Grace

“Never let anyone touch your private parts, they’d say. But I wasn’t told why I had to protect my private parts, just that it was imperative that I did. Because of this, when I thought of my experience, I didn’t hold my abusers accountable—I held myself to blame. In my mind, they didn’t abuse me. I broke the rules. I was the one who did something wrong.”
― Tarana Burke, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

“I suppose that’s the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. The drop swells on the tip of a cedar and I catch it on my tongue like a blessing.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Dangerous is the woman who can give herself what she used to seek from others. Limitless is the woman who dares to name herself. The way I see it, shame cannot oppress what acceptance has already claimed for sovereignty.”
― Tarana Burke, You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience