Mateo

“Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?" Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexpected territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.
And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) - is our sorrow? Or... the 'intolerable.' It astonishes me sometimes - no, often - how every person I get to know - everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything - lives with some profound personal sorrow... Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is - and if we join them - your wild to mine - what's that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrow, I'm saying.
I'm saying: What if that is joy?”
― Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

“It is within our differences that we are both most powerful and most vulnerable, and some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“I'll never know whether I'm right or wrong about what I am. Nobody is going to take me aside after death and give me a self-awareness trophy to lord over all the other ghosts. There's no prophecy that will prove my gender is mine. But I'm happier with my new name and pronouns than I was before, and that's really all that matters. I've got one life to live and I've got an overlord to kill. Why be miserable if I don't have to be?”
― Ana Mardoll, No Man of Woman Born

“You are my child, and you are special and loved. Whether you're a boy, or a girl, or both, or neither, or something else entirely, Eoghan and I will love you as we always have and always will.”
― Ana Mardoll, No Man of Woman Born