Earthseed: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

by Octavia E. Butler

A little more hypocrisy to keep the peace.

She jumps on me for sharing pain with the living, but she tries to share it with the dead.

Every one knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season”), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it. We give lip service to acceptance, as though acceptance were enough. Then we go on to create super-people—super-parents, super-kings and queens, super-cops—to be our gods and to look after us—to stand between us and God. Yet God has been here all along, shaping us and being shaped by us in no particular way or in too many ways at once like an amoeba—or like a cancer. Chaos.

Even so, why can’t I do what others have done—ignore the obvious. Live a normal life. It’s hard enough just to do that in this world.

I feel ya

Near space programs dealing with communications and experimentation will be privatized—sold off.

State space programmes held on quite a while into the collapse; seems late to privatize.

I don’t know whether the reporters are condemning it or advertising it.”

“It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.”

“You’ve just noticed the abyss,” he continued. “The adults in this community have been balancing at the edge of it for more years than you’ve been alive.”

I’d never told him about my sharing, for instance. I’ll have to before I marry him. If I don’t, when he finds out, he’ll know I didn’t trust him enough to be honest, with him. And not much is known about sharing.

"Sharing" all of a sudden; has it not been "hyperempathy" until now?

People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

“No such thing as enough money.

Sharing is a weakness, a shameful secret. A person who knows what I am can hurt me, betray me, disable me with little effort. I can’t tell. Not yet.

There’s power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there’s no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix things for you or take revenge for you.

“Stumbling across the truth isn’t the same as making things up.” I wondered how many times and ways I would have to say this to new people.

“I wouldn’t give a dog nothing but a bullet or a rock,” Mora said. “I saw dogs eat a woman once.”