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Jason Stewart
https://12characters.org.uk/
What This World Needs This world does not need more entrepreneurs. This world does not need more technology breakthroughs. This world needs leaders.
“Orphan Wisdom is a teaching house and a learning house for the skills of making human culture.
Knowledge, in an information-drunk, competence addicted culture like our own, must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed to make life without killing life in the gathering.
Wisdom is the place where knowledge is fired, forged, and annealed to become something of great beauty, useful to the world.
Human Culture is made when that beauty swells into life and dies to nourish a time we won’t live to see.
Knowledge gathers wood and flint and gut. Wisdom conjures a cranky, playable fiddle from the gatherings. People who have been bathed in the grief and love for life play some small magnificence on those fiddles together, and sing their unknown songs, and make human culture.”
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Knowledge, in an information-drunk, competence addicted culture like our own, must be the life-tested skill of gathering what is needed to make life without killing life in the gathering.
Wisdom is the place where knowledge is fired, forged, and annealed to become something of great beauty, useful to the world.
Human Culture is made when that beauty swells into life and dies to nourish a time we won’t live to see.
Knowledge gathers wood and flint and gut. Wisdom conjures a cranky, playable fiddle from the gatherings. People who have been bathed in the grief and love for life play some small magnificence on those fiddles together, and sing their unknown songs, and make human culture.”
―
“Dying is active. Dying is not what happens to you. Dying is what you do. Dying”
― Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
― Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
“If you wrestle an angel, you will grow muscle. There’s no doubt of that. You will also hurt in places that you didn’t know you had. There’s no doubt of that either. And you will lose, by the normal calculus of trying to engineer the life that you’re sure you deserve. It will not come out as you planned, wrestling angels. Your plans our usually the first casualty of the match. But here is that great secret of it: you will be able to boast of your defeat. You will be able to stand in the wreckage of what used to be your certainty, your creed, your way of doing life’s business, and you can tell wild, true stories about how it all came to ruin. Whatever is left standing - and there is always something left standing when you wrestle angels - is the thing that was true about you and your life all along, as faithful a companion as the Earth that will one day cradle you again.”
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“Grief is not a feeling it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you, we are not on the receiving end of grief we are on the practising end of grief.”
― Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
― Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul
“Grief doesn’t go away. It can change into many things and will, but as a substance and presence it never leaves. To have caused and witnessed suffering and loss of life means grief is eagerly awaiting your decision as to what direction it will take in your destiny: to make more life or to make more death and violence, internally or externally. The best decision is that all grief be turned into life-promoting grief-based beauty and usefulness. The willingness for violence-shattered soldiers to heal others makes their malady into medicine.
If a society is alive, and aware in this way, then those who have suffered loss will have a chance to heal, and those who have caused loss will be socially supported to sprout a new type of life-making person out of the death they have caused: a person who can now help others to heal from their losses, instead of both of them causing more loss to the rest of the world. This not only gives a place to these people, but having been remade into a new type of human, they will become an indispensible necessity for the future well-being of the community on the whole.
Only in such a way can one who has killed continue living without destroying even more: themselves and/or others. Alive, in love as one who can feel the heartbreak of another, they are praised by their community as useful human beings instead of being shunned or forgotten.”
― The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise
If a society is alive, and aware in this way, then those who have suffered loss will have a chance to heal, and those who have caused loss will be socially supported to sprout a new type of life-making person out of the death they have caused: a person who can now help others to heal from their losses, instead of both of them causing more loss to the rest of the world. This not only gives a place to these people, but having been remade into a new type of human, they will become an indispensible necessity for the future well-being of the community on the whole.
Only in such a way can one who has killed continue living without destroying even more: themselves and/or others. Alive, in love as one who can feel the heartbreak of another, they are praised by their community as useful human beings instead of being shunned or forgotten.”
― The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise
Jason’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Jason’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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