Bryce Townsend

“How do you make hope?
For me, it's writing,
reading, researching,
rehearsing, teaching, coaching,
loving--partnering, parenting, friending,
all those things that take me outside of myself
and take me deeper inside myself at the same time,
a beautiful contradictory co-existing reality.

We do not know yet what is still to come,
but we do know what we can do to find our way through it.
Keep making things,
keep making hope.
It's the least we can do.
It's the most we can do.”
― Shellen Lubin

“I am continually surprised by who people are
and what they have been through
when you can be in a place and a time
where and when
they are open to sharing
stories.”
― Shellen Lubin

“We are in a time of destruction,
perhaps the worst destruction many of us
have ever known.

So many of us are at risk,
some paying with their livelihoods,
some with their lives,
with their ability to stay here, be here, with
their will to persist ...
some of us just with our time and energy,
peace of mind,
sanity.

So many, so much has already been destroyed.
The cost of this period of our history piles on daily,
even as the signs of its end seem to beckon to us
from the horizon, from the end
of this dark tunnel.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Despair manifests in multiple ways--
illness, exhaustion, indulgence, malaise--
some days I just have to let it be,
whatever form it takes.

We have to do what we can, all we can,
to turn the tides.
But ... but ...
Sometimes despair overwhelms
and what we need is to do, to create, to make
hope.”
― Shellen Lubin