Micah Spiece

“Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. School”
― bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters:
that is the only question.
If you would not feel
the horrible burden of Time
weighing on your shoulders
and crushing you to the earth,
be drunken continually.

Drunken with what?
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken.

And if sometimes,
on the stairs of a palace,
or on the green side of a ditch,
or in the dreary solitude of your own room,
you should awaken
and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you,
ask of the wind,
or of the wave,
or of the star,
or of the bird,
or of the clock,
of whatever flies,
or sighs,
or rocks,
or sings,
or speaks,
ask what hour it is;
and the wind,
wave,
star,
bird,
clock will answer you:
"It is the hour to be drunken!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“She wanted me to bear witness, to hear again both the naming of her pain and the power that emerged when she felt the hurt go away.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“I think that one of the unspoken discomforts surrounding the way a discourse of race and gender, and sexual practice has disrupted the academy is precisely that mind/body split. Once we start talking in the classroom about the body and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated itself in that particular institutionalized space.The person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body….
I think part of why everyone in the culture, and students in general, have a tendency to see professors as people who don’t work is totally tied to that sense of the immobile body.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom