[quotes] The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century - Grace Lee Boggs 2011

 

"Above all, Americans have learned that the tremendous changes we now need and yearn for in our daily lives and in the direction of our country cannot come from those in power or from putting pressure on those in power. We ourselves have to foreshadow or prefigure them from the ground."

"With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of rights. We have entered the epoch of responsibilities, which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy."

"... self-transformation and structural transformation must go hand in hand."

"In words that will resonate throughout this book, we must define revolution both by the humanity-stretching ends to be achieved and the beloved community-building means by which to achieve those ends."

"At a time when jobs and whole industries are collapsing, growing your own food seems reasonable."

"As Grace argues, Bush represents the end of an era - one dating back to the advent of capitalism and taking off with the rise of industrial society."

"... the change needed to overcome our mounting crises must be of revolutionary scale."

"These perilous times call for us to be both imaginative and generative. Time is precious. History awaits our response."

"Perhaps eighty million people have been killed in wars during my lifetime."

"At this point in the continuing evolution of our country and of the human race, we urgently need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and to recognize that we must each become a part of the solution because we are each a part of the problem."

"Each of us needs to stop being a passive observer of the suffering that we know is going on in the world and start identifying with the sufferers."

"The will of too many Americans has been to pursue private happiness and take as little responsibility as possible for governing our country."

"Einstein asserted that the solution of world peace could arise only from inside the hearts of humankind. That is why 'imagination is more important than knowledge.'"

"He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"Freedom now included the responsibility for making choices."

"The social activists among us struggle to create actions that go beyond protest and negativity and build community because community is the most important thing that has been destroyed by the dominant culture."

"That is why linking Love and Revolution is an idea whose time has come."

"We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other."

"Now, in the light of our historical experiences and thanks especially to the indigenous cultures that the Zapatistas have revealed to us, we are beginning to understand that the world is always being made and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival; that struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many 'others' in our society who are also seeking ways out from alienation, isolation, privatization, and dehumanization by corporate globalization."

"Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness."

"Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers and to relate to other human beings."

"These two notions - that reality is constantly changing and that you must constantly be aware of the new and more challenging contradictions that drive change - lie at the core of dialectical thinking."

"The next American Revolution, at this stage in our history, is not principally about jobs or health insurance or making it possible for more people to realize the American Dream of upward mobility. It is about acknowledging that we Americans have enjoyed middle-class comforts at the expense of other peoples all over the world."

"We are the ones who must begin to live more simply so that others can simply live."

"Instead of pursuing economic productivity, we need to expand our uniquely human powers, especially our capacity for Love."

"Most people think of Love only in terms of affection, between lovers (eros) or friends (philia). However, King's experiences as a black man in racist America had taught him that love of power goes hand in hand with dominating and destroying community. So he developed a concept of Love (he called it 'Agape'), which is based on the willingness to go to any lengths to restore or create community."

"Gerald was unique in that his dreams were not only in his heart and head but also in his hands."

"Teach people what will truly help them, he said, not to become servants and bureaucrats for the Empire but to aid them in all the little things of village life. Education, he said, should be of the Heart, the Hand, and the Head."

"Healing our society will require the patient work not primarily of politicians but of artists, ministers, gardeners, workers, families, women, and communities. It will require new forms of governance, work, and education that are much more participatory and democratic than those collapsing all around us."

[quotes] The Color Purple - Alice Walker 1982

 

"I know this to be true, and yet it remains difficult to imagine."

"It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man."

"She look like she ain't long for this world but dressed well for the next."

"First time somebody made something and name it after me."

"And we kneeled down right on deck and gave thanks to God for letting us see the land for which our mothers and fathers cried - and lived and died - to see again."

"We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?"

"Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly."

"Only the sky above us do we hold in common. I look at it often as if, somehow, reflected from its immensities, I will one day find myself gazing into your eyes."

"There is so much we don't understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that."

"Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown."

"But if God love me, Celie, I don't have to do all that. Unless I want to. There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes."

"Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not to find God."

"God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it."

"God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it."

"My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all."

"You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just waiting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it... People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back."

"Try to think like you got some sense. Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me."

"Shug look at me and us giggle. Then us laugh sure nuff. Then Squeak start to laugh. Then Sofia. All us laugh and laugh."

"I curse you, I say. What that mean? he say. I say, Until you do right by me, everything you touch will crumble... Until you do right by me, I say, everything you even dream about will fail. I give it to him straight, just like it come to me. And it seem to come to me from the trees."

"I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I'm here."

"I smoke when I want to talk to God. I smoke when I want to make love. Lately I feel like me and God make love just fine anyhow. Whether I smoke reefer or not."

"Our days are fuller than ever, our sojourn in England already a dream. But all things look brighter because I have a loving soul to share them with."

"I don't say nothing. I pray to die, just so I don't never have to speak."

"Celie, I say, happiness was just a trick in your case. Just cause you never had any before Shug, you thought it was time to have some, and that it was gon last. Even thought you had the trees with you. The whole earth. The stars. But look at you. When Shug left, happiness desert."

"But now Shug's six months is come and gone and she ain't come back. And I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can't have."

"Yeah son, I tell him. THey had a lot of love to give. But I needed love plus understanding. They run a little short of that."

"Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights."

"Who am I to tell her who to love? My job just to love her good and true myself."

"And I thank God he let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan. It don't surprise me you love Shug Avery, he say. I Have love Shug Avery all my life."

"Hard not to love Shug, I say. She know how to love somebody back."

"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love."

"If she come, I be happy. If she don't, I be content. And then I figure this the lesson I was suppose to learn."

"But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt."

[quotes] In Search of Our Mother's Gardens - Alice Walker 1983

 

"The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect - even if rejected - enrich and enlarge one's view of existence."

"Therefore, to write the books one wants to read is both to point the direction of vision and, at the same time, to follow it."

"I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, indeed, I am not alone."

"It is, in the end, the saving of lives that we writers are about. Whether we are 'minority' writers or 'majority'. It is simply in our power to do this... We care because we know this: the life we save is our own."

"What the black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community. Something simple but surprisingly hard, 'especially these days, to come by'."

"Actually I suppose I am left with a project that will be a private one whose success will be largely immeasurable, but since I don't believe success must be measurable I don't mind at all."

"But please remember, especially in these times of groupthink and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended."

"I understand that each woman is capable of truly bringing another into the world. This we must all do for each other."

"But my mother has already opened the gate. To her, life has no fences, except, perhaps, religious ones, and these we have decided not to discuss."

"The fact that in Mississippi no one even remembers where Richard Wright lived, while Faulkner's house is maintained by a black caretaker is painful, but not unbearable. What comes close to being unbearable is that I know how damaging to my own psyche such injustice is. In an unjust society the soul of the sensitive person is in danger of deformity from just such weights as this. For a long time I will feel Faulkner's house, O'Connor's house, crushing me. To fight back will require a certain amount of energy, energy better used doing something else."

"Without money of one's own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence."

"We are a people. A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children, and, if necessary, bone by bone."

"For such a woman the Civil Rights Movement will never be over as long as her skin is black."

"As long as one black American survives, the struggle for equality with other Americans must also survive."

"If knowledge of my condition is all the freedom I get from a 'freedom movement,' it is better than unawareness, forgottenness, and hopelessness, the existence that is like the existence of a beast."

"Part of what existence means to me is knowing the difference between what I am now and what I was then."

"The truest and most enduring impulse I have is simply to write."

"The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks."

"And when I write about the people there, in the strangest way it is as if I am not writing them at all, but about myself. The artist then is the voice of the people, but she is also The People."

"We always agreed that when both of us were under a lot of pressure to be away from home I would be the one to curtail my activities. I wasn't too unhappy about this. It was really a question of knowing what our priorities were. And since my top priority has always been my family there was never any conflict."

"It was Martin, more than anyone, who exposed the hidden beauty of black people in the South, and caused us to look again at the land our fathers and mothers knew."

"And if I leave Mississippi - as I will one of these days - it will not be for the reasons of the other sons and daughters of my parents. Fear will have no part in my decision, nor will lack of freedom to express my womanly thoughts. It will be because the pervasive football culture bores me, and the proliferating Kentucky Fried Chicken stands appall me, and neon lights have begun to replace the trees. It will be because the sea is too far away and there is not a single mountain here. But most of all, it will be because I have freed myself to go; and it will be My Choice."

"'I want peace,' he says. 'Cleanliness and space around me. And just some time to be myself, before I die.'"

"What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood."

"The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists, and Short-Story Writers (over a period of centuries), who died with their real gifts stifled within them."

"Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own."

"that is, the book itself did not seem to me important; only the writing of the poems, which clarified for me how very much I loved being alive."

"Since that time, it seems to me that all of my poems - and I write groups of poems rather than singles - are written when I have successfully pulled myself out of a completely numbing despair, and stand again in the sunlight. Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before."

"Women who wanted their rights did not frighten him, politically or socially, because he knew his own rights were not diminished by theirs."

"And the giggles and the tears and the holding and the sanctioning of responsibility to those we love and those who have loved us is what I know will see us through."

"She fell for the first man who loved her enough to beat her for looking at someone else, and when I was still in high school, she married him."

"Fatally irradiating ourselves may in fact be the only way to save others from what Earth has already become. And this is a consideration that I believe requires serious thought from every one of us."

"Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it."

"So let me tell you: I intend to protect my home. Praying - not a curse - only the hope that my courage will not fail my love. But if by some miracle, and all our struggle, the Earth is spared, only justice to every living thing (and everything is alive) will save humankind. And we are not saved yet. Only justice can stop a curse."

"I am in the desert for the first time. I fall totally in love with it. I am so overwhelmed by its beauty, I confront for the first time, consciously, the meaning of the doctor's words years ago: 'Eyes are sympathetic. If one is blind, the other will likely become blind too.' I realize I have dashed about the world madly, looking at this, looking at that, storing up images against the fading of the light. But I might have missed seeing the desert! The shock of that possibility - and gratitude for over twenty-five years of sight - sends me literally to my knees. Poem after poem comes - which is perhaps how poets pray."

[quotes] Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto - Tricia Hersey 2022

 

"This book is a testimony and testament of my refusal to donate my body to a system that still owes a debt to my Ancestors for the theft of their labor and DreamSpace. I refuse to push my body to the brink of exhaustion and destruction. Let the chips fall where they may. I trust myself more than capitalism."

"May the ground underneath hold us, and if we must collapse, may a soft pillow be there."

"I am in awe of what our bodies can hold. We must lighten our loads. Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive. We must rest."

"Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. Both these toxic systems refuse to see the inherent divinity in human beings and have used bodies as a tool for production, evil, and destruction for centuries."

"Grind culture is a collaboration between white supremacy and capitalism. It views our divine bodies as machines."

"TENETS OF THE NAP MINISTRY: 1. Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy. 2. Our bodies are a site of liberation. 3. Naps provide a portal to imagine, invent, and heal. 4. Our DreamSpace has been stolen and we want it back. We will reclaim it via rest."

"Rest supports our grieving by allowing space, and with space we can begin healing from the trauma of grind culture. Grieving is a sacred act and one of the ways we can begin to reconnect with our bodies, as we craft a rest practice."

"To be colonized is to accept and buy into the lie of our worth being connected to how much we get done. Keep repeating to yourself: I am enough now. There is no way around this."

"Resting our bodies and minds is a form of reverence. When we honor our bodies via rest, we are connecting to the deepest parts of ourselves."

"I don't belong to the systems. They cannot have me. I will never donate my body to a system that views it as only a tool for its production."

"You are the expert of your own body. Your body is yours and knows the way."

"Your mind needs space for silence. Space to process what it is feeling without the participation of others. Your brain needs deep, consistent sleep, rest, and silence to make new connections, for memory retention, and to download."

"Rest is anything that allows you to slow down enough to allow your body and mind to connect in the deepest way. We must be focused on knowing that our bodies and our worth are not connected to how many things we can check off."

"Rest must be practiced daily until it becomes our foundation."

"We speak so highly of the material and nonmaterial things we desire to feel whole and expansive without addressing the sleep deprivation, exhaustion, and disconnection we suffer from."

"Liberation is a process. Freedom is a temporary state of being. Liberation is dynamic. It never ends."

"Like Audre Lorde, I am totally enamored and lay my body on the altar of poetry. I am a dreamer because I am a poet."

"Techniques to create space to dream: Cultivate deep community that is now allowed to post online."

"Rest is somatic work - connecting your body and mind. Rest is anything that slows you down enough to connect with your body and mind. It is an ethos that holds firm to the body as a site of liberation."

"There is room to rest in the freedom of managing your own deprogramming journey. IT is never either/or and always both/and. You don't have to grind, hustle, accept burnout as normal, and be in constant state of exhaustion and sleep deprivation. You don't have to kill yourself spiritually or physically to live a fruitful life."

"Softness is available to us. Care is available to us. Rest is available to us. Intimacy is available to us. Community is available to us. Sleep is available to us. Justice is available to us. Pleasure is available to us."

"Any system that degrades and ignores our divine right to have care, rest, leisure, and space must be examined and illuminated. The time is up for any shallow wellness work that doesn't speak about dismantling the systems that are making us unwell."

"Do not let your lack of money and possessions make you feel negative about your worth as a human being. Do not let your credit score, man-made poverty, and/or racism define your extreme power. Your body is a site of liberation. Rest is your true power. Your birth was not a coincidence. Your coming to Earth is a divine occurrence."

"We are moving in and out of worlds all the time so give beautiful grace to yourself. Start again on rest. Keep going back to rest. Stay in the DreamSpace."

"Octavia Butler shares a powerful truth related to imagination: 'The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities is an act of hope.'"

[quotes] To Shake the Sleeping Self - Jeddediah Jenkins

 

"I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine."

"But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what's next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand."

"But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I'm in a new place, I don't know what's next, even if I've read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends."

"I'd done everything right. I'd spent my twenties going to college and law school and getting a job and being a good boy. But when I turned thirty, I quit my job and spent a year and a half bicycling from Oregon to Patagonia. It wasn't the job that chased me away, it was mortality."

"I would be stripped of what me feel safe to make room for something else."

"Let whatever money I have flow through me."

"For me, thoughts and emotions stay cloudy until I put them into words, give them bodies to walk around in and be their own thing. That's when they become knowable."

"A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a home, and when they aren't right, we try another."

"I've read that the San Diego-Tijuana border runs down the middle of the largest wealth gap in the world."

"Either way, my culture is the most dominant on the planet, and I benefit from that. Sitting there watching Alejandro studying my markup like it was holy scripture made me wonder, what moral weight does being the beneficiary of my dominant culture place on my shoulders?"

"This, in my opinion, is why so many gay people turn to art, music, fashion, or comedy. As the world around them grows hostile, their spirit becomes obsessed with the meaning of it all."

"I was homesick, but also leaning into the lessons I knew I wanted from this bicycle. I was unpacking the bags of my life, spreading the contents on the floor to have a look."

"As he talked, I would drift between good cheer and observation. This often happens to me when I'm listening to someone tell a story they've rehearsed a hundred times with a hundred different visitors. Their face is not astonished by their own words; they're not reading your face as they go, to tell if their sentences are landing. They're bored at the injustice of having to make their case again and again to a deaf universe."

"It's remarkable how normal moments live on in the middle of chaos and tragedy. People still play chess and drink tea in the middle of war. New inside jokes are born at funerals."

"Human brings have little capacity for sustained horror. I think our minds need to play to survive. Permanently serious people always look so tired, maybe because they are fighting an emotional battle that eats the body alive. To laugh and play while the bombs drop is one way to survive a war, even to win it."

"And it would be here when I got back. Perhaps tweaked and slightly changed, but not transformed. It would be the thing I stepped away from. It would be the routine I could return to."

"The humidity that enveloped us felt so thick that I thought I could bite the air."

"You don't want to spin through space without a tether."

"What better place to destroy God than surrounded by His best handiwork? Or what better place to replace the white man's God with the god of nature?"

"Jesus had kept me from kissing a boy for twenty-eight years. Jesus had kept me from myself. I had thrown myself upon Him so that He might fulfill me. If He unraveled before me, or worse, vanished, what would I make of my youth?"

"I am a Christian, but how many beliefs can I strip away before I am not anymore? Do I believe the world is six thousand years old? No. Do I believe the Bible is the infallible word of God? Hmm, I think it's inspired, but open to interpretation."

"Maybe that's what I was rejecting now. Certainty. But that's what faith is - believing without certainty."

"I wanted to understand who lives and who dies, but I didn't. I just believed that I would always be okay. It was unshakable. Maybe some people just have that. Harry Devert certainly did, and he died. But I did, too, and I was still here."

"If our shittiest actions can lead to beauty, what does it mean to do right and wrong? Is it about avoiding hurting others?"

"They keep Americans arguing over guns and black people so they won't look outside the country and see that the U.S. is an empire."

"I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew that my deepest wounds were the place of my deepest meaning. And she was ground zero. My salvation was somewhere inside her."

"An awareness of my own hypocrisy stung me. I hadn't noticed this in myself. And from this thought, it spread in me an empathy for my mom, for the people in my church. If I, being in a category of oppression, could still mock another who is literally the same as me, then how common must that hypocrisy be?" 

"Exposure to human stories reminds us that we're all human. I mean real exposure. Listening, hearing. Not point from across the room. Engaging. And most of us are just trying to make it day by day without hurting anyone else."

"Everywhere, the wonders of Patagonia rose up around me, but by then, and with no one to exclaim to, I stopped exclaiming. I looked, and my eyes were happy. But I had no one to sing the praises of Creation to. Only the Creation itself."

"More than that, I needed it to reveal my questions to me, then answer them. What a burden to put on travel, which in itself is ignorant and indifferent. It becomes so hard to just enjoy the thing as it happens. We make the journey about arrival, not travel. We are so goal focused."

"I wanted to leave my office life in order to feel time passing in some more holy way, holding it in my fingers and studying each minute like a prayer bead."

"For the first time in my life, I felt that my only allegiance was to the truth. Not to tradition. Not to safety. Not to what I had been taught. But to whatever was true. And that made me feel strong."

[quotes] Stepping off the Relationship Escalator - Amy Gahran 2017

 

"That said, the Relationship Escalator does not exist in a vacuum. Race, class, religion, cultural background, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and similar types of context can color what it means to ride the Escalator. That's because social norms tend to accommodate social privilege."

"Many participants reported that stepping off the Relationship Escalator allowed them to discover a sense of love, belonging, support, intimacy, fulfillment and authenticity that they hadn't been able to achieve otherwise."

"If at some point a partner or relationship becomes disqualified from the Escalator, usually that relationship gets sidetracked to a less important status; or it ends or simply fizzles out."

"Thus, they may socialize and vacation separately, maintain close friendships with people who are potentially sexually or romantically attractive, not consider each other to be default companions for support, and so on."

"Deeply ingrained social norms about relationships, reinforced by media, role models, legal and financial considerations, and external support and recognition, can make it quite daunting to step off the Escalator - or even to consider doing so. Several people reported conflicting feelings about stepping off the Escalator. Sometimes, it's unclear whether these emotions are authentic, or the result of strong social conditioning."

"When people continue to have strong emotional reactions or personal crises triggered by lingering ingrained Escalator assumptions (particularly about monogamy) that they no longer believe in, some people call this the monogamy hangover."

"When this happens, it can be jarring. It can feel like a friction emerging from the inside of our being: the outer form of things does not match the internalized societal programming, and therefore we might act from spite, anger, or jealousy. Or paralyzed by shame and self-judgment, we might suddenly change from being very present and forthcoming, to absent, reticent, even fearful."

"What makes these connections 'casual' is the lack of significant emotional investment, or any intention beyond having fun or killing time, or any expectation that the relationship will continue beyond the current encounter."

"First, most people prefer some stability and reliability, or at least predictability, in their most important relationships. They'd rather not be dealing with lots of change or disruption, especially in areas of life where they might feel especially vulnerable."

"Second, there's the deep-seated social assumption that a successful relationship should last a lifetime."

"Even when people are aware of (or perhaps practice) unconventional relationship styles, sometimes they still assume that traditional relationships must be safer - or at least, less prone to risk and trouble."

"Unconventional relationships definitely are not risk-free. But in the big picture, all intimate relationships are inherently risky, to some extent."

"These advantages spring from social couple privilege: the assumption that people who are coupled up are more important, and worthy of greater consideration and reward, than other people."

"No relationship exists in a vacuum. On the Escalator or not, all relationships are affected by the world around them. Consequently, if an unconventional relationship appears to be unhealthy or struggling, it's probably facile to blame that on its structure, without deeper inquiry."

"Often people view sex, love, family, stability or privilege as scarce resources - and monogamy as the key to securing access to them."

"Blended relationships are fairly common in consensual nonmonogamy. This is when partners have different approaches to consensual nonmonogamy, and they negotiate their common ground."

"These agreements can be consensual and mutually beneficial without being symmetrical."

"The catch is, social norms encourage assumptions. This can create dilemmas about consent. When people rely on assumptions, they often sidestep communication and negotiation."

"Introspection is a vital component of informed consent. This means getting to know oneself well enough to be able to clearly express wants, needs and uncertainties; as well as what one can offer or accept in intimate relationships."

"Because unless someone is dating their clone, intimate partners always have substantial differences."

"Lighter or less-involved intimate connections can be a valuable part of life."

"in polyamorous relationships, people typically are open to the possibility that more than one of their relationships at a time might develop a strong sense of emotional investment or commitment, and perhaps also some level of logistical entwinement."

"not every intimate connection must blossom into a major romance or life commitment."

"Being a metamour has some things in common with family ties. For instance, siblings are people who have an important relationship in common: they share the same parents. However, it's up to siblings to shape their own relationships."

"Constructive interaction with metamours is a unique skill that mainstream culture does not tend to foster."

"In any freeform poly network, some relationships are likely to be deeper or more entwined than others."

"The diminutive 'just' is telling. It indicates how our society prioritizes sexual/romantic relationships above others. It also implies that whether people are sexually or romantically involved is always relevant - even to people who are not involved."

"Friendships, whether they include sex or not, involve real people with real feelings - and ideally, some level of mutual appreciation, consideration and respect."

"For many people, being solo means prioritizing one's internal relationship with oneself... It just means refusing to lose or sacrifice oneself within any relationship."

"It's common for solos to carefully nurture a diverse range of deep ties with friends, intimate partners, family, and community... Solos usually must build and maintain their support networks very consciously, so they can count on support in times of need."

"Most solos prefer to avoid life-entwined intimate relationships, especially living with or marrying sexual or romantic partners."

"Merging is probably the characteristic of Escalator relationships that affects partners' lives most profoundly. It changes not just how they live and love but their very identity and ways of connecting with others."

"Usually, behavior patterns over time are better indicators than labels about the presence or strength of relationship hierarchy."

"Thus, hierarchy dictates the balance of power across a relationship network."

"... secondary relationships often grow to become quite significant and substantial, with deep mutual emotional investment and commitment."

"Partners wish to ensure that their existing shared commitments, investments and goals are honored. They also wish to ensure that additional relationships complement their life and their primary relationship - or at least, that they do not derail it."

"This is why, when nonmonogamous people say 'Relationship hierarchy works for us," it's important to consider who, exactly, is included in that 'us.' Seeking all involved perspectives can yield a more complete picture."

"Some people find that distinguishing between descriptive and prescriptive hierarchy helps them remain conscious of when their hierarchy might need to change."

"Hierarchy can be a permanent feature of poly relationships. But often, as people gain experience with polyamory, they relax their hierarchy and move toward egalitarian relationships."

"'Ethics' leans towards decisions based upon individual character, and the more subjective understanding of right and wrong by individuals. Whereas 'morals' emphasizes the widely-shared communal or societal norms about right and wrong."

"The author suggests two key axioms to support ethical decisions in relationships, rooted in considerations of basic human rights: The people in the relationship are more important than the relationship. Don't treat people as things."

"Requirements or rules about feelings, not just behavior, commonly prove impractical as well as ethically dicey. In particular, emotional requirements that attempt to make one person responsible for maintaining another person's sense of happiness or security tend to yield no win situations."

"However, consent is an ongoing process, not a one-time choice. As circumstances and feelings evolve, people may change their minds about what they want in their relationships, and what they're willing or able to consent to."

"Our culture defines a 'good person' as someone who follows rules. I think this leads to rule-based polyamory, in which people attempt to demonstrate that they're still Good People by armoring themselves in new rules, despite breaking The Big Relationship Rule."

"From an ethical perspective, a kill switch is the ultimate form of third-party relationship control."

"Desiring safety, security and stability in one's intimate relationships, and in life, is not wrong. Still, it helps to realize that people usually have many options to support feeling secure, to protect shared investments, and to improve the chances that partners will continue to meet existing commitments."

"Love and relationships, of any kind, are never, ever safe. Even on the Relationship Escalator, risk is omnipresent. Monogamous partners abandon and betray each other all the time. And eventually, everyone dies."

"How people handle relationship risk largely comes down to how they perceive their options."

"Many survey participants noted how considering one's personal values and ethics, and being open to discuss them clearly with partners and metamours, typically yields better relationships while also supporting the greater good."

"Egalitarian relationships are about partners having an equal ability to effectively advocate for themselves within their own relationships."

"Of course, egalitarianism doesn't mean that every partner always gets everything they want, or that every conflict must be resolved through compromise, or that no one is allowed to have priorities or hard limits. It just means that all partners are equally empowered to speak up, that they can expect to be heard and considered, and that third parties cannot override the decisions partners make about their relationship... No person or relationship trumps or precludes others by default... That is, only the people who are partners in a relationship have the power to make decisions about their relationship."

"... the quest for fairness usually includes active consideration of people who might be affected by a relationship decision."

"For a relationship network to be fair, everyone needs to be flexible. This includes established partners being willing to make room, or to adapt, in order to accommodate and respect other partners and relationships."

"... egalitarian relationships (as well as relationship anarchy) tend to put life-entwined relationships on an equal footing with other kinds of relationships."

"... relationships anarchists do not gauge the importance of a relationship based on whether it involves sex, romance, life entwinement, or ties of blood or marriage."

"... up-front awareness of the limited scope of a relationship can amplify its intensity and significance. And sometimes, acknowledged limits are what allows a relationship to exist at all."

"Some people believe that nonmonogamy provides a buffer which can mitigate the emotional pain and disruption of a breakup."

"Sometimes positive afterships emerge from how people manage their own emotions, and sometimes it's a matter of how they acknowledge or approach the process of concluding relationships."

"There's a huge difference in viewing someone as part of your past, vs. seeing them as having an alternate role in your present and future."

"De-escalation, or downshifting, happens when intimate partners step back from some or all of their forms of sharing or merging."

"Some people wish to retain the option of riding the Escalator, even if they're currently exploring unconventional relationships."

"... it's crucial to periodically have a conversation just to take the pulse of how everybody in the relationship feels. How does it feel to be monogamour or polyamorous? How does it feel to be having sex, or not? How does it feel to live together or apart? How do we feel about having children, or about how we are parenting? Do we want to be married or not? Do we want to be public or private about our relationship? This stuff does not stay static."

"The fundamental liberating factor is that I have a choice. It is okay to choose a relationship based on tradition, or based on what someone else wants, or based on what I desire in my heart."

"Most people who have unconventional relationships are not claiming that traditional relationships have no value. I think they're just advocating choice. They're advocating close examination or relationship traditions and seeing which ones resonate."

[quotes] Begin Anew: Four Steps to Restoring Communication - Sister Chan Khong 2014

  

"If people don't take enough time to come to know themselves well and untie their internal knots, when they enter into a relationship with another person, their union will be difficult."

"When we fall in love, we construct a beautiful image that we project onto our partner, and we may be a little shocked as our illusions disappear and we discover the reality of living with someone."

"Practicing the art of mindful living together, we can help untie each other's knots successfully. We will be able to see that other people, like us, have both flowers and compose inside, and we accept this. Our practice is to water the flowers in them, and not bring them more garbage."

"Your partner is a flower. If you take care of her well, she will grow beautifully. If you take care of her poorly, she will wither. To help a flower grow well, we must understand its nature."

"Beginning Anew practice has four stages: "flower watering", expressing regrets, expressing hurts and difficulties, and checking in and asking for more information."

"First, we practice what we call flower watering. During flower watering, the speaker acknowledges the wholesome, wonderful qualities of the others."

"In the second part of the practice, we express our regrets for things we have said or done that may have hurt or disturbed others."

"In the third part, we express ways in which others have hurt us."

"Lastly, there's a chance to ask real questions and get more information. So often our suffering comes from inaccurate or insufficient information. Finding out what is going on with the other person and what is behind their actions can go a long way to repairing a relationship."

"In Hugging Meditation, you begin by taking a few moments to look at the other person and realize how dear they are to you. Take three breaths, just looking at the other person and feeling their true presence. As you open your arms to hug the other person, breathe consciously and hug with all your body, mind, and heart. "Breathing in, I know my dear one is here in my arms, alive. Breathing out, he is so precious to me."

"True love requires deep understanding, seeing the depth of the other person's darkness, pain, and suffering. If you don't understand her, you can't love her properly; your love will only cause her to suffer."

"Real love means loving kindness and compassion, the kind of love that doesn't have any conditions. You form a community of two in order to practice love - taking care of each other and helping your partner blossom. Through your love for each other, and learning the art of making one person happy, you also learn to offer your love for the whole of humanity and all beings."

"Please open your heart and tell me. To love you well, I need to understand you, in order to help you fulfill your aspirations. I don't want to just impose on you what I would like."

"We must train ourselves to be humble about our perceptions and open ourselves to learning more about the other side of the story."

"If possible, practice every day with yourself and your children, and every week with your partner or family, whether or not a problem has come up during that time."

"Or suppose you reflect on yourself. You may think 'I know very well what I am like.' But in fact you only perceive twenty or thirty percent of who you are."

"When you fall in love with someone, you fall in love with your perception of him or her, no with his reality, no with her suchness, not yet."

"The practice of Beginning Anew will help your perception come closer to the true suchness of the person you love, to who they really are rather than to who you thought they were according to your initial perception."

"We have to be very humble about our views. Our view of something is just a perception, and all perceptions are incomplete and are not the whole reality of an object, a situation, or an event."

"THE ART OF HAPPINESS is the capacity to create an environment where everyone is seen, valued, and appreciated on a regular basis."

"So the first practice of Beginning Anew is: when you see something good in the other person, you have to take note of it right away. Don't let yourself forget it."

"So it might help to keep a notebook or a file on your computer where you list all the things about your loved one that bring you happiness."

"I learned later that although they didn't think many issues were coming up in their relationship, in fact little hurts were pilling up one by one, until each person became more and more irritable and less sweet to the other."

"Ask your partner from time to time: 'Do I understand you enough? Do I understand your deep aspirations, what you love to do the most? Please tell me what I can do to keep our love fresh and new?"

"To love you well, I need to understand your life's dream, so I can support and not hinder you from fulfilling your aspiration, what you most deeply wish to do in life."

"I don't know why you spoke like that. Maybe there was a reason behind it? I want to understand so I can rediscover the person I love and respect."

"My proposal for you is that at the initial stage you only water the flowers in the other person and don't yet touch the real issue until more trust is restored."

"Beginning Anew is a powerful tool for manifesting the practice of mindfulness in relationship. It's allowing me to have more trust and love in my life."

[quotes] The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz 1997

 

"Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society's dream or the dream of the planet."

"The outside dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child's attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind."

"The outside dream hooks our attention and teaches us what to believe, beginning with the language that we speak. Language is the code for understanding and communication between humans. Every letter, every word in each language is an agreement."

"The outside dream may hook our attention, but if we don't agree, we don't store that information. As soon as we agree, we believe it, and this is called faith. To have faith is to believe unconditionally."

"We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid of being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough. Eventually we become someone that we are not. We become a copy of Mamma's beliefs, Daddy's beliefs, society's beliefs, and religion's beliefs."

"We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator. We are an autodomesticated animal. WE can now domesticate ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the same system of punishment and reward."

"One by one, all these agreements go into the Book of Law, and these agreements rule our dream."

"Whatever goes against the Book of Law will make you feel a funny sensation in your solar plexus, and it's called fear. Breaking the rules in the Book of Law opens your emotional wounds, and your reaction is to create emotional poison. Because everything that is in the Book of Law has to be true, anything that challenges what you believe is going to make you feel unsafe. Even if the Book of Law is wrong, it makes you feel safe."

"One edge is the misuse of the word, which creates a living hell. The other edge is the impeccability of the word, which will only create beauty, love, and heaven on earth."

"When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself."

"How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word. When you are impeccable with your word, you feel good; you feel happy and at peace."

"If you live without fear, if you love, there is no place for any of those emotions. If you don't feel any of those emotions, it is logical that you will feel good. When you feel good, everything around you is good. When everything around you is great, everything makes you happy. You are loving everything that is around you, because you are loving yourself."

"Telling yourself the truth about it may hurt, but you don't need to be attached to the pain."

"Doing my best has become a ritual in my life because I made the choice to make it a ritual. It's a belief like any other belief that I choose. I make everything a ritual, and I always do my best."

"By doing your best, the habits of misusing your word, taking things personally, and making assumptions will become weaker and less frequent with time. You don't need to judge yourself, feel guilty, or punish yourself if you cannot keep these agreements. If you're doing your best, you will feel good about yourself even if you still make assumptions, still take things personally, and still are not impeccable with your word."

"Your own body is a manifestation of God, and if you honor your body everything will change for you. When you practice giving love to every part of your body, you plant seeds of love in your mind, and when they grow, you will love, honor, and respect your body immensely."

"The real you is still a little child who never grew up."

"But you are no longer a child. Now it's up to you to choose what to believe and what not to believe. You can choose to believe in anything, and that includes believing in yourself."

"The truth is like a scalpel. The truth is painful, because it opens all of the wounds which are covered by lies so that we can be healed."

"And I put a little piece of love in every human, and I become one with the whole of humanity. Wherever I go, whomever I meet, I see myself in their eyes, because I am a part of everything, because I love."

"Help me to keep the love and the peace in my heart and to make that love a new way of life, that I may live in love the rest of my life. Amen."

[quotes] Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Davis 2003

 

"When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison."

"In the twenty-first century, antiprison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison system."

"That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane."

"The notion that female 'deviance' always has a sexual dimension persists in the contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and sexuality continues to be racialized."

"But throughout the history of the U.S. prison system, prisoners have always constituted a potential source of profit."

"A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system."

"the only full alternative is building the kind of society that does not need prisons: A decent redistribution of power and income so as to put out the hidden fire of burning envy that now flames up in crimes of property - both burglary by the poor and embezzlement by the affluent. And a decent sense of community that can support, reintegrate and truly rehabilitate those who suddenly become filled with fury or despair, and that can face them not as objects - 'criminals' - but as people who have committed illegal acts, as have almost all of us." - Arthur Waskow, Institute for Policy Studies

"Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance."

[quotes] Healing Resistance - Kazu Haga 2020

 

"... Beloved Community: a world where conflict surfaces as an opportunity to deepen in relationship, a world where all people understand our interconnectedness, and a world where - as stated in the Kingian Nonviolence training curriculum - 'all people have achieved their full human potential.'"

"We can heal every person's trauma, but if we haven't begun to dismantle the structures still in place that perpetuate injustice at a systemic level, we'll replicate the conditions for new traumas to constantly be created."

"Desire and will alone cannot bring about the changes that we need. We need training and skill."

"For most of us, our natural reactions to violence fall into one of three categories: to fight, flight, or freeze. Nonviolence gives us an alternative way of responding: to face. Facing means looking your assailant in the eye, not backing down, not giving into fear, and not reacting in kind. Facing also means genuinely listening to your partner when they are upset, hearing their pain, and taking full accountability for your actions without blaming or getting defensive."

"Nonviolence is not about what not to do. It is about what you are going to do about the violence and injustice we see in our own hearts, our homes, our neighborhoods, and society at large. It is about taking a proactive stand against violence and injustice. Nonviolence is about action, not inaction."

"Racism has become normalized. Poverty has become normalized. Patriarchy has become normalized. Ecological destruction has become normalized. So many things have become normalized in our society, and part of the work of nonviolence is to never normalize violence and injustice."

"I've come to the conclusion that structures, policies, systems, and bureaucracies are often an attempt to compensate for a lack of trust and relationships between people."

"Understanding another person's perspective in a conflict does not mean you condone it. It does not mean you agree with their conclusions. The purpose is to gather more information about the conflict so you can see the full picture."

"Courage means that I have the internal fortitude to honestly speak from my heart and to act in congruence with the content of my heart."

"We are harmed in relationships, so we need to heal in relationships. We are harmed in community, so we need to heal in community."

"Building Beloved Community is not about loving the people who are easy to love. It is about cultivating love for those that are difficult to love. Those people over there."

"My life has been forever altered by everyone I have interacted with and learned from. Indirectly, I have been impacted by everyone who ever interacted with that person. And on and on we go."

"If our traumas are interconnected and interdependent, then so must be our healing and liberation."

"The best way to protect those that we love is to love those that may hurt them."

"... there is one important question that everyone needs to ask themselves to build a strong foundation for a relationship. That question is, 'How do my partner's traumas come out, and can I live with that?'"

"When people talk about 'holding someone accountable,' the key word should not be accountable, but holding. What does it mean to hold someone? When people talk about holding people accountable, does that person feel held, or do they feel attacked and judged?"

"We live in a culture that is so averse to suffering that we do everything we can to find ourselves surrounded by comfort. But there is no growth in comfort. It is through tension that we grow."

"As members of marginalized communities, our work is to heal from our traumas so we're not seeing violence where it doesn't exist and perpetuating our traumas in unnecessary ways. As members of privileged communities, our work is to understand that our position may not allow us to see the full picture, have compassion for why people may be too sensitive, and allow space for that pain and anger."

"He told me that tools like Power Mapping, Spectrum of Allies (which maps different sectors of society and analyzes how much of an ally or opponent they are), SWOT analysis (scenario planning around a movement's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), and Pillars of Support (which looks at which institutions are propping up the larger systems you are trying to change) are among the most important tools a successful movement needs to conduct before jumping into action."

"This is a commitment not only to our own wellbeing but to the healing of past generations and the liberation of future ones."

"Feeling the anger or hurt we have toward people we not been able to forgive, looking at our deepest insecurities, and facing our own shame is not light work. But peace is messy, and nonviolence is the work of the courageous."

"... nonviolent negotiation is about creating dialogue, not debate. Second, a nonviolent negotiation strives to find a win-win solution. Finally, we believe that only equals can negotiate."

"Direct actions are largely about mobilizing people power to counter the structural power that has become barriers to genuine negotiations. They create leverage to take to the negotiating table so that we can be heard."

"Forgiveness (Understanding + Grief) + Accountability (Insight + Remorse + Amends) = Reconciliation"

"We heal society not only through individual resilience, but by healing our relationships to each other. Because we are harmed in relationship, we need to heal in relationship."

"Whether or not we'll end oppression, overcome violence, or reconcile all conflict is not the point. The point is to always be walking in the direction of freedom."

"We have the wisdom of our ancestors and the lives yet to be lived by our descendants."