Joyce Amen

“It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked from our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“Recently, Stacey Milbern brought up the concept of “crip doulas”—other disabled people who help bring you into disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before. The more seasoned disabled person who comes and sits with your new crip self and lets you know the hacks you might need, holds space for your feelings, and shares the community’s stories. She mentioned that it’s telling that there’s not even a word for this in mainstream English. We wondered together: How would it change people’s experiences of disability and their fear of becoming disabled if this were a word, and a way of being? What if this was a rite of passage, a form of emotional labor folks knew of—this space of helping people transition? I have done this with hundreds of people. What if this is something we could all do for each other? How would our movements change? Our lives? Our beliefs about what we can do?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“As I gazed rather intently at the earth my grandfather said: How long will your thoughts continue to dwell upon the earth?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero , Somnium Scipionis: The Dream of Scipio

“In order for nonviolence to work. Your opponent must have a Conscience. The United States has none.”
― Stokely Carmichael