Child go break off from the herd
go beyond the lowlands
leave the valley of shed antlers
the elders are sick
it is your time now

"There is always a gap between the here and now of direct interaction and the past interactions whose funded result constitutes the meanings with which we grasp and understand what is now occurring. Because of this gap, all conscious perception involves a risk; it is a venture into the unknown, for as it assimilates the present to the past it also brings about some reconstruction of of that past. When past and present fit exactly into one another, when there is only recurrence, complete uniformity, the resulting experience is routine and mechanical; it does not come to consciousness in perception. The inertia of habit overrides adaptation of the meaning of the here and now with that of experiences, without which there is no consciousness, the imaginative phase of experience."

"Because we smashed their statues all to pieces,
because we chased them from their temples -
This hardly means the gods have died.
O land of Ionia, they love you still,
It’s you whom their souls remember still."

"For private business prison labour is like a pot of gold. No strike. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’ compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria’s Secret, all at a fraction of the cost of ‘free labour.’"

“Everything is contextually unique”

“When forced into a binary, you always choose wrong.”

"There is a fundamental element in interaction, which takes on a greater complexity in relationship. I am refering to curiosity, some sort of openness to comprehending what is in orbit of the challenged being’s sensibility. It is this human disposition to be surprised before people, what they do, say, seem like, before facts and phenomena, before beauty and ugliness, this unrefrainable need to understand in order to explain, to seek the reason for being of facts. It is this desire, always alive, of feeling, living, realizing what lies in the realm of one’s “vision of depth”."

“I think that to realise an
anxiety attack and to resolve it
is the highest form of existence
[…] it is a useful ‘creation’.
useful in the sense that I make a
progress [..]
the word useful smells of morals
by useful I mean reel [sic]
as opposed to aesthetic ‘creation which
is an un-useful creation [..]
I want to create bridges
what I want is to be close to the others

"This is the image for pattern-mind, which is about seeing entire systems and the trends and patterns within them, and using these to make accurate predictions and find solutions to complex problems. There are three lines with three sections. Each section represents the line from the kinship-mind symbol, which is two elements linked by a relationship. You can see at each point a new pair begins, linked by a new relationship. It is about truly holistic, contextual reasoning.

Pattern-mind links back to the beginning, to the first symbol of kinship-mind, to the assertion that everything is interconnected. Mastery of Indigenous epistemology (ways of knowing) demands being able to see beyond the object of study, to seek a viewpoint incorporating complex contextual information and group consensus about what is real. This is the difference between oral and print-based cultures....
‍
....Oral cultures are known as high-context or field-dependent-reasoning cultures. The have no isolated variables : all thinking is dependent on the field or context. Print-based cultures, by contrast, are low-context or field-independent-reasoning cultures. This is because they remain independent of the field or context, focusing on ideas and objects in isolation.”

“Emotional maturity, we are just beginning to glimpse, may mean capacity to feel truly, in relation to the facts of our world, the feelings of others; and also to create in our responses to others a relationship of “feeling together” which is something different from and better than single individuals could experience alone. So little do we know about this that we have scarcely any vocabulary to talk about it. But something like this is at the basis, we are sure, of acting together, for out of common feeling much more than from shared intellectual concepts comes the capacity to cooperate for valued ends.”

“Emotional maturity, we are just beginning to glimpse, may mean capacity to feel truly, in relation to the facts of our world, the feelings of others; and also to create in our responses to others a relationship of “feeling together” which is something different from and better than single individuals could experience alone. So little do we know about this that we have scarcely any vocabulary to talk about it. But something like this is at the basis, we are sure, of acting together, for out of common feeling much more than from shared intellectual concepts comes the capacity to cooperate for valued ends.”

“And then there is the butterfly, a most magical creature. The wings of the butterfly are already held inside the caterpillar, and as it breaks down its old self into goo the wings emerge ready to go. That process is amazing and teaches me that as we change and transform, we also have everything we need already right inside of us. So my organizing and healing work becomes about building the cocoon that can hold the goo so that the wings can emerge.”

Imagine your little finger now as a child. The child has a singular purpose when it is young-to relate.
It relates completely to people and land.
This puts children at the centre of family and society, the ones who make relationships happen, trying everything together in a kinship system.
So this finger represents kinship-mind - a way of thinking and learning that depends on linking knowledge to relationships with people and with places.

What defines you? The very moment that you find yourself in.
Let go.
‍

Every shouted greeting, every stalling car, every siren, every screaming kid, dog, fox, radio. All that sound out there is life and people living. Not background sound. But close up. Front and centre. See all those windows in all those buildings? Look up. There’s life in there. Put yourself away. Let go of yourself. Tune in to other people. To the movement in the branches, the sudden coming of the rain or the patterns in the waves. To how those two lie on the grass. To how that one sits on the bench with their hands clasped, looking up. To how those three stand at the crossing, playing with each other’s hair. To how that young one shifts the weight of those shopping bags and tries to keep up with their mother’s strong legs. This is it. This is the thing. This is the beautiful thing.

"TRY THIS

FINDING A LISTENING POST IN NATURE

Is there a place where you feel more connected to the web of life? It can be either somewhere you go physically or somewhere in your imagination. Each time you go there, make yourself comfortable. Think of yourself plugging in to a root system that can draw up insights and inspiration as well as other nutrients. To receive guidance, all you need to do is ask for it, and then listen."

"Healing is difficult for me to talk about, to neatly conceptualize in a language that communicates my relationship to what I consider a process of slow but intentional liberation. I am nervous and anxious to speak of healing in spaces and places that are suspicious of what it means to heal. I know that sometimes we distrust healing because it means that we have to imagine a different way of being in the world beyond our anger, woundedness, or despair. Moreover, we believe that to move beyond these hurts means that we can no longer be attuned to the suffering of communities and people struggling for justice, equality, or basic visibility. Or maybe because we feel that healing means forgetting that we have been hurt, oppressed and that there is an oppressor who should and must be held accountable for their violence. Perhaps we think healing means weakness, that we are no longer strong when we are healed or that healing zaps our super-human ability of being pissed off and agitated, which we think keeps us conscious and present. We have learned that anger is a part of the work of social liberation, that being angry is what motivates and drives us. To a certain extent this is true. However I believe that the true blessing of anger is how it can indicate an imbalance in our experience and in the world around us. But we have to be very clear: Anger is not about creating or building up. That is the work of loving. Or maybe we believe that the right to healing is only for those who have been hurt and opressed, and we are upset to consider that the one who hurts and oppresses is in just as much need of healing. It is hard for us to consider that if the oppressor is healed, then maybe he or she would not reproduce so much violence."

“Emotional maturity, we are just beginning to glimpse, may mean capacity to feel truly, in relation to the facts of our world, the feelings of others; and also to create in our responses to others a relationship of “feeling together” which is something different from and better than single individuals could experience alone. So little do we know about this that we have scarcely any vocabulary to talk about it. But something like this is at the basis, we are sure, of acting together, for out of common feeling much more than from shared intellectual concepts comes the capacity to cooperate for valued ends.”

“In contrast to the latency that is elsewhere associated with testimony (both in Agamben’s work and that of others such as Elsaesser), the face is now associated with ‘non-latency’. In contrast to the common view of the face as ‘expressive’, in particular as expressive of readily recognisable affects, the face is now associated with a ‘pure visibility’. Pure visibility, in turn, is deemed to be equivalent to ‘non-latency’, suggesting that rather than concealing hidden depths of meaning, the face is ultimately an empty cipher. Such a suggestion, of course, is not the same as a simple statement of the face’s emptiness. Instead, it arrives at that conclusion in a rhetorically painstaking manner, labouring, like Beckett, the statement of expression’s absence. The grimace is associated with this expression of a ‘mute identity’ or, to put it in familiar terms, of the expression of the inability to express”

"Realization doesn't have to do with strategy... it is open ended. You start and you don't know exactly where you're going to end."

“When I defend unity within diversity, I am thinking of unity between those who do not live it, and vice versa. If our utopia is the constant changing of the world and the overcoming of injustice, I cannot refuse the contribution of progressives who have no faith, nor can I be rejected for having it. What must not be accepted in those who proclaim their faith is that they use it at the service of the popular classes’ uncriticalness. This is how I have always understood God - a presence in history that does not preclude me from making history, but rather pushes me toward world transformation, which make it possible to restore the humanity of those who exploit and of the weak”.

"Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve - but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but “incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there”. That the presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day.”