“I’ve lost control of the situation.”
Notes: Quote Source – Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Tweets of God.
Category: Quotes
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
Source: Photo by @brianlehmannphotography (via Paper Ghosts) – Barn swallow’s nest on the wire of a missing light fixture inside an abandoned farmhouse in Nebraska.
We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra
After a run of darkness (Orlando, Baton Rouge, Dallas, Minnesota, Nice), Rebecca Solnit writes an essay for The Guardian titled “Hope is an Embrace of the Unknown” on living in dark times. I’ve shared a few excerpts below.
After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation…
…our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of centre stage. Our hope and often our power…
What startled me about the response to disaster was not the virtue, since virtue is often the result of diligence and dutifulness, but the passionate joy that shone out from accounts by people who had barely survived. These people who had lost everything, who were living in rubble or ruins, had found agency, meaning, community, immediacy in their work together with other survivors…But people return to those selves, those ways of self-organising, as if by instinct when the situation demands it. Thus a disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible…
Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that, yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.
~ Rebecca Solnit, Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times
Photo: Morel Mushroom by Kim Fleming
from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.
Sonja said once that to understand men like Ove and Rune, one had to understand from the very beginning that they were men caught in the wrong time. Men who only required a few simple things from life, she said. A roof over their heads, a quiet street, the right make of car, and a woman to be faithful to. A job where you had a proper function. A house where things broke at regular intervals, so you always had something to tinker with. “All people want to live dignified lives; dignity just means something different to different people,” Sonja had said. To men like Ove and Rune dignity was simply that they’d had to manage on their own when they grew up, and therefore saw it as their right not to become reliant on others when they were adults. There was a sense of pride in having control. In being right. In knowing what road to take and how to screw in a screw, or not. Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.
~ Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove: A Novel
Notes:
- Photo – Colin Grubbs with Old Men, Old Quarter
- Related Posts: Fredrik Backman
The Wisdom of Crowds
Notes:
- Source: NY Times Magazine (July 17, 2016)
- Post Title taken from James Surowiecki’s Book: The Wisdom of Crowds
- Post inspiration: Vera Meum – “Why does the sound of rain gently tapping on the roof and windows instantly relieve stress? It is a reminder of survival, an appreciation for being safe, dry, and warm, the most basic of needs. Therein lies a secret to contentment; to remind ourselves regularly of the satisfaction of our basic needs, to appreciate another moment of survival, and forget the extraneous factors that cause us undue stress.”