The grounds

for hope are in the shadows,

in the people who are inventing the world

while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet

whether they will have any effect, in the people you have

not yet heard of who will be the next Cesar Chavez, the next

Noam Chomsky, the next Cindy Sheehan, or become something

you cannot yet imagine. In this epic struggle between light and dark,

it’s the dark side — that of the anonymous, the unseen, the officially

powerless, the visionaries and subversives in the shadows —

that we must hope for. For those onstage, we can just

hope the curtain comes down soon and the

next act is better, that it comes more

directly from the populist

shadows.

Rebecca Solnit

 

Avoid

the bad habit

of domesticating the prophet

of your choice, turning him or her into

a cheerleader for your way of thinking and way

of life. Remember that all the great prophets were courageous

and outrageous folks who railed against the powers-that-be,

challenged self-satisfied piosity, threatened the

prevailing social order, and would find

you falling short in some

significant

ways.

Parker Palmer

oliver jeffers

I believe that

the universe is one being,

all its parts are different expressions of

the same energy, and they are all in communication

with each other, influencing each other, therefore

parts of one organic whole. This is

physics, I believe, as well as

religion.

The parts

change and pass, or die,

people and races and rocks and stars,

none of them seems to me important in itself,

but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful,

and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled

to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this

whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love;

and that here is peace, freedom,

I might say a kind of

salvation.

I think that

one may contribute (ever so slightly)

to the beauty of things by making one’s own life

and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches.

This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities

of humanity, though it seems not to

appear elsewhere in the

universe. 

Robinson Jeffers

hevrin khalaf, may she rest in peace

There is

only one way to strive for

decency, reason, responsibility,

sincerity, civility, and tolerance, and

that is decently, reasonably,

sincerely, civilly, and

tolerantly.

Václav Havel

What is

needed for dramatic change

is an accumulation of acts…We know that it

does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and

peace, but only a small, determined group

who will not give up during

the first, second, or

hundredth

gale.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes