades."

chapter 4

"The revolution is made neither by the leaders for the people, nor by the people for the leaders, but by both acting together in unshakable solidarity."

"Authentic revolution attempts to transform the reality which begets this dehumanizing state of affairs."

"We can legitimately say that in the process of oppression someone oppresses someone else; we cannot say that in the process of revolution someone liberates someone else, nor yet that someone liberates himself, but rather that human beings in communion liberate each other."

"Although they may legitimately recognize themselves as having, due to their revolutionary consciousness, a level of revolutionary knowledge different from the level of empirical knowledge held by the people, the cannot impose themselves and their knowledge on the people. They cannot sloganize the people, but must enter into dialogue with them, so that the people's empirical knowledge of reality, nourished by the leader's critical knowledge, gradually becomes transformed into knowledge of the causes of reality."

"It is necessary for the oppressors to approach the people in order, via subjugation, to keep them passive. This approximation, however, does not involve being with the people, or require true communication. It is accomplished by the oppressors' depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo: for example, the myth that the oppressive order is a 'free society.'"

"All these myths (and others the readers could list), the internalization of which is essential to the subjugation of the oppressed, are presented to them by well-organized propaganda and slogans, via the mass 'communications' media - as if such alienation constituted real communication."

"One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action which is almost never perceived by the dedicated but naive professionals who are involved is the emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as dimensions of a totality."

"By means of manipulation, the dominant elites try to conform the masses to their objectives. And the greater the political immaturity of these people (rural or urban) the more easily the latter can be manipulated by those who do not wish to lose their power."

"Manipulation, like the conquest whose objectives it serves, attempts to anesthetize the people so they will not think."

"One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success." 

"In [cultural invasion], the invaders penetrate the cultural context of another group, in disrespect of the latter's potentialities; they impose their own view of the world upon those they invade and inhibit the creativity of the invaded by curbing their expression."

"The more the invasion is accentuated and those invaded are alienated from the spirit of their own culture and from themselves, the more the latter want to be like the invaders: to walk like them, dress like them, talk like them."

"Homes and schools exist not in the abstract, but in time and space. Within the structures of domination they function largely as agencies which prepare the invaders of the future."

"Internalizing paternal authority through the rigid relationship structure emphasized by the school, these young people tend when they become professionals to repeat the rigid patterns in which they were miseducated. This phenomenon, in additional to their class position, perhaps explains why so many professionals adhere to anti-dialogical action. Whatever the specialty that beings them into contact with the people, they are almost unshakable convinced that it is their mission to 'give' the latter their knowledge and techniques."

"In order to determine whether or not a society is developing, one must go beyond criteria based on indices of 'per capita' income as well as those which concentrate on the study of gross income. The basic, elementary criterion is whether or not the society is a 'being for itself.' If it is not, the other criteria indicate modernization rather than development."

"If at a certain historical moment the oppressed, for the reasons previously described, are unable to fulfill their vocation as Subjects, the posing of their very oppression as a problem will help them achieve this vocation."

"... just as the oppressor, in order to oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become free, also need a theory of action."

 

 

[quotes] What It Takes to Heal - Prentis Hemphill 2024

 

"We neglect ourselves or our growth in our rush to change what is external. When we do, we fracture, and succumb to what we are unwilling to face." 

"It seemed as if everyone had come to the edge of the precipice, held hands, but failed to jump. The change that was needed required more than many were willing to give." 

"I don't think healing begins where we think it does, in our doing something. I believe it begins in another realm altogether, the realm of dreams and imagination. A realm that I might also call spirit. A place of potential, where possibilities reside, where we retrieve, through prayer or in dreams, visions for ourselves and for the world that make us more whole." 

"Some say that in our time of overwhelm and chaos we are at the end of futures, out of resources and hope, that were is nothing left to dream in this reality, that we are trapped on a timeline where we keep remaking disaster movies until we meet our final catastrophe." 

"Visioning is an uncovering of potential. It's revealing what is already there and trying to become, if only we believe in it."

"I think of the risk it is to stretch beyond the containers that have been created for us. I think about longing. It's a visceral word for me. It's vulnerable and hard to let ourselves desire beyond what we can trust will be fulfilled. Longing is not evidence-based in that way; it's a yearning that comes from our bodies."  

"When we can't perceive too far ahead, it's impossible to imagine that we can shape what comes and create a future we've never seen." 

"There is a difference between the visions that come out of our most individualistic tendencies and those that arise when we are able to admit that we need other people. I've often found that the visions people articulate for themselves, those that they are most afraid to admit, are their yearnings for connection and their longing to lead and coordinate something that will have a big impact on the world." 

"Our ability to dream of something different, to name longing, to articulate a vision and commit to it, directly correlates to the likelihood that we will experience it, that it will be realized... In prayer or meditation, in what we ritualize, our visions become more real the more space we give to them." 

"Healing and social change are not, in fact, unrelated. To pry them apart is to exacerbate the issue. They are inextricably linked, braided together, interdependent processes of transformation... How could our personal development ever truly be at odds with social transformation? How could it happen without it?"

"As we attempt to reconfigure the world where it has been unjust and where our systems and beliefs have hurt us, so must we transform ourselves, our values, our cultures, our actions, and our spirits." 

"Pain is transmitted across a power grid. It's sent to the places where we don't fear the consequences of it spilling over onto the people less powerful than us, onto seemingly less deserving bodies. It shows up as abuse toward a partner who has fewer means to leave or in the scapegoating of whole communities for our suffering." 

"I've been working for years now with this: Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma." 

"Healing, I often say, helps us fight in the places we need to, but love in the places we long to."

"It's in everything that right rightsizes you, brings you into reverence and presence, where you leave your control or hiding place, and suddenly you can create within the world, and be taken aback in awe of it, too."

"We commit to our own healing in part because the realization of what we are dreaming of rests on it. It is our responsibility to one another to do our internal work, not so that we feel good alone but to stay in active part of the whole and to refuse to pass down to the next generation what pain we've accrued." 

"For healing to take place, for it to be felt, for it to root, remake, and rearrange us, it has to happen not only in the realm of our thinking, but in the soil of our bodies. Healing has to be embodied." 

"(1) What we practice, what we do over time, can eventually become automatic; that is, it no longer requires our thinking to execute. We just do it. Something is truly learned when it is embodied (whether it's riding a bicycle or having the capacity to trust someone). What we embody may be aligned or misaligned with our values or may be helpful or harmful to us as we learn and embody practices both consciously and unconsciously over time. (2) We can build our awareness of what it is we do automatically, how we do it, and how it came to be - which gives us the possibility to change. (3) We can increase our ability to feel our emotions rather than deny them and allow ourselves to feel what we deeply long for in ourselves and the world. (4) To transform and become who we intend to be more often, we have to practice being who we are becoming."

"Such a view of our own bodies and the natural world converts us all easily into objects when we relate to one another. If we treat our bodies like machines, as if they are only containers for our thinking, then our emotions, in their unpredictability, become the wild in need of conquering, too. And it would follow that if we do not feel or if our society views feeling as a failure, our culture might lose its grasp on what is truly humane." 

when did you first know you have a body?

"Our best thinking happens as a full-bodied experience, because no matter how much we try to separate the brain from the body, it is irritatingly located there, inside of it, a part of the ecosystem that is us. There is a reality that our bodies connects us to." 

"And our bodies are somehow a collection of living stories, too, of where we've been and where we come from, a profound record of our ancestors' survival." 

"The more we are jolted into reactivity, the more we lose our grounding in the present moment as we respond to the vestiges of the past. This loss of presence is a loss of agency. If we are always caught up in responding to the conditions of another time, we are not able to respond as thoughtfully to the conditions of this one." 

"Numbing is one way that we protect ourselves from feeling something we are afraid to or are under-resourced to feel." 

"Somatics, in a way, is born from the original fracture that separates us all into feeling and non-feeling, wild and civilized. It's a solution to a problem created when the mind was given supremacy." 

"Somewhere along the way we were taught to stop feeling instead of being taught to stop what harms us, as though the feeling were our enemy, as though the feeling were hurting us. To move forward and address the harm, we have to feel. As Audre Lorde said in her essay, 'Poetry Is Not a Luxury,' 'The white fathers told us: I think, there I am. The Black mother within each of us - the poet- whispers in our dreams: I feel, there I can be free.'" 

"Empathy, mutuality, and connection are dangerous to injustice. They can unravel what is otherwise a fragile, imposed order. For safety reasons, then, we are all taught to push our emotions down and away rather than feel them. If we felt, imagine what we might change." 

"Across this earth are our kin. What we do shapes the lives of others. We exist in an impossibly complex web of relationship." 

"Inauthenticity is sometimes rewarded. It's a set of defenses learned over time. They can develop out of striving to achieve the visions that were imposed on us. Or we can become someone we're not to protect ourselves from being vulnerable and impacted by other people, a self that is assembled through trauma." 

"When we allow ourselves to be authentic, it's from there that we can be known. Authenticity is the root of vulnerability, of intimacy, of relationship. When we can take off our mask, we invite others to do the same." 

"I choose what to share, I choose what I respond to, I choose when to leave. I see people all the time who bring others back into their lives after distance and assume that the relationship and their proximity to each other should revert to what it once was. Instead, ruptures should inform the shape of relationships going forward. We should relate differently based on what's happened, now that we've learned something about who the other actually is and who we are. If not, we risk falling into the same patterns that didn't work before." 

"These are boundaries. When we decide the shape and nature of our relationships. When we are not forced into closeness because of expectations or history, but we choose according to our comfort. We get to move forward with the knowledge of our history, following a path of our own making." 

"trust as the choosing to make something you value vulnerable to another person's actions. Trust is a risk we take with one another to do something bigger than we could have done alone." 

"Of course, unplugging gives us the space we sometimes desperately need to reassess and listen, to hear ourselves, our own heartbeats in the silence. But if we believe that our wholeness requires long-term disconnection from the world, we run the risk of mistaking what is comfortable for what is healing, a sense of control with safety, and reinforcing separation and isolation." 

"We can't change the world if we can't heal what has become embodied in us, and we cannot truly heal if the conditions that break and isolate us don't change, too." 

"While these systems are sometimes the sites of both individual and collective trauma, each of these sites, these systems, is also a potential place of action and transformation. Just as they shape us, they are places that can be shaped and reshaped, rebuilt and reworked, abolished and replaced." 

"To initiate change, we can only begin where we are and as whoever we are right now." 

"We decide together what is sacred and we hold it as such."

"Engaging the world is about making our contribution, about exiting the safety of the sidelines and feeling the texture of deep practice and collective action." 

"When we choose to deny that interconnection by othering, by seeing some of us as less worthy, we refuse to submit to a clear and urgent lesson from our universe: When we don't care for all of us, what is allowed to happen to me will eventually be done to you." 

"No one teaches us how to build a family, how to decide that people with whom we share no blood are relatives."

"... we must first be able to feel grief, our own, before we can truly become an ally to anyone else. We have to know what it is to have lost. For all of us striving to achieve, climbing the ladders of success or acceptance in our society, that might well mean we have to stop and admit that there's something that we've given up to play the game." 

"There's no saviors in a circle, no heroes, just people taking risks for a vision of another way." 

"There's is almost nothing more profound or more terrifying than the simple act of reaching for each other. There is no real intimacy that does not begin with listening. And there is no chance that we can show up for each other if one or both of us is still somehow an object." 

conflict is the nature of a relationship asking to deepen

"Sometimes we wrap our tender fears in judgment and in blame, punishing someone for making us bare our chests, holding tight the apologies that are ours to say until the other person shows they are worthy by apologizing first."  

"Conflict can makes us very unsure, and a body threatened craves certainty. This can affect the way we respond... when we are able to hold and explore nuance in a situation, it leads to more precise actions. We see that contradictions can exist alongside one another, and we can hear and take in other perspectives. We can hold multiple motivations and truths in our core and live with that stewing of complexity until the next right action shows itself to us." 

"What if we could do something different from having innocence and guilt at the core of our conflicts? To give up on this binary is not to erase the fact that we often hurt one another in conflict - very must the opposite in fact... What if, in resolving conflicts, we could move out of binaries and into a culture of accountability? Where we are proactively responsible for our actions and relationships."

"I'm left with a question I haven't yet been able to answer: What will it really take to believe in our and others' ability to change? Maybe the most direct question is: How do we begin to create this culture when there have already been so many betrayals?" 

"It is hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it, what it is for a body to open, but it is just as holy as falling before the pulpit and as righteous as a riot. It is the breaking of what binds. It is undoing so that we can become." 

"We are always practicing something, somatics teaches us... We have practiced, whether we realize it or not, who we are right now." 

"Practice isn't only helpful because repetition brings us closer to some kind of perfection, but because in each repetition we are met by our internal barriers, sometimes small and lurking, sometimes quite profound, that threaten the skill we are trying to learn. Practice is the recurring encounter with ourselves and the space to learn from it. The mundane is miraculous with the right attention." 

[quotes] Calling In - Loretta J. Ross 2025

  

"Empathetic accountability requires developing the emotional and intellectual fitness to entertain contradictory thoughts at the same time... not about feeling sorry for wrongdoers but about recognizing their humanity." 

"We can say what we mean and mean what we say, but we don't have to be mean about it." 

"we rightfully resist demands that we be polite to our oppressors when voicing our outrage." 

"call out culture is born out of an under-reaction to abuse and overreaction to conflict." 

"There are people who say we need to burn it all down to be able to build a new society. But if we can't find people to build power with now, how are we going to find them in the ashes?" 

"More information doesn't make people change their behavior if they don't think the source of that information has their best interests at heart." 

"Transitional demands are an important way to practice nonviolent social change." 

"When many people have different ideas but move in the same direction, that's a movement. When people have the same idea and move in the same direction, that's a cult." 

"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love." - MLK

"When you ask someone to give up hate, you need to be there for them when they do."

"Empathy means extending your circle of care to strangers beyond your kith and kin." 

"It takes courage to be true to your own integrity, especially when there are benefits to doing otherwise." 

"Since I was unwilling to question if I was wrong, I didn't do anything right." 

"Anyone working for change needs to be able to channel charged emotions without being overcome by them." 

"Calling in techniques: (1) Start with the self; (2) Calibrate the conflict; (3) Approach with love; (4) Accept the reaction; (5) Reach a solution." 

"I like to hold meetings where the whole organization - or a series of breakout rooms - can discuss their understandings of conflict and power dynamics." 

"You can start by helping people recognize their own tendencies to engage in call out culture." 

"The point is not to encourage public confessions but for everyone to think about their patterns and to ask themselves if this the best they can do." 

"Our goals in identifying their different degrees and sources of conflict is to create a culture where we're not treating every offense as an emergency. Instead, we're creating channels for deescalating conflicts." 

"Advance understanding is about trying to reach a shared perspective on conflict before a crisis arises." 

"Advance accountability is about creating a set of practices that we can use to navigate conflicts once they've erupted." 

"Power differentials make it harder for employers to be candid unless extra reassurance is provided (and meant)." 

"In a call out culture, it's common for agreements to turn into arguments; re-expression helps turn conflicts back into conversations." 

"The problem with not standing up to injustice is that it normalizes it. It makes it seem that those who violate the human rights of others are not doing anything weird. A calling in mindset should make us braver and less likely to ignore the injustices around us."

"Calling in works on the assumption that people want to work well together but need more skills to do so." 

"If you don't know someone well enough to call them in, if they haven't directly harmed you, if you're not involved in the actual situation - then you shouldn't be calling them in or out. You're just adding noise." 

"At the heart of a call in culture is that simple of act of love." 

"Healing and reconciliation cannot take place without truth and accountability first, without addressing the conditions and the feelings that caused the harm in the first place." 

"The more consistently we call ourselves in, the more we learn to enjoy the learning we are gifted from others. If you are peacefully aligned with your values, you can talk to anyone and take joy in the messiness of us all stumbling through being human together."

[quotes] Serviceberry - Robin Wall Kimmerer 2024

 

"what is the 'sun' of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it's love" 

"you can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother." 

"Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you can take care of them."

"Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for a life." 

"Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer."

"Never take the first one. Never take the last."

"Take only what you need."

"Take only that which is given."

"Never take more than half. Leave some for others."

"Harvest in a way that minimizes harm."

"Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken."

"Share."

"Give thanks for what you have been given."

"Give a gift in reciprocity for what you have taken."

"Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will last forever." 

[quotes] A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things - Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore 2017

  

"Cheap is the opposite of a bargain - cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life. 'Things' become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print." 3

"Great historical transitions occur because 'business as usual' no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing." 12

"While much has been made of its gory and oppressive history, one fact is often overlooked: capitalism has thrived not because it is violent and destructive (it is) but because it is productive in a particular way. Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work - as cheaply as possible." 19 

"Everything that humans make is coproduced with the rest of nature: food, clothing, homes and workplaces, roads and railways and airports, even phone and apps... The 'human' relations of power and difference, production and reproduction, not only produce nature, they are products of nature." 20

 

"Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can count only dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible. For capitalism, this means that the whole system thrives when powerful states and capitalists can reorganize global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption as possible." 21

"In economics, an externality is a cost or a benefit, private or social, that doesn't appear in the calculus of production. We're arguing that the modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at the frontier, crises that resulted from human and extrahuman life inserting itself into that calculus. The modern world happened because externalities struck back." 21

"Frontiers are so important in these processes because they offer places where the new cheap things can be seized - and the cheap work of humans and other natures can be coerced. We come, then, to what we mean by cheapness: it's a set of strategies to manage relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism's crises." 22

"Capital isn't the dead stock of uncut trees or unused skill. For Marx and for us, capital happens only in the live transformation of money into commodities and back again. Money tucked under a mattress is as dead to capitalism as the mattress itself. It is through the live circulation of money, and in the relations around it, that capitalism happens." 26

"Capital is a process in which money flows through nature. The trouble here is that capital supposes infinite expansion within the finite web of live." 27 

"The story of cheap things and the crises that follow their cheapening is not one of inevitability. Humans can and do fight back. Capitalists then try to address that resistance with a range of cheap fixes. These too inevitably generate their own crises and, in turn, more and more sophisticated mechanisms of control and order." 29 

"... without the power to decide whose lives matter and whose do not, it would not have been possible to suppress Indigenous Peoples or members of rival religions and states and appropriate their knowledge, resources, and labor power." 37 

"So when we write and hyphenate world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of 'world-systems' to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation." 38

"The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear, and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history - one that includes the early modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples, and Africans from humanity - is testimony to modernity's extraordinary capacity to make us forget." 39

chapter 1: Cheap Nature

"Where European capitalism thrived was in its capacity to turn nature into something productive and to transform that productivity into wealth. This capacity depended on a peculiar blend of force, commerce, and technology, but also something else - an intellectual revolution underwritten by a new idea: Nature as opposite of Society." 46 

"Originally just a claim on land, the encomienda became a strategy to shift certain humans into the category of Nature so that they might more cheaply work the land." 50 

"This means that Descartes's philosophical abstractions were practical instruments of domination: they were real abstractions with tremendous material force... Society and Nature were not just existentially separate; Nature was something to be controlled and dominated by Society." 52

"This Cartesian revolution accomplished four major transformations, each shaping our view of Nature and Society to this day. First either-or binary thinking displaced both-and alternatives. Second, it privileged thinking about substances, things, before thinking about the relationships between those substances. Third, it installed the domination of nature through science as a social good. Finally, the Cartesian revolution made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination." 54

"So peasants were forced either to leave the land or to offer the only thing they had left to sell: their labor. In this sense their labor was 'free' - its sale was uncoerced by anything other than poverty and prison terms for vagrancy, the laws against poverty and vagabondage being motivationally harsh." 60 

"Knowledge was enclosed too. If anything was to be known about nature and the world, European men would author and authorize it."61

chapter 2: Cheap Money

"Two movements make financialization attractive and even useful to capitalism when the world's economic pie stops growing. One is the tendency of leading powers to go to war, or at a minimum to build up their war-making capacity... As we will see, modern states rarely self-finance their wars. They have to borrow money just like everyone else. The other thing that boosts financialization is that capital in the heartlands of the system begins to flow toward the frontiers." 69

"Financialization's bet on the future has worked historically so long as there were bountiful frontiers, where humans and other natures might be put to work - or otherwise extracted - for cheap." 69

"The silver boom didn't just make money - it also produced one of the first modern working classes, devastated landscapes, and provoked modernity's first great worker and peasant revolt" 73 

"One of his earliest inventions was the repurposing of an Indigenous labor regime: the mita. Every community in the sixteen provinces around Potosi had to send one in seven men to work in the silver mines. These men, called mitayos, were required to work from dawn until dusk. This stipulation, enforced by violence, was waived on Sundays and Christian holidays... He knew that Indigenous People were in the realm of nature but might redeem their souls through labor." 83 

"Hence the role of a credible 'lender of last resort' - a state bank or, more recently the IMF - an institution that, with hard currency and military connections, can guarantee a given hegemonic order." 87

"The extraordinary volatility of financial markets speaks not only to the dominance of finance capital but also to its weakness. At some point, bets on the future must pay off. And that's precisely what past centuries' frontiers of work, food, energy, and raw materials enabled. Today, those frontiers are smaller than ever before, and the volume of capital looking for new investments is greater than ever before." 88 

chapter 3: Cheap Work

"So the Portuguese crown requested and received permission from Rome for its subjects to capture and enslave any north or west Africans they encountered on their colonial adventures." 92 

"Since it was hard to argue that residents of the Americas harbored actual enmity toward Christianity, a new criterion emerged: ignorance. What people knew, and didn't know, became the proper subject of the state, for the purposes of acquiring and managing a labor force." 93 Requerimiento

"In his debate against Sepulveda before the panel, Las Casas conceded that there is a hierarchy of life, that some kinds of humans are superior to others. At issue was the position of Indigenous People in this hierarchy and the duties of Christian conquerors toward them. In the end, it was resolved that although Indigenous People aren't part of society, they might escape their place in nature through generations of labor." 94

"Note the toxic chemistry of greed and piety. If colonization was to proceed, God had to be okay with it. Ultimately, it was the duty of care for Indigenous souls that licensed the appropriation of their land and their labor to work it, in the service of civilization... Here lies capitalism's most sinister accounting tricks. Putting most humans into the category of Nature rather than Society enabled an audacious act of frontier bookkeeping." 94 

"The conquest of the Americas therefore involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the 'lazy' native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock. Policing time was central to capitalism's ecology." 98 

"Slavery was the cost of cheap cotton." 103

"And with every resistance to it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again." 107

"It's time now for us to explore the boundaries of what has counted as payable work and as the kind of work offered, by nature, as a 'free gift' to the economy." 110 

chapter 4: Cheap Care

"There's no necessary reason why the language of sex should also be the language with which silver mines were acquired. Yet as some humans moved across the surface of the planet, bringing it under the reign of property, they compassed it as they would a sexual conquest. The reign of cheap nature and cheap work was, from the beginning, a transformation not just in how and what humans could own but also in who could won and work, how they would be born, and how they would be cared for." 113

"For the order of cheap nature and cheap work to be created, other work needed to happen without being paid at all - most of all, the creation and management of bodies to do that work... Such work is overwhelmingly unpaid because it makes the whole system of wage work possible. Without unpaid work, especially care work, wage work would simply be too expensive. At the origins of capitalism, strategies used to corral Indigenous Peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and mange the category of humans who would perform unpaid care work: women... we continue to think of 'real work' solely as wage work and forget the care work that makes it all possible" 116 

"For modern models of the household to stick, economics wasn't enough. Women and men needed to be schooled and disciplined in their new household responsibilities." 120 

"The hegemony of the modern household wasn't made purely through instruction manuals. It was also made by force. As with cheap work, the bodies of certain kinds of humans needed to be disciplined for the strategy of cheap care to work. Transforming women's bodies into compliant machines of reproduction took force and fear and social policing. The institutions of this policing included the prison, the school the clinic, the madhouse, and the management of public and private sex and sexuality through violence and shaming... The household's violent education was enforced through law, property law in particular." 121

"Kin networks that had supported women, men, and children beyond the nuclear family were destroyed no less than the commons. The extended family and relationships that could sustain families were transformed and professionalized... Women's economic activity, insofar as it was permitted, was confined to the domestic sphere, a domain from which politics was correspondingly banned." 128 

"To make this system work, the state developed a keen interest in enforcing the categories of man and woman." 128

"... to use the term workshop is to mischaracterize how housework was viewed. It was considered precisely beyond the domain of wage work, a favor that women did for men, akin to the free gifts that nature offered enterprise." 129 

"The global household has always done the work that makes possible the global factory and the global farm." 134

"To ask for capitalism to pay for care is to call for the end to capitalism." 135

"To imagine a world of justice in care work is to imagine a world after capitalism. But while capitalism persists, the cheapness of labor reproduction is based in turn on other cheap things." 137 

chapter 5: Cheap Food

"Without food surplus, there is no work outside agriculture." 140 

"While historians debate the precise timing of its agricultural revolution, it's clear that by 1700 England was doing the two big things that every great capitalist power must: increasing the agricultural surplus and expelling labor from the farm." 141

"Every global factory needs a global farm." 142

"Cheap food is 'cheap' in a specific sense: more calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system." 143

"Cheap food required the suppression of political dissent. The Green Revolution was, after all, a package of reforms designed to prevent the Red revolutionary political goal of many peasants' and landless workers' movements: comprehensive land and agrarian reform. That's why, in its implementation, the Green Revolution was often an authoritarian program." 151

"Raw meat in the supermarkets is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism's ecology." 156

"The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to the profit calculus of the industrial food system. This is one of the reasons why meat is so cheap. Cheap labor is another." 156

chapter 6: cheap energy

"Here a new layer of cheapness emerges in our picture of the world: capitalism's global factory requires not just a global farm and a global family, but a global mine as well." 165

"Why is cheap oil so important? It's not that capitalism can't do without fossil fuels. After all, retailers and manufacturers don't care if their electricity comes from ancient fossils, windmills, or solar panels. Cheap oil is so important because today's capitalists don't wish to support the kinds of massive investment that would make a solar transition possible... If a solar transition is to happen under capitalism, it will only be because governments will pay for it." 178

"Yet we cannot end a discussion of energy without observing that the IEA in 2016 announced that the capacity of renewable energy exceeds that of coal. Does this render a discussion of cheap energy moot? Hardly. Look inside the batteries of the solar revolution, and you'll find blood minerals from the DRC and Bolivia." 179

"It requires violence meted by public and private sectors, licensed by a world-ecology that stretches back to cheap nature and is possible only because of a collective understanding that cheap energy is part of the national bounty." 179

chapter 7: cheap lives

"Yet while it certainly involved bloody murder, colonialism was never exclusively an act of brute force. Columbus and his descendants had weapons but also an organization and language that legitimated their use of that force. Capitalism may have claimed the New World with guns, germs, and steel, but the New World's order was kept through race, police, and profits. These technologies of hegemony and order are the subject of our final chapter." 181

"Women, wageworkers, Indigenous People, and even those members of the ruling class on whose fortunes the sun has set - all have fought, more or less successfully, against the requirement of their subservience. In response, capitalists developed new strategies to forge new frontiers and to deepen existing ones... Governments, merchants, and financiers scaled new heights of creativity and destruction in the search for profit. But capitalism's ecology has also expanded and consolidated itself through prodigious experimentation in the arts and science of social order" 181 

 

"To maintain hegemony is, as Antonio Gramsci observed, to recruit and maintain forces from across society in a bloc that is able to continually outmaneuver its rivals. In the pursuit of order and control, the idea of 'the nation' became affixed to the state in ways that few could predict and which continue to shape the planet." 182

 

"Keeping things cheap is expensive. The forces of law and order, domestic and international, are a costly part of the management of capitalism's ecology." 182

 

"More important still, as states confront the limits of their ability both to manage the lives in their charge and to provide conducive environments for liberal capitalism, we're reaching the end of an era of cheap lives." 182

 

"In New Spain, the sistema de castas emerged as a way of policing citizens, taxes, and labor requirements, as well as proximity to god. It ranked people according to their blood, with categories emerging like answers to a combinatorial mathematics problem." 185 

 

"Once assigned, these categories were enforced. Which is to say that women's bodies, workers, taxes, religion, and property rights were policed simultaneously." 186 

"Geographers and chorographers were in the first ranks of empire, and map making helped to define not only the state but also the new story of what united the citizens of that state, the story of national blood and soil." 195

 

"Race, nation, and print capitalism were tightly linked. Strategies that required cheap care and cheap labor produced and reproduced the racial orders by which bodies were read, categorized, and policed at the boundaries of Society and Nature. Print and narratives that both fixed domestic order and offered future national greatness in reward circulated and confirmed these orders." 196

 

"No surprise then that... on the whole, racism and anti-semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination." 196

 

"Through this idea of nationalism, states' power to police their citizens extended to everything from productive to reproductive labor through actions in defense of currency and food purity to mental health policy" 197

 

"This is the strategy of cheap lives in three words: define and rule" 198

 

"Hegemony, the idea with which we began this chapter, is never secure or guaranteed. It must always be maintained, by force and suasion... The nation is a fiction in permanent flux, written and rewritten to interpret and order its destiny - and thus the present. But the ideas of the nation and its economic destiny aren't the exclusive domain of a particular hegemonic bloc. Indeed, this is why we see in moments of capitalist crisis the rise of alternate interpretations of national destiny" 199 

conclusion

"Our cheap things didn't magically make themselves. They emerged through a violent alchemy of ideas, conquest, and commerce in the modern world. At its heart has been a series of binaries that entwined with each other from the beginning: Society and Nature, colonizer and colonized, man and woman, the West and the Rest, white and not-white, capitalist and worker. Each of these dualisms has not merely worked to describe and categorize the world but served practically to dominate and cheapen the lives of nearly all humans and the rest of nature." 202

 

"The individual footprint teaches us to think of consumption as determined by 'lifestyle choices' rather than socially enforced logics." 204

 

"If we are made by capitalism's ecology, then we can be remade only as we in turn practice new ways of producing and caring for one another together, a praxis of redoing, rethinking, reliving our most basic relations." 206 

"But knowing that there is someone whose only fault is to be born now, likely a woman, Indigenous, harmed by climate change and pollution, and whose life will be rendered demonstrably worse by the cumulative actions of everyone able to read this sentence, how might we live differently? The outlines of such a program must include recognition, reparation, redistribution, reimagination, and recreation." 207

 

"There's no easy calculus for the computation of suffering and repayment." 208

 

"In other hands, this might be evidence of the futility of reparations, of the hopelessness of changing on thing when everything must change." 209

 

 

[quotes] Let This Radicalize You - Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba 2023

  

"This assumption can sometimes lead activists to become walking, talking encyclopedias of doom. However, as organizers, our job is to help move people into action, and no fact is so shocking or profound that its utterance will spontaneously spark a movement." 20

 "When a fact or set of facts prompts people to change course, it's usually because someone or something has interrupted the narrative they knew and told a story that feels more true - one worth making changes over." 21

"Everything is a story, and people need to understand themselves as having a meaningful role within the story you, as an organizer, are telling. If their role in your story feels like 'doom appreciator,' most people will recoil, retreat to their own smaller story, and keep the focus there." 23

"Capitalism requires an ever-broadening disposable class of people in order to maintain itself, which in turn requires us to believe that there are people whose fates are not linked to our own: people who must be abandoned or eliminated." 32

"In order to invest in a new vision, and a new way of living, we have to believe in each other and our capacity to create something better. Our belief in human potential must outweigh our fear of human failure. Our imagination must be courageous." 34 

"Amid a landscape of catastrophe and extraction draped in bright plastic product displays and endless streams of escapism, most people are simply being herded along. They do as they are told and try to replicate the same set of relations that defined life before. As things deteriorate, they keep trying. They do not know what else to do. Nothing in their experience or imagination has prepared them to conceptualize the realities of capitalism, their real relationship to it, or any fathomable escape." 45

"An organizer can also ask, 'What would make this more interesting and appealing to you? What would make this more interesting for the people that you know? Are there other people that you know that want to get involved?' We build better relationships, Dixon said, 'when we build projects where people honestly have a stake in the project, not because we told them they have to, but because we've asked them what they need and we are responsive to the needs of multiple people." 49

"The creative power of the oppressed ill always exceed that of the oppressor, because it is the oppressed who must exercise creativity to navigate and survive a world that is set against them. It is the oppressed who create art and poetry and revolutionary ideas to cultivate hope in bleak places, so that people might galvanize and make change." 78

"... we have to break free from the shackles of individualism and commit to building a culture of care, in which everyone's well-being and survival are significant." 78

"We urge organizers to spend more time with books and other modes of learning, not as an admonition but to encourage you to claim an inheritance of knowledge your oppressors hope you never discover, embrace, or build from - the stories, wisdom, hope, and imaginings of organizers who came before us." 85

"Work that can only occur within corporate confines can be eliminated according to corporate whims. We need to strategize around alternative modes of digital outreach and use in-person outreach methods, such as canvassing, flyering, in-person mutual aid and other community events." 92

"When we believe in each other, we are more likely to take risks and to invest ourselves in possibility, even when our own hopes are not fully formed. In this way, our relationships and the work of relationship building can change our sense of what's possible." 97 

"It is important to understand the distinction between activists, organizers, and political hobbyists. Hobbyists often have very strict political standards around respectability or radicalism, to which few activists ever seem to rise. If you organize anything political, you are likely to attract the criticism of hobbyists, since for some people, critique is a pastime." 98

"Grief work, healing work, and conflict resolution have always been important to our movements, but in this age of catastrophe they are more crucial than ever. A strong organizing community is more than a labor force for social justice. It is an ecosystem of care, learning, relationship building, and action." 103 

"Sometimes becoming 'aware' of 'bearing witness' is simply an act of consumption. Given the sheer amount of media available to any person with an internet connection, we have no shortage of 'witness' to atrocity... The goal is to pull people into an active formation and build something. To do that, we have to draw people into conversations about the harms that have been done to our communities, how we can help one another, and how we can thwart the forces that are harming us. Through that work, the generation o new vision born in collectivity becomes possible." 105

"Conditions that the state characterizes as 'peaceful' are, in reality, quite violent. Even as people experience the violence of poverty, the torture of imprisonment, the brutality of policing, the denial of health care, and many other violent functions of this system, we are told we are experiencing peace, so long as everyone is cooperating... when they refer to 'peaceful protest,' they are talking about cooperative protest that obediently stays within the lines drawn by the state... It is therefore imperative that the state not be the arbiter of what violence means among people seeking justice." 111 

"The violence of the state in response to protest is rarely scrutinized to the degree that protesters are scrutinized. The idea that if you are defiant in the face of authority you should expect to incur its wrath is firmly entrenched in our culture." 111

"Because, under capitalism, 'peace' is the maintenance of violence on the state's terms. Organized efforts to disrupt those harms will always be characterized, by any necessary stretch of the imagination, as violent." 115 

"As Kayali told us, the Israeli government's definition of violence 'contorts itself to repress any and all forms of our resistance.'" 125

"The maintenance of global capitalism necessitates mass death, just as the maintenance of capitalism in the United States requires the violence of the carceral system. If these systems function without interruption, you will be told you are experiencing 'peace.' After all, police are often cast as 'peace officers,' and soldiers are called 'peacekeepers.'" 128

"People who are understandably impatient for large-scale changes often want to believe that there's a shortcut: that one group, movement, or demographic is the truth and the way and that merely cheering on that contingent will spur a revolution. This places undue pressure on whatever group or demographic is being fetishized as a savior troupe." 136 

"... organizers need to develop a vision of who they want to be in relation to their community, their movement, and other people, instead of focusing on self-elevation. What role will they play in the context of the larger group? What are their skills and knowledge base? What will they not do? These are questions that must be answered together with others in the struggle." 137

"May also suggested that rotating the role of 'spokespersons' among members of the group  is a way to avoid placing one organizer on a permanent pedestal." 138

"Grief, after all, is a manifestation of love, and our capacity to grieve is in some ways proportional to our capacity to care. Grief is painful, but when we process our grief in community, we are less likely to slip into despair." 151

"Organizing makes it possible to grieve in ways that make a different future visible." 159 

"Active hope is a practice... First, we take a clear view of reality; second, we identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we'd like things to move in or the values we'd like to see expressed; and third, we take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction." 176

"Acts of rebellious grief can take many shapes, but all are a rejection of mass death and an insistence on the humanity of those who have passed." 178 

"... to create movements, rather than clubhouses, we need to engage with people with whom we do not fully identify and may even dislike... We will, at times, have to constructively critique people's behavior or simply allow them room to grow. There will be other times, of course, when we have to draw hard lines, but if we cannot organize beyond the bounds of our comfort zones, we will never build movements large enough to combat the forces that would destroy us." 182 

"As we struggle to balance our lives with what the work demands of us, we must ask ourselves whether the manner in which we organize reflects the world we want to build." 200

"I am the person I am today because of the people who chose to build relationships with me along the way... I feel deeply for people who are still out there, going it alone, believing they are supposed to make it as individuals and blaming themselves when they falter. We were not meant to survive that way, and it's no surprise when we cannot in a world that is set against us in so many ways." 222

"So how can you - how will you - lessen suffering where you are?" 229 

"Radical imagination is essential to organizing and also important to me because the horizon that I am working toward is a world I have never seen: a world without policing, imprisonment, or surveillance." 231

"Even if the end times are upon us, we should still plant trees." 232 

"While many of us have our own self-care rituals, few have collective-care and conflict resolution skills. Frankly, it is often easier to be dangerous to the state systems that we confront than it is to be tender with each other." 235

[quotes] The Wild Edge of Sorrow - Francis Weller 2015

 

"Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive. To be human is to know loss in its many forms." 

"We were not meant to live shallow lives, pocked by meaningless routines and the secondary satisfaction of happy hour. We are the inheritors of an amazing lineage, rippling with memories of life lived intimately with bison and gazelle, raven and the night sky. We are designed to encounter this life with amazement and wonder, not resignation and endurance. This is at the very heart of our grief and sorrow. The dream of full-throated living, woven into our every being, has often been forgotten and neglected, replaced by a societal fiction of productivity and material gain." 

"This book is about grief, about its many moods and movements, shapes and textures. It is about how sorrow carves riverbeds in our soul, deepening us as it flows in and out of our lives." 

"Establishing a relationship with grief, developing practices that keep us steady in times of distress, and staying present in our adult selves are among the central tasks in our apprenticeship with sorrow. This is the hard work of maturation. In the traditional language of apprenticeship, this would be called achieving mastery. In the language of soul, this is the work of becoming an elder. An elder is able to touch grief deftly and is able to craft sorrow into something nourishing for the community."

"Grief work is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow into a hole of comfort and anesthetization" 

"Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving." 

"I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive." 

"A sense of belonging offers us much-needed medicine in these times, which are marked by feelings of anonymity and isolation. In fact, belonging protects the heart from much of life's unavoidable challenges." 

"We tumble and fall as the ground beneath us opens, shaken by violent rumbling. Grief unfolds our lives, drops us close to the earth, reminding us of our inevitable return to the dark soil." 

"'How can we take a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, lethargy, or misery? Disneyland means 'no ashes.''"

"What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth." 

"Shame ruptures our connection with life and with our soul. It is, indeed, a sickness of the soul. When feelings of shame arise, we pull back from the world, avoiding contact that could cause or risk exposure. The last thing we want in times of excruciating self-consciousness is to be seen." 

"Shame closes the heart to self-compassion. We live with an internal state best characterized as self-hatred. In order to loosen shame's grip on our lives, we need to make three moves. The first is from feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of a budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing. As long as we see our suffering as evidence of worthlessness, we will not move toward our wounds with anything but judgment." 

"What is the vow your soul is waiting for you to make? What will you have to sacrifice in order to honor that vow?" 

"It is our deep grief that the village did not appear."

"Instead, what is asked of us in the quiet terrain of our inner conversations is to hold these regrets with gentleness, acknowledging who we were at the time we made those choices."

"What if, however, the feelings we have when we pass through these zones of destruction are actually arising from the land itself? What if it is the grief of the forest registering in our bodies and psyches - the sorrow of the redwoods, voles, sorrel, ferns, owls, and deer, all those who lost their homes and lives as a result of this plunder of living beings?" 

"To live a life of soul means living with sensitivity to the plight of the planet."

"Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what our minds and bodies expect." 

"We, too, are meant to embody a vivid and animated life, to live close to our wild souls, our wild bodies and minds. We were meant to dance and sing, play and laugh unselfconsciously, tell stories, make love, and take delight in this brief but privileged adventure of incarnation." 

"We become acutely aware that there is no 'out there'; we have one continuous existence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing." 

"Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liefloff concludes, 'what was once man's confident expectation for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain." 

"Another facet of loss at this gate concerns the expectation of purpose in our lives. Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need."

"We often feel flattened under the weight of domestication, which smothers the heat and howl of our wild selves. We feel eviscerated, made tame by rules and conditioning that blanket the world with uniformity and mediocrity." 

"To be left with a 'shrunken residue' or to walk around 'possessed by the dullest parts' of ourselves is a great loss."

"To not be cut off, however, we need to be moving in a rhythm that is syncopated with that of the oaks and willows, heartbeats and touch. We must recall the original cadence of the soul."

"When that emptiness appeared, the arms of community were there to hold me, helping me to endure the terror of that aloneness. It was because I felt held and loved that I was able to descend into these places of darkness." 

"To be empty, to feel empty, is to live in the wasteland near the gates of death. This is intolerable to the soul. We were not meant to live such shallow lives."

"When we feel hesitant or uncertain of our worthiness to touch our sorrows, knowing these gates are there offers us a way to connect with our losses, wounds, and disappointments." 

"The powerful presence of the family and community of the individual who is ill broadens the context of illness to include the entire village. This recognizes that everyone is impacted by the illness. This is powerful medicine, as it frees the individual from having to carry the weight of the illness alone, which, as we have seen is a major preoccupation of the Western mind."

"Ritual offers two things required to fully let go of the grief we carry: containment and release. Containment offers the holding space for the ones in grief. It provides the safe place to fall, to descend into the depths of both the known and unknown layers of sorrow."

"Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow."

"Our activism is directly connected to our heart's ability to respond to the world."

"Ritual signals to the psyche that a different order has been established, one that invites alternative styles of behavior and modes of social engagement."

"Ritual can bring us into that state of togetherness, and there we can remember our deeper affinity and communality."

"Life is far too complex to rely solely on our intellect. We need the invisible hands of Spirit to shelter us, to support us, and to offer us the nourishment comfort that comes from that Other World. This concert between the human and the sacred is ancient; it is held in the bones. Trust this bond. It is our healing ground."

"The truth is we need both the vital exhalation of community and the renewing inhalation of our interior lives for our grief to move and change over our long walk with sorrow. Our healing is in 'every small contracting and expanding.'"

"I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy." - Rilke 

"The most commonly noted obstacle, perhaps, is that we live in a flatline culture, one that avoids depths of feeling."

"When we send our grief into exile, we simultaneously condemn our lives to an absence of joy. This gray-sky existence is intolerable to the soul. It shouts at us daily to do something about it, but in the absence of meaningful ways to respond to sorrow or from the sheer terror of entering the terrain of grief naked, we turn instead to distraction, addiction, or anesthesia."

"It is our job to openly grieve for the disappearance of wetlands, the destruction of forests, the shrinking whale populations, the erosion of soil, and on and on. We know the litany of loss, but we have collectively neglected our emotional response to this emptying of our world. We need to see and participate in grief rituals in every part of this country."

"We are here for such a short time, and the call to truly live is something to which we each must respond."

"Whatever the experience, grief offers a revelation: in the midst of great loss, we find ourselves in the presence of the sacred."

"Coming to trust darkness takes time and often involves many visits to this land."

"How do we say goodbye? How do we acknowledge all that has held beauty and value in our lives - those we love, those who touched our lives with kindness, those whose shelter allowed us to extend ourselves into the world? How do we let go of sunsets and making love, pomegranates and walks on the bluff? And yet, we must. We must release the entire, fantastic world with one last breath."

"There is another face to this grief of saying goodbye. We must acknowledge the sorrow that others will feel with our death. This is an especially tender sorrow, one we must bear in our soul, the consequence of having been privileged to enter another's heart."

I Hope We Choose Love - Kai Cheng Thom 2019

 

[quotes] The Body Keeps the Score - Bessel van der Kolk 2014

  

[quotes] Escape from Freedom - Erich Fromm 1941