Sekar Writes

“What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn't you dance it? Wouldn't you act it out? Wouldn't your every movement tell the story? In time you would be so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Not all certainty is a trap. The trap is when certainty leads us to dismiss, demonize, and judge others harshly, especially on heated political issues.”
― Ilana Redstone, The Certainty Trap: Why We Need to Question Ourselves More--and How We Can Judge Others Less

“because he’s a man who disappoints himself with his need of firm ground. He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe. And though he’d give his leg to be the latter, it’s not the kind of thing you can trade a leg for – in any case who’d want his leg if they already had limitlessness?”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“If access to good jobs, housing, health care, and other essentials was fairer, we wouldn't heap such outsized economic expectations on our schools. If we aren't asking them to fix our deepest social and economic inequalities, for example, we can ask them to focus on preparing kids for citizenship in a diverse democracy. Today, we measure the success of our schools mostly according to how well they advance the interests of individual consumers.”
― Jennifer Berkshire, The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual