lena

“After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores.
They look at the toll on the land and say,
“The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.” This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past.
America has been called the home of second chances. For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second
Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants,
learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore?”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It's serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed.”
― Maya Angelou

“The only place where Negroes did not revolt is in the pages of capitalist historians.”
― C.L.R. James