'anything can happen'

Anything can happen, the tallest towers 

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded.

Seamus Heaney, from 'Anything Can Happen.'
(via evencleveland)

Tales

“ If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in! ”

-- Shel Silverstein

seeds

I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held. And I know that we don’t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.  

Rebecca Solnit, “The Arc of Justice and the Long Run”

heart break

I am an immigrant, indefinitely so, with no future plans to one day return 'home' and yesterdays decision has left me feeling cut a drift, ashamed and heartbroken.

I love England, I do. I carry it with me, my heart is forever claimed by that mystical, damp, witty, cramped, eccentric, eruptive Isle and I don't find it hard to muster energy and emotion for my British heritage. But I don't give a flying fuck for the kind of isolationist, selfish, racist borders we will now frantically try and erect. Its painful to watch.

I know our history and our mythologies. I've read the books and listened to past witnesses. History can repeat itself and when we break with relations to Europe, we also break with our own mythology, our own history and understandings of the past. This is incredibly dangerous territory.
I can't speak to the immediate ephemeral stuff, thats what tv 'experts' and the internet is for, but i do know two things:

1. There’s no point blaming those who wished to leave; they are us too and they had their own intelligence and convictions. I understand the corruptive elements at play in both positions and can't help but wonder about the conversations long denied between us that have caused todays raw, calamitous bellow to fill the air. If you feel profoundly unwitnessed then the move to voice will almost always become desperate.

2. Now we are where we are know this; it is the fault of the likes of Farage, Boris and Cameron. Their lies are seductive. But In the name of all those you love, all those that have come before us and anyone who gives to the society and communities we all share please don’t be taken for a fool. Try and get past the statistics of this situation into the soul of what is happening. Your books matter. Your activism matters. The things that claim purchase on your heart matter. They absolutely do. They are not a whimsy. If we have been wandering in an enchantment then here is an awakening. You are absolutely needed and we need to come together to face those that would have us make decisions out of fear. Now is the time to start bearing witness to each other and stand up and fight for a fairer society.

Be the love that you want to see in this world.

friday cartoon

The Power of Empathy from Gobblynne on Vimeo.

there's room for everyone

to be hopeful

Rewilding

George Monbiot imagines a wilder world in which humans work to restore the complex, lost natural food chains that once surrounded us. If you like this the I highly recommend getting hold of a copy of his book Feral.
There are certainly links to be made with 'rewilding' and the way we move and experience our own bodies too...time to start learning from our mistakes.

There is always hope.

(image found here)

There is power in hope.

Nawal El Saadawi — who has been imprisoned, censored, and exiled — still talking about hope.

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

--Howard Zinn

HOPE

Image found here