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When You Say 'mother' Or 'father' You Describe Three Different Phenomena. There Is The Giant Who Made You And Loomed Over Your Early Years; There Is Whatever More Human-scale Version Might Have Been Possible To Perceive Later And Maybe Even Befriend; And There Is The Internalized Version Of The Parent With Whom You Struggle- To Appease, To Escape, To Be Yourself, To Understand And Be Understood By- And They Make Up A Chaotic And Contradictory Trinity.

-Rebecca Solnit

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When You Say 'mother'

Rebecca Solnit

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When You Say 'mother' Or 'father' You Describe Three Different Phenomena. There Is The Giant Who Made You And Loomed Over Your Early Years; There Is Whatever More Human-scale Version Might Have Been Possible To Perceive Later And Maybe Even Befriend; And There Is The Internalized Version Of The Parent With Whom You Struggle- To Appease, To Escape, To Be Yourself, To Understand And Be Understood By- And They Make Up A Chaotic And Contradictory Trinity.

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Nothing To Lose

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To Be Hopeful Means To Be Uncertain About The Future, To Be Tender Toward Possibilities, To Be Dedicated To Change All The Way Down To The Bottom Of Your Heart.

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Native American

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A Restlessness Has Seized Hold Of Many Of Us, A Sense That We Should Be Doing Something Else, No Matter What We Are Doing, Or Doing At Least Two Things At Once, Or Going To Check Some Other Medium. It's An Anxiety About Keeping Up, About Not Being Left Out Or Getting Behind.

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Never Turn Down An Adventure Without A Really Good Reason.

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Sometimes A Few Passionate People Change The World; Sometimes They Start A Mass Movement And Millions Do.

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Hope Is Not A Lottery Ticket You Can Sit On The Sofa And Clutch, Feeling Lucky. It Is An Axe You Break Down Doors With In An Emergency. Hope Should Shove You Out The Door, Because It Will Take Everything You Have To Steer The Future Away From Endless War, From The Annihilation Of The Earth's Treasures And The Grinding Down Of The Poor And Marginal. To Hope Is To Give Yourself To The Future - And That Commitment To The Future Is What Makes The Present Inhabitable.

How Do You Calculate Upon The Unforeseen? It Seems To Be An Art Of Recognizing The Role Of The Unforeseen, Of Keeping Your Balance Amid Surprises, Of Collaborating With Chance, Of Recognizing That There Are Some Essential Mysteries In The World And Thereby A Limit To Calculation, To Plan, To Control. To Calculate On The Unforeseen Is Perhaps Exactly The Paradoxical Operation That Life Most Requires Of Us.

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That's What I'm Trying To Get Over: The Idea That Anarchism Offers A Description Of Equitable Relations That Go Way Back Rather Than A Hypothesis Of What The Future Should Look Like.

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If Gold Has Been Prized Because It Is The Most Inert Element, Changeless And Incorruptible, Water Is Prized For The Opposite Reason -- Its Fluidity, Mobility, Changeability That Make It A Necessity And A Metaphor For Life Itself. To Value Gold Over Water Is To Value Economy Over Ecology, That Which Can Be Locked Up Over That Which Connects All Things.

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A Lone Walker Is Both Present And Detached, More Than An Audience But Less Than A Participant. Walking Assuages Or Legitimizes This Alienation.

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There Are Fossils Of Seashells High In The Himalayas; What Was And What Is Are Different Things.

A Lot Of People Think Of Political Activism As Some Grim Duty, And I Think We Do Have An Obligation To Be Citizens - To Be Informed And Engaged.

If Sorrow And Beauty Are All Tied Up Together, Then Perhaps Maturity Brings With It Not What Nabhan Calls Abstraction, But An Aesthetic Sense That Partially Redeems The Losses Time Brings And Finds Beauty In The Faraway.

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There Are Disasters That Are Entirely Manmade, But None That Are Entirely Natural.

A Contrarian At Heart, I Am Often Guided By What I Disagree With And Don't Want.

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In Her Novel Regeneration, Pat Barker Writes Of A Doctor Who 'knew Only Too Well How Often The Early Stages Of Change Or Cure May Mimic Deterioration. Cut A Chrysalis Open, And You Will Find A Rotting Caterpillar. What You Will Never Find Is That Mythical Creature, Half Caterpillar, Half Butterfly, A Fit Emblem Of The Human Soul, For Those Whose Cast Of Mind Leads Them To Seek Such Emblems. No, The Process Of Transformation Consists Almost Entirely Of Decay.

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Language Is Like A Road, It Cannot Be Perceived All At Once Because It Unfolds In Time, Whether Heard Or Read. This Narrative Or Temporal Element Has Made Writing And Walking Resemble Each Other.

A Book Is A Heart That Only Beats In The Chest Of Another.

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To Write Is To Carve A New Path Through The Terrain Of The Imagination, Or To Point Out New Features On A Familiar Route. To Read Is To Travel Through That Terrain With The Author As A Guide-- A Guide One Might Not Always Agree With Or Trust, But Who Can At Least Be Counted On To Take One Somewhere.

Walking, Ideally, Is A State In Which The Mind, The Body, And The World Are Aligned.

Every Woman Knows What I'm Talking About. It’s The Presumption That Makes It Hard, At Times, For Any Woman In Any Field; That Keeps Women From Speaking Up And From Being Heard When They Dare; That Crushes Young Women Into Silence By Indicating, The Way Harassment On The Street Does, That This Is Not Their World. It Trains Us In Self-doubt And Self-limitation Just As It Exercises Men’s Unsupported Overconfidence.

The Positive Emotions That Arise In...unpromising Circumstances Demonstrate That Social Ties And Meaningful Work Are Deeply Desired, Readily Improvised, And Intensely Rewarding. The Very Structure Of Our Economy And Society Prevent These Goals From Being Achieved.

When You Say 'mother' Or 'father' You Describe Three Different Phenomena. There Is The Giant Who Made You And Loomed Over Your Early Years; There Is Whatever More Human-scale Version Might Have Been Possible To Perceive Later And Maybe Even Befriend; And There Is The Internalized Version Of The Parent With Whom You Struggle- To Appease, To Escape, To Be Yourself, To Understand And Be Understood By- And They Make Up A Chaotic And Contradictory Trinity.

What's Your Story? It's All In The Telling. Stories Are Compasses And Architecture; We Navigate By Them, And To Be Without A Story Is To Be Lost In The Vastness Of World That Spreads In All Directions Like Arctic Tundra Or Sea Ice. To Love Someone Is To Put Yourself In Their Place, We Say, Which Is To Put Yourself In Their Story, Or Figure Out How To Tell Yourself Their Story. Which Means That A Place Is A Story, And Stories Are Geography, And Empathy Is First Of All An Act Of Imagination, A Storyteller's Art, And Then A Way Of Traveling From Here To There.

What Gets Called 'the Sixties' Left A Mixed Legacy And A Lot Of Divides. But It Opened Everything To Question, And What Seems The Most Fundamental And Most Pervasive In All The Ensuing Changes Is The Loss Of Faith In Authority: The Authority Of Government, Of Science, Of Patriarchy, Of Progress, Of Capitalism, Of Violence, Of Whiteness.

There Is So Much Information That Our Ability To Focus On Any Piece Of It Is Interrupted By Other Information, So That We Bathe In Information But Hardly Absorb Or Analyse It. Data Are Interrupted By Other Data Before We've Thought About The First Round, And Contemplating Three Streams Of Data At Once May Be A Way To Think About None Of Them.

Perhaps It’s That You Can’t Go Back In Time, But You Can Return To The Scenes Of A Love, Of A Crime, Of Happiness, And Of A Fatal Decision; The Places Are What Remain, Are What You Can Possess, Are What Is Immortal. They Become The Tangible Landscape Of Memory, The Places That Made You, And In Some Way You Too Become Them. They Are What You Can Possess And In The End What Possesses You.

Violence Always Seems To Me The Worst Form Of Tyranny. It Deprives People Of Their Rights, Including The Right To Live.

I Am Against Resources Being Controlled By Corporations, But That Doesn't Mean I Want Them Controlled By The State.

The Poor Have Often Been Subversive Just Because They Don't Always Believe Their Own Depiction As Brutes And Loafers And Leeches, And New Economy Is Making Lots More Poor Or Recognize Their Fellowship With The Insecurity Of The Poor, The Portion Of The Population For Whom The System Does Not Work.

To Lose Yourself: A Voluptuous Surrender, Lost In Your Arms, Lost To The World, Utterly Immersed In What Is Present So That Its Surroundings Fade Away. In Benjamin’s Terms, To Be Lost Is To Be Fully Present, And To Be Fully Present Is To Be Capable Of Being In Uncertainty And Mystery.

We Are Often In Two Places At Once. In Fact We Are Usually In At Least Two Places And Occasionally The Contrast Is Evident....here, Most Often, Is Nothing More Than The Best Perspective To Contemplate There.

Globally, As The Nation-state Becomes Increasingly Less Meaningful - A Provider Of Positive Goods And More And More Just An Army And Some Domestic Enforcement - People Are Withdrawing To Shape And Support More Localised Forms Of Organisation And Power. To The Extent That It's Part Of That Civilised And Localising World, The Same Is True Of The U.s.

The Promenade Is A Special Subset Of Walking.

For Millions Of Years, This World Has Been A Great Gift To Nearly Everything Living On It, A Planet Whose Atmosphere, Temperature, Air, Water, Seasons, And Weather Were Precisely Calibrated To Allow Us - The Big Us, Including Forests And Oceans, Species Large And Small - To Flourish.

The New Architecture And Urban Design Of Segregation Could Be Called Calvinist: They Reflect A Desire To Live In A World Of Predestination Rather Than Chance, To Strip The World Of Its Wide-open Possibilities And Replace Them With Freedom Of Choice In The Marketplace.

I Feel Like We're In A Truly Revolutionary Period, Not Just In Terms Of Practical Activities To Overthrow Regimes In The Middle East Or Occupy But Also In Terms Of Radical Redefinitions. I Feel Like Workers Are A Big Part Of It, But There's So Much More Going On.

Pain Serves A Purpose. Without It You Are In Danger. What You Cannot Feel You Cannot Take Care Of.

Solitude In The City Is About The Lack Of Other People Or Rather Their Distance Beyond A Door Or Wall, But In Remote Places It Isn’t An Absence But The Presence Of Something Else, A Kind Of Humming Silence In Which Solitude Seems As Natural To Your Species As To Any Other, Words Strange Rocks You May Or May Not Turn Over.

Stories Are Compasses And Architecture, We Navigate By Them, We Build Our Sanctuaries And Our Prisons Out Of Them, And To Be Without A Story Is To Be Lost In The Vastness Of A World That Spreads In All Directions Like Arctic Tundra Or Sea Ice.

We Fly; We Dream In Darkness; We Devour Heaven In Bites Too Small To Be Measured.

Revolution Is A Phase, A Mood, Like Spring, And Just As Spring Has Its Buds And Showers, So Revolution Has Its Ebullience, Its Bravery, Its Hope, And Its Solidarity. Some Of These Things Pass.

Before Writers Are Writers They Are Readers, Living In Books, Through Books, In The Lives Of Others That Are Also The Heads Of Others, In That Act That Is So Intimate And Yet So Alone.

In The Aftermath Of 9/11, People Had Not A Good Time, But A Deep, Profound, Rousing Time, Woke Up From Their Ennui And Isolation And Trivialization To Feel Engaged, Connected, Purposeful, Ready To Give, To Engage, To Care, To Learn.

Everywhere People Are At Work To Build A Better World In Which We - And Some Of The Beauty Of This World - Will Be Guaranteed To Survive. Everywhere They Are At War With The Forces Threatening Us And The Planet.

The Object We Call A Book Is Not The Real Book, But Its Potential, Like A Musical Score Or Seed. It Exists Fully Only In The Act Of Being Read; And Its Real Home Is Inside The Head Of The Reader, Where The Symphony Resounds, The Seed Germinates. A Book Is A Heart That Only Beats In The Chest Of Another.

When I Think About, Say, 1995, Or Whever The Last Moment Was Before Most Of Us Were On The Internet And Had Mobile Phones, It Seems Like A Hundred Years Ago. ... Time Passed In Fairly Large Units, Or At Least Not In Milliseconds And Constant Updates. A Few Hours Wasn't Such A Long Time To Go Between Moments Of Contact With Your Work, Your People Or Your Trivia.

There's Enough Food In This World. There's Enough Housing In This World. There's Enough Shelter In This World. There's Enough Clothing In This World. There's Enough Teachers, There's Enough Universities For Everybody's Needs To Be Met, And The Reasons They Aren't Is Not Because Of Lack Of Resources. It's Because Of Distribution, And That's The Politics Of Hate, Which Is Why This Is A Movement Against That. It's A Politics Of Love.

There Was An Assumption That Aerial Bombing Of Civilians In World War Ii Would Cause Fragile, Working-class People To Basically Have Nervous Breakdowns And It Would Paralyze The State. That Was The Logic Of Aerial Bombing. In Fact, It Doesn't Happen At All, But The Logic Behind Aerial Bombing Has Never Stopped, Even Though It Never Demoralizes, Terrorizes, Or Paralyzes A Population.

The Battle With Men Who Explain Things Has Trampled Down Many Women - Of My Generation, Of The Up-and-coming Generation We Need So Badly, Here And In Pakistan And Bolivia And Java, Not To Speak Of The Countless Women Who Came Before Me And Were Not Allowed Into The Laboratory, Or The Library, Or The Conversation, Or The Revolution, Or Even The Category Called Human.

Las Vegas Suggests That The Thirst For Places, For Cities And Gardens And Wilderness, Is Unslaked, That People Will Still Seek Out The Experience Of Wandering About In The Open Air To Examine The Architecture, The Spectacles, And The Stuff For Sale, Will Still Hanker After Surprises And Strangers. That The City As A Whole Is One Of The Most Pedestrian-unfriendly Places In The World Suggests Something Of The Problems To Be Faced, But That Its Attraction Is A Pedestrian Oasis Suggests The Possibility Of Recovering The Spaces In Which Walking Is Viable.

I Sometimes Wonder What Those Of Us Who Are Writers Would Become In A Nonliterary Culture - Storytellers? Hermits?

Modern Life Is Moving Faster Than The Speed Of Thought, Or Thoughtfulness.

...[cabeza De Vaca] Ceased To Be Lost Not By Returning But By Turning Into Something Else.

It Had Come To Me Not In A Sudden Epiphany But With A Gradual Sureness, A Sense Of Meaning Like A Sense Of Place. When You Give Yourself To Places, They Give You Yourself Back; The More One Comes To Know Them, The More One Seeds Them With The Invisible Crop Of Memories And Associations That Will Be Waiting For You When You Come Back, While New Places Offer Up New Thoughts, New Possibilities. Exploring The World Is One Of The Best Ways Of Exploring The Mind, And Walking Travels Both Terrains.

Exploring The World

Some Things We Have Only As Long As They Remain Lost, Some Things Are Not Lost Only So Long As They Are Distant.

A Labyrinth Is A Symbolic Journey . . . But It Is A Map We Can Really Walk On, Blurring The Difference Between Map And World.

Leave The Door Open For The Unknown, The Door Into The Dark. That’s Where The Most Important Things Come From, Where You Yourself Came From, And Where You Will Go.

In The Bare Room Under The Old Library On The Hill In The Town At The Tip Of The Small Peninsula On The Cold Island So Far From Everything Else, I Lived Among Strangers And Birds.

There Are Infinite Shades Of Grey. Writing Often Appears So Black And White.

Black And White

It Turns Out That We're Actually Capable Of Something Other Than Neoliberalism And Actually We're Really Capable Of Enjoying Ourselves More Than We Do Under Neoliberalism. It Feels That If Neoliberalism Is First About Privatizing Desire And Imagination Before The Economy, Then We're In This Process Of Publicizing It Again.

Perhaps Walking Is Best Imagined As An 'indicator Species,' To Use An Ecologist's Term. An Indicator Species Signifies The Health Of An Ecosystem, And Its Endangerment Or Diminishment Can Be An Early Warning Sign Of Systemic Trouble. Walking Is An Indicator Species For Various Kinds Of Freedom And Pleasures: Free Time, Free And Alluring Space, And Unhindered Bodies.

We Know Less When We Erroneously Think We Know Than When We Recognize That We Don't.

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