[quotes] Parable of the Talents - Octavia E. Butler 1998

 

[The back cover has this quote from the New Yorker: "In the ongoing contest over which dystopian classic is most applicable to our time, Octavia Butler's 'Parable' books may be unmatched." I can't agree with that more. I consumed this book in two days and it made me very paranoid about where the world can be headed under the wrong influence - we are already seeing symptoms of that now. This series also inspires me to build something with community. What can we learn together? How can we nourish each other? How else do we need to prepare the earth and ourselves for the Destiny we define? Oh Octavia Butler, thank you for entering my life.]

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

"Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all ack to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can't read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them."

"Indenturing indigents, young and old, is much in fashion now ... Indenturing indigents is supposed to keep them employed, teach them a trade, feed them, house them, and keep them out of trouble. In fact, it's just one more way of getting people to work for nothing or almost nothing. Little girls are valued because they can be used in so many ways, and they can be coerced into being quick, docile, disposable labor."

"Yet Earthseed is not a fatalistic belief system. God can be directed, focused, speeded, slowed, shaped. All things change, but all things need not change in all ways. God is inexorable, yet malleable. Odd. Hardly religious at all. Even the Earthseed Destiny seems to have little to do with religion."

"We moved Dan's cot so that he could use the garden trowel and watering can, and we let him plant his own seedlings. He, too, did what he had to do without help. The ritual was already important to him. It was something he could do for his sisters and his parents. It was all he could do for them."

"If my mother had created only Acorn, the refuge for the homeless and the orphaned... If she had created Acorn, but not Earthseed, then I think she would have been a wholly admirable person."

"None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used that analogy more than once."

"It shouldn't be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction."

"How many people, I wonder, can be penned up and tormented - reeducated - before it begins to matter to the majority of Americans? How does this penning people up look to other countries? Do they know? Would they care? There are worse things happening here in the States and elsewhere, I know. There's war, for instance."

"On the other hand, one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side - a side of yourself or your organization that's dangerous and unpredictable - willing to do any damned thing."

"Kindness eases Change. Love quiets fear."

"I will go with the first ship to leave after my death. If I thought I could survive as something other than a burden, I would go on this one, alive. No matter. Let them someday use my ashes to fertilize their crops. Let them do that. It's arranged. I'll go, and they'll give me to their orchards and their groves."

[poems] catalog of unabashed gratitude - ross gay 2015

 

[ross gay has such a unique talent of being able to string different scenes and thoughts together in a coherent and beautiful way - moving from one thought to another seamlessly. Here are a few of my favorite poems and phrases. And I dream of one day being able to write about my garden as welcomingly as ross gay writes about his orchard.]

to the fig tree on 9th and christian 

ode to buttoning and unbuttoning my shirt

feet

ode to sleeping in my clothes

c'mon!

"beneath which you are now too the canopy of a fig its arms pulling the September sun to it." - to the fig tree on 9th and christian 

"Feel the small song in my chest swell and my coat glisten and twitch." - becoming a horse

"when his loneliness dragged him to a carpeted room in an apartment building in Chinatown" - sharing with the ants

"marching across the long plains of the calf and the meticulously unnamed zone behind the knee over the hamstring into use your imagination for Chrissakes but I will tell you it is dark there and sweet" - sharing with the ants

"the way Myself had made unwittingly a habit of slathering mortar everywhere, almost by accident, for fear of what might forever slip in and be felt;"- the opening

"for jumping and grabbing at once like this a soft thing is hard be gentle she said emerging from the dugout beneath the mulberry tree" - to the mulberry tree

"I can't stop my gratitude, which includes, dear reader, you, for staying here with me, for moving your lips just so as I speak. Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it." - catalog of unabashed gratitude

"thank you the ancestor who loved you before she knew you by smuggling seeds into her braid for the long journey, who loved you before he knew you by putting a walnut tree in the ground, who loved you before she knew you by not slaughtering the land" - catalog of unabashed gratitude

"I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward, the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems slipping into your eyes." - catalog of unabashed gratitude

[quotes] When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago 1993

 

"I had my last guava the day we left Puerto Rico."

"My own grandparents, whom I was to respect as well as love, were said to be jibaros. But I couldn't be one, nor was I to call anyone a jibaro, lest they be offended. Even at the tender age when I didn't yet know my real name, I was puzzled by the hypocrisy of celebrating a people everyone looked down on."

"A bubble of rage built inside my chest and forced out a scream meant for Mami's harshness and Papi's indifference but directed at Delsa who was smaller. I pushed her off the stump."

"'Well, it is the soul of a person that writes poetry ... The soul lives inside a person when he's alive. It's the part of a person that feels. A poet's soul feels more than regular people's souls. And that's what makes him write poetry."

"There was no rice on the chart, no beans, no salted codfish. There were big white eggs, not at all like the small round ones our hens gave us. There was a tall glass of milk, but no coffee. There were wedges of yellow cheese, but no balls of cheese like the white queso del pais wrapped in banana leaves sold in bakeries all over Puerto Rico. There were bananas but no plantains, potatoes but no batatas, cereal flakes  but no oatmeal, bacon but no sausages."

"And I wished that I knew how to pray, because then I could speak to God and maybe He or one of His saints could explain things to me. But I didn't know any prayers, because Mami didn't believe in church or holy people, and Papi, even though he read the Bible and could lead novenas for the dead, never talked to us about God."

"But he didn't, and when Abuela came out from her prayers, we sat by the door, working our needles in, around, up, and out, silently making patterns with thread that might have told a story had either one of us known how to transform our feelings into shape."

"I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences."

"I buried my face in the soft space between her neck and shoulder and sought there the fragrance of oregano and rosemary, but all I could come up with was Cashmere Bouquet and the faint flowery dust of Maybeline."

"Someone down there can look up through the hole and see my private parts, I thought. There is someone down there. A dead person is in that water waiting for me to squat so that it can claw me in and drown me in turds and pee. There are eyes looking up from that black pool, seeing parts of me that even I can't see."

"I tossed until dawn, unused to so much room on the bed, while on the other side of the wall, my sisters and brothers slept, their bodies gently rising and falling in rhythm with one another's breathing."

"I crouched against the wall and watched them injure each other without touching each other, hurling words that had the same effect as acid on metal."

"For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created. The Puerto Rican jibara who longed for the green quiet of a tropical afternoon was to become a hybrid who would never forgive the uprooting."

"I dozed, startled awake, panicked when I didn't know where I was, remembered where we were going, then dozed off again, to repeat the whole cycle, in and out of sleep, between earth and sky, somewhere between Puerto Rico and New York."

"They dressed like Americanos but walked with a jaunty hop that made them look as if they were dancing down the street, only their hips were not as loose as Puerto Rican men's were. According to Mami, they too lived in their own neighborhoods, frequented their own restaurants, and didn't like Puerto Ricans."

"Men only want one thing, and until then, I thought it was up to me to give it up. But that's not the way it was. A little girl leaning out a window watching the world fulfilled the promise Marilyn Monroe made with her eyes. I who had promised nothing, who knew even less, whose body was as confusing as the rock and roll lyrics accompanying the trucker's hand pumping up and down to words yelled, not sung."

"We could count on her in a way we had never been able to count on Papi, Tata, or Francisco, who had made everyone happy for such a short time before dying and becoming a ghost that haunted us all for the rest of our lives."

"The men they beat up; the women, they raped. I couldn't stop thinking about it as I walked to school, or home from the library: every man was a potential rapist, and every dark doorway was a potential hiding place for someone waiting to hurt me."

"'You'll be exposed to a different class of people,' she assured me, and I felt the force of her ambition without knowing exactly what she meant."

[quotes] Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals - Alexis Pauline Gumbs 2020

 

[This book was apparently started as a series of Instagram posts and that's just so inspiring to me. I love how accessible and welcoming transformative knowledge has become. Also passages of this book read like beautiful poems.]

"I have to do some work to disrupt the violent colonizing languages of almost all the texts in which I have accessed information about marine mammals and their lives, and families and super-powers and struggles."

"There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three."

"I wonder what it means for an ocean dolphin to swim up a river. The bottlenose has a range across the whole planet, the whole open ocean and yet sometimes they will choose the boundaries and specificity of a river, brackish water, narrow shores. Why?"

"And for all of you, ocean dolphins, wondering 'What am I doing in this river full of mud?' Remember why Harriet Tubman went south. She didn't have to. She was skilled, untraceable. She could have been individually free. Unencumbered. But if she wanted to tell an everlasting truth about freedom that would ring across the planet, a message for the ages, she had to live free in unfree spaces. It was the only way to bring us all with her."

"Legally and narratively, our society encourages small, isolated family units and an anti-social state reluctant to care. So care becomes the unsustainable work, the massive unpaid labor that breaks backs, hearts, and the visionary will of multitudes on a regular basis... What can we learn about the failure of the imagined ideal household? What could we learn if we cared to learn?"

"I do know that sometimes people have seen a part of themselves in me too messy to beat. Do I cherish my wildness more than I fear their rejection? Sometimes if I feel all my emotions in public I can't make myself speak. But sometimes I speak anyway."

"Sometimes when someone is avoiding you, they are just avoiding you. We have the right to be obscure. It is not an invitation to colonize us. It is not seduction. Boundaries can be so beautiful. Teach so much."

"The fact that you grew up not knowing that narwhals were a real animal swimming around in the Arctic right now, is not a coincidence. It is the result of a long and lucrative conspiracy. Turns out, since the Middle Ages, whalers, traders, explorers, and even chemists collaborated to hide the existence of the narwhal as a real animal, while selling their tusks as 'unicorn horns' at a huge profit."

"At just the right moment, the scholar Tavia Nyong'o reminded me that to conspire means to breathe together. Like narwhals do by the hundreds every summer. It's happening now. May we activate and renew the oldest conspiracy, remember all the thick impossible breathing before us and after us and with us, too real to be for sale. Too beautiful to be forgotten. Too magical for theft."

"I'm sure neither Moana nor the WWF are perfect, and no, I don't believe that capitalism can heal the Earth, but there is something for me to learn from this rare collaboration across these particular sectors."

"I love the way you live a layered Blackness where Black meets Black across itself as Black. How you make family out of need and tradition out of what is left and found."

"Sometimes when you love the coast enough you become shoreline. Move so steady on the floor algae grows on you. Sometimes the way you love is perfectly on time and very slow is fast enough. So keep on breathing."