Neeyati

“The trick of life, as I see it now, is to make what’s around you beautiful. It’ll grow from there. Took me a long time to see that.”
― Kate Fagan, The Three Lives of Cate Kay

“These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“The practice of observing the living world and taking inspirations for human ways of living from its model is an essential element of indigenous science. It embraces the reality that there are intelligences other than our own, from whom we might learn.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World