Infra-ordinary People | Cara Blue Adams
Both through her fiction and in her diaries Butler demonstrated that no one was a nobody. To be a person in whatever place or time had value. Self-doubting, self-made, self-helped, the city-state’s prophet suffered and thrived on things found in the world and mind. Both gave her pain. Both gave her art. So be it. See to it. She found a way.
Rosecrans Baldwin • Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles
Do you suffer what a French paleontologist called “the distress that makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars”? For the world is as glorious as ever, and exalting, but for credibility’s sake let’s start with the bad news.
An infant is a pucker of the earth’s thin skin; so are we. We arise like budding yeas
Annie Dillard • For the Time Being
Enlightenment thinkers once disparaged animist ideas as backwards and unscientific. They considered them to be a barrier to capitalist expansion, and sought desperately to stamp them out. But today science is beginning to catch up. Biologists are discovering that humans are not standalone individuals, but composed largely of microorganisms on which
... See moreJason Hickel • Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
If the spaces we imagine to facilitate reconnection with the self also banish the factors that determine who we are — the wider cultural dimensions of the worlds we belong to — then we are condemned to either living falsely, or being alone. Both concepts collapse when one acknowledges that, no matter how far off-grid one travels, there is no place,... See more
Real Life • The Great Offline
Once, our worldview embedded each of us within a world in which all the parts were intricately interconnected. Each of us could be at the centre of this multidimensional web of interconnections, “trapped,” in a sense, by our total dependence on all of the strands enfolding and infusing us, yet deriving the ultimate security of place and belonging.
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