Natalie > Recent Status Updates

“The trees were vastly high. Only eagles reached their very top and they told nobody what they saw from there. Each fringed branch was almost large enough to be a tree on its own. For a dizzy moment, it felt as if I were the only human left alive, glued by gravity alone to the edge of a spinning globe, only just keeping myself from being flung off.“

“The political socialization of a people becomes obvious as we reflect on the fact that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not considered a practice of violence or terrorism. Generally, instead, the use of the word ‘terrorism’ is reserved for small groups of people attempting to defend their interests in the midst of overwhelming opposition.”

Ever since the United States intervention of 1954, there has been a saying in the countryside: “The best place to visit organizers of rural labor is in the cemeteries.“

“Dictatorial regimes require anti-intellectualism and an ahistorical perspective. Illiteracy is the desired condition for the masses and its antithesis, university education and reflective thought, are identified as subversive. By 1965 thousands of the best educated citizens of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala were being slaughtered in a vast institutional drive for political unconsciousness.”

“Injustice burns in me like a fever. Take away the Catholicism, and a little Gaelic heart like mine still beats martyr’s blood.“

“Ryan J. Dolan of Nothing, Nowhere, having nether house nor bed, nothing a person might call a possession, somehow had a lawyer. Rye wondered if that, more than waking on a ball field or eagles or George Washington’s hair, was what it really meant to be an American.”

“And the idea that you could make men equal just by saying it? Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother’s unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.”

“The key is to meet the abrasiveness head on – to, in a sense, examine the abrasions. You pay attention to the discomfort the noise creates. Where in your body does annoyance or even revulsion reside? What is the texture of the feeling? The more fine-grained your examination, the more complete your acceptance of the feeling, the more it’s negative energy drains away.“

“There was something childlike in the way grown-ups had a need for stories. They held a naive belief that by telling an inspiring anecdote—the right fable at the right time—they could lift their children’s moods, motivate them to great achievements and simply change reality. There was no point in telling them that life was more complicated than that and words less magical than they presumed.”

“In the most surprising ways, the victims continued to live, because that is what nature did to death, it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.“

“If you weep for all the sorrows in this world, in the end you will have no eyes.”

“Some days she was full of confidence and expectation, others she managed just fine, but then there were days, and especially nights, when she would hear, somewhere in the distance, ticking as steady as a metronome, the approaching footsteps of a familiar sense of melancholy. She felt guilty for feeling this way, and she blamed, judged and berated herself endlessly for it.”

“Perhaps in a world bound with rules and regulations that made little sense, and usually privileged a few over the money, madness was the only true freedom.”

“Humans, especially the victors, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting. It remains to us plants to collect the untold, the unwanted. Like a cat that curls up on its favorite cushion, a tree wraps itself around the remnants of the past.”

“You don’t put on your best dress and tuck a flower in your hair when you are surrounded by ruins and shards. You don’t lose your heart at a time when hearts are supposed to remain sealed, especially for those who are not of your religion, not of your language, not of your blood.

You don’t fall in love in Cyprus in the summer of 1974. Not here, not now. And yet here they were, the two of them.“

“…what we can say with some confidence is that the societies encountered by European invaders from the 16th century onwards were the product of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate. They were, in many cases, societies in which the ability to engage in self-conscious political debate was itself considered one of the highest human values.“

“Parents, especially those as distracted as her father, desperately needed things to run smoothly and were so inclined to believe the system they had created was working fine that they assumed a normality even when surrounded by clues to the contrary.”

"Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it."

"I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders; I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying."

“We might ask what ultimately determines the shape a society takes: economic factors, organizational imperatives or cultural meanings and ideas? … We might also suggest a fourth possibility. Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?”

“Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.”

“Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.”

“At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom…”

“He offered me only the cliché that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and since science separates the observer and the observed, by definition beauty could not be a valid scientific question. I should have been told that my questions were bigger than science could touch.”

“The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze.“

I am ALIVE for this description of plantation owners whining about how hard it is to get people to work in their fields after emancipation.

“The quiet of the reservation…that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.”

“We stayed after fighting in the Second World War. After Vietnam too. We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay – which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets.”

“Most males are not told that they need to be upheld by love every day. Sexist thinking usually prevents them from acknowledging their longing for love or their acceptance of a female as their guide on love’s path.”

“Most of all, it illustrates how day-to-day encounters between the races became infused with the tension inevitable when a social order, infused with its power relations and commonly understood rules of conduct, has been swept away and a new one has not yet come into being.”