Rose Gittell

“This is how it feels to be in this broken female body. This is how it feels to be alone... This is how it feels to be me. I dare you to look...and once you look, I’m going to make sure you cannot look away.”
― Frida Kahlo

“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.”
― Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

“I am looking for the door to another world. I've waited thousands of years. Take me.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect.”
― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto