Boxofdelights

“Once, when I was in high school, and unhappy about having to deal with a math teacher who struck me as arrogant, my mom heard my complaint, nodded understandingly, and then shrugged. "You don't have to like your teacher, and she doesn't have to like you," she said. "But she's got math in her head that you need in yours, so maybe you should just go to school and get the math." She looked at me then and smiled, as if this should be the simplest thing in the world to grasp. "You can come home to be liked," she said. "We will always like you here.”
― Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times

“By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“The poetry reading promoted an anthology celebrating the varied voices of the United States. The evening's readers represented several races and ethnicities, a kind of attention to inclusivity I admired. But a few days before my flight, I found out that I was the roster's only woman. I brought this to the attention of the event coordinators, and they said it was too late to correct the lack of gender equity. As a concession, they said that I and the other readers should make a point of reading others' poems to that end.

When I joined the seven male readers at the venue, the organizers reminded us of our time limit and suggested I read first. I read my poem from the anthology, as well as one poem each by two other women: a wry, pointed poem by Jane Mead and a focused, hopeful poem by Audre Lorde. I kept to the specified time limit. Then I sat down. Like an obedient girl.

The men at the podium, every one, read over their times. They read their own poems from the anthology. Then they read others. Not others as in other people's - women's - poems, which was the idea conveyed to me. No. These men read other poems of their own.

I'd flown to New York to read a single poem of my own and watch men drown out my voice and the voices of all the other women in the book.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

“The baby plant root has forty-eight hours after it decides to emerge to locate water and nutrients, and then push out a leaf or two and begin photosynthesizing, before it runs out of resources and dies. The first green parts of any plant are folded preassembled and waiting inside the seed. This preassembled plantlet bears little resemblance to the plant itself; it consists of one or two cartoonish green lobes on a short green stem, the manifestation of the plant emoji, and it is entirely temporary.”
― Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth