Inspiration: A running list
One of my favorite roles is that of curator. Here are words and people that keep me inspired on a daily basis (a non-exhaustive list I will continue to update). I highly recommend going to the sources and reading them more fully!
On Love
“My work is loving the world.”
-Mary Oliver, from the poem Messenger
“Never tire of demanding love for the world.”
-CA Conrad, from the poem Saturn.1
“…in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.”
-Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Preface (p. 22)
Rilke
“I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?“
Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, I 2
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Adrienne Maree Brown
Everything adrienne maree brown. She’s one of the most inspiring teacher/writer/facilitators/activists alive and creating right now. I highly recommend her podcast that she hosts with her sister Autumn Brown, How to Survive the End of the World, as well as her books, Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism (released March 2019, which I am reading right now). Here are a few favorite ES passages:
“Our generation must walk the spiritual path that is available to us only in this time, with its own unique combination of wisdom and creation” (p. 12).
“At this point, we have all the information we need to create change; it isn’t a matter of facts. It’s a matter of longing, having the will to imagine and implement something else. We are living in the ancestral imaginations of others, with their longing for safety and abundance, a longing that didn’t include us, or included us as enemy, fright, other” (p. 21).
“We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist. And visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together” (p. 196).
And I could go on and on – just do yourself a favor and read the whole book 😉