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Fox In The Stars, Lisa Falzon

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

-- Arundhati Roy, from War Talk

“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” –John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

“A few beings are neither in society nor in a state of dreaming. They belong to an isolated fate, to an unknown hope. Their open acts seem anterior to time’s first inculpation and to the skies’ unconcern. It occurs to no one to employ them. The future melts before their gaze. They are the noblest and the most disquieting.” ― René Char [Poetic Outlaws]

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.Václav Havel, Czech dissident, writer and statesman

"Our survival won’t depend on political or economic systems. It’s going to depend on the courage of the individual to speak the truth, and to speak it lovingly and not destructively. It’s saying what you really know and feel is the truth, in all directions. Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and mis-conditioning of humanity." ~ Buckminster Fuller

"Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it." Simone Weil

I have to tell you what I’ve learned, that I know now what happens to the dreamers. They don’t feel it when they change. One day they wake, they dress, they are old. Louise Glück

Those who live nobly, even if in their day they live obscurely, need not fear that they will have lived in vain. Something radiates from their lives, some light that shows the way to their friends, their neighbours—perhaps to long future ages. I find many men nowadays oppressed with a sense of impotence, with the feeling that in the vastness of modern societies there is nothing of importance that the individual can do. This is a mistake. The individual, if he is filled with love of mankind, with breadth of vision, with courage and with endurance, can do a great deal." ~Bertrand Russell

Anger is a teacher, so let her teach you. Let her point out all of the places where you abandoned your sincerity along the side of the road simply to appease someone else -- Where you stopped following that great arch of your mythic life. Let her show you where you have held yourself silent when the world needed you to speak: where your fierce wisdom was cut off at the knees. Our shadows have grown so grotesque, we've mistaken them for culture, but now is the time to remember what has been deliberately suppressed; to prepare a grand feast for all the ghosts who've been starved by neglect. Do not apologize when feathers fall like nighthawks from your fiery eyes. ~ April Tierney from Memory Keeper

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her live, and weaves them gratefully into a single cloth - it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall and clears it for a different celebration where the one guest is you. In the softness of evening it's you she receives. You are the partner of her loneliness. the unspeaking center of her monologues. With each disclosure you encompass more and she stretches beyond what limits her, to hold you. ~ Rilke from Rilke's Book of Hours Love Poems to God

Initiation Song from the Finders' Lodge Please bring strange things. Please come bringing new things. Let very old things come into your hands. Let what you do not know come into your eyes. Let desert sand harden your feet. Let the arch of your feet be the mountains. Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps and the ways you go be the lines on your palms. Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing and your outbreath be the shining of ice. May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words. May you smell food cooking you have not eaten. May the spring of a foreign river be your navel. May your soul be at home where there are no houses. Walk carefully, well loved one, walk mindfully, well loved one, walk fearlessly, well loved one. Return with us, return to us, be always coming home. - Ursula K. Le Guin Always Coming Home

To the taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end. - Alan Watts - “The Way of Zen”

Anyone who has studied Napoleon’s campaigns will know how he was able to see what would happen in a battle and how he would wait for that moment and take advantage of it when it did happen. Then he lost this capacity and everything went wrong for him. His own picture of himself took the place of this simple perceptiveness. This has happened with more than one successful person. It very seldom happens that people who acquire this power accidentally are able to keep the right attitude towards it. They don’t recognize that it is not their own doing and has nothing to do with their being or quality. For the man who is looked upon as someone who can achieve what he sets out to do, it is extraordinarily hard to maintain the awareness that he simply has the capacity to read the course of events and adapt himself to them, not to influence them.” ~ J.G Bennett, 'The Way to be Free'

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest…. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.” ---Buckminster Fuller, 1970

"When a man goes away, having heard something which might have changed his mind, and does not pay attention, I do not call him back. I am on the side of nature.

The old Chinese Book of Wisdom says: "The Master says it once."

He does not run after people, it is no good. Those who are meant to hear will understand, and those who are not meant to understand will not hear."

-- Carl Jung

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