Rebekah

“Writing was a forbidden game, Bei Dao (the Chinese dissident poet) said, that could cost one’s life. The poetry they published amounted to a new language, since “for thirty years the Chinese language there had no personal voice at all.” The official line on Bei Dao’s poetry was that it was politically subversive because it expressed intimate thoughts, asserting the rights of the individual by his or her own private experience. And the more obscure Bei Dao’s poems became, the more subversive the authorities considered him. He said, 'on the one hand, poetry is useless. It can’t change the world materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence. It came into the world when humans did. It’s what make human beings human.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real

“Failures weigh people down. Writing reports of all the cases I was unable to solve, however, had helped me to tell stories, or at least get them down on paper, as they say. Whether I was obeying or taming language is not important.... Sometimes failures push us to open the door of a run-down old house, to clean the dust off the unused furniture and find a drawer where an old typewriter hides. Failures force us to reflect, and reflection, with any luck, may lead us to a coastal city and a pile of blank pages.”
― Cristina Rivera Garza, The Taiga Syndrome

“Was there some deeper, level some plane upon which the consciousness of mountains responded to death and waste and pain? Was there a compassion embedded in the very rocks, so that they offered their beauty in compensation for human loss?”
― Starhawk, Walking to Mercury

“We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.”
― Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing