To Be Taught, If Fortunate

by Becky Chambers

How can anyone be expected to care about the questions of worlds above when the questions of the world you’re stuck on – those most vital criteria of home and health and safety – remain unanswered?

A global mindset. An enlightened humanity. Instead, they found that dream inextricably, cripplingly anchored to the very founts of nationalistic myopia and materialistic greed that said dream was antithetical to.

We celebrate the tree that stretches to the sky, but it is the ground we should ultimately thank.

It is not for everyone, even though the end results are.

The ache to return to a time long gone was almost worse than fear.

It is a paradox – the impossibility of reclaiming that which lies behind, housed within a form comprised entirely of the repurposed pieces of that same past. We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.

I saw exactly what my soul had longed for. A quiet place. A blank slate. A reality in which everything held still for however long I needed it to.

a home can only exist in a moment. Something both found and made. Always temporary, in the grand scheme of things, but vital all the same.

Sometimes we do harm, despite our best efforts. We are human. We are fragile.

Would you be more comfortable with the limited predictability of machines? Or is the flexibility of human intelligence worth the risk of our minds and bodies breaking?

but we live within a home that was lovingly built by other hands. Everything we do, we do on the shoulders of others.