Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future,
But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These...
A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was comfortable wi...
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, I remember coming to this realization when I was meeting with same-sex couples before performing their ceremonies when it wa...
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned...
What’s blocking action on climate change is what’s blocking action on all the other issues that matter: it would cut into profits. Never mind the deep future, not when what’s at stake is quarterly ear...
What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.
What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.
We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.
We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harassment, intimidation, threat, battery, rape, murder. But I realize now that what I was saying is: it’s...
Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About
To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to...
To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your...
The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.
The light belies the bony solidity of the land, playing over it like emotion on a face, and in this the desert is intensely alive, as the apparent mood of mountains changes hourly, as places that are...
The anthropoligical theorist Paul Shepard writes, 'Humans intuitivesly see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic...
Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell...
Sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.
One disturbing aspect of abuse and harassment is the idea that it’s not the crime that’s the betrayal but the testimony about the crime. You’re not supposed to tell. Abusers often assume this privileg...