Good People

Gratitude of Resistance Three:
Good people doing good work. ASSETS Lancaster, and organization which trains and mentors and invests in small businesses. RAICES provides legal services for immigrants and asylum-seekers. The people who are traveling into Honduras to meet with and comfort and aid the asylum-seekers who are traveling north right now. The canvassers and door-knockers who talk to people about what they really want. You, doing your good work, smiling at your neighbor, picking up trash, writing letters, making change, believing in the best version of us all.

“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés
*****
“A tree is beautiful, but what’s more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.” —Anton Chekhov
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“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.” —Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
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“I would like to think that everybody in America would think it’s wrong to spend all your time from a position of power vilifying people, questioning their patriotism, calling them enemies of the people and then suddenly pretending that you’re concerned about civility.” —Barack Obama, in Michigan
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“And then there are the cravings. Oh, la! ⠀
A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. ⠀
She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.⠀
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights ⠀
where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. ⠀
She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estés
*****
“It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little.”
—Ellen Bass
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“Blessed is this, the new day of slowly uncovering fog, the echoing song of ravens praising a break in the rains, the moon somewhere still quietly ripening, the calm of always receiving another chance.” —Toko-pa Turner
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“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” —Dorothy Day
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“You want to be human. Be angry, it’s okay. But not to practice is not okay. To be angry, that is very human. And to learn how to smile at your anger and make peace with your anger is very nice. That is the whole thing—the meaning of the practice, of the learning. By taking a look at your anger it can be transformed into the kind of energy that you need—understanding and compassion. It is with negative energy that you can make the positive energy. A flower, although beautiful, will become compost someday, but if you know how to transform the compost back into the flower, then you don’t have to worry. You don’t have to worry about your anger because you know how to handle it—to embrace, to recognize, and to transform it. So this is what is possible.” —bell hooks
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“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” —Frida Kahlo