Jeff

“Rather than anchoring our hope beyond the struggle, always projecting ahead, perhaps locating joy within the struggle through our full presence can be our essential gesture at this moment in time. To feel the pain of now and not look away. To act not with the hope of moving forward, always forward, but to see the wisdom of stepping sideways as we create a different space, a more conscious space in the direction of pause, where we can breathe and gather ourselves so we can gather others around us and create a community of care, even within our own families, especially within our own families.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing

“Maintaining the social contract required trust, it required that we see ourselves as bound together if not as a family then at least as a community each member worthy of concern and able to make claims on the whole. It required us to believe that whatever actions the government might take to help those in need were available to you and people like you that nobody was gaming the system and the misfortunes or stumbles or circumstances that caused others to suffer were ones to which you at some point in your life might fall prey. Over the years that trust proved difficult to sustain.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“...dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals