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I thought somehow that when I left, she would still be here. Everyone would still be here, frozen in time just as I left them. But no, that’s fantasy. God is Change.
Sensible. Conservative and sensible and mature and wrong. Very much in character with Joanne.
What is it in young boys that makes them want to wander off alone and get killed?
Moral: The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
“And what? You think it’s going to get sane? It’s never been sane. You just have to go ahead and live, no matter what.”
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.
She’s just being worn down by one blow after another. We’ll adapt. We’ll have to. God is Change.
I am one of the street poor, now. Not as poor as some, but homeless, alone, full of books and ignorant of reality.
… I don’t feel rested, but I’m a little less exhausted.
How is it that we had never established an outside meeting place—somewhere where the family could reunite after disaster. I remember suggesting to Dad that we do that, but he had never done anything about it, and I hadn’t pushed the idea as I should have. (Poor Godshaping. Lack of forethought.)
There’s nothing familiar left to me but the writing. God is Change. I hate God. I have to write.
We’ve never been rich, but to the desperate, we looked rich. We were surviving and we had our wall. Did our community die so that addicts could make a help the poor political statement?
Kindness eases Change
Walking hurts. I’ve never done enough walking to learn that before, but I know it now. It isn’t only the blisters and sore feet, although we’ve got those. After a while, everything hurts.
Nothing eases the pain except rest.
It’s going to be strange for me, pretending to be a man.
It’s crazy to live this way, suspecting helpless old people. Insane. But we need our paranoia to keep us alive.
He had a brain and he had courage. He just didn’t want to change.
“I didn’t think I’d like you,” she said. “Preacher’s kid, all over the place, teaching, telling everybody what to do, sticking your damn nose in everything. But you ain’t bad.”
We weren’t strong enough to survive slowness or stupid mistakes.
So many people hoping for so much up where it still rains every year, and an uneducated person might still get a job that pays in money instead of beans, water, potatoes, and maybe a floor to sleep on.
Again I was amazed to find so much comfort in sleeping on the ground in my clothes. There’s no narcotic like exhaustion.
None of us can swim. We’ve never before seen water enough to swim in.
We were always, it seemed, looking for walls to shield us. Was it better to have them and perhaps get trapped against them or to camp in the open and be vulnerable on every side? We didn’t know. It just felt better to have at least one wall.
We want to find work that pays money.”
I decided not to hear him.
But then, everyone gets lonely.
Once or twice each week A Gathering of Earthseed is a good and necessary thing. It vents emotion, then quiets the mind. It focuses attention, strengthens purpose, and unifies people.
The rumors were that they did it to fight for the poor, to expose or destroy the goods hoarded by the rich.
Every living thing, every bit of matter, all the energy in the universe changes in some way. I don’t claim that everything changes in every way, but everything changes in some way.”
“Change does scare most people.” “I know. God is frightening. Best to learn to cope.”
God isn’t good or evil, doesn’t favor you or hate you, and yet God is better partnered than fought.”
It’s odd, but I don’t think anyone on the road would have thought of attacking that community en masse like that if the earthquake—or something—had not started a fire. One small fire was the weakness that gave scavengers permission to devastate the community—which they were no doubt doing now.
When had I begun thinking of him as a man rather than a boy? What the hell. We’re all men and women now, not kids anymore. Shit.
I’ve never worked as hard at not seeing what was going on around me as I did today.
God is neither good nor evil, neither loving nor hating. God is Power. God is Change. We must find the rest of what we need within ourselves, in one another, in our Destiny.
The penalty for being too poor to be worth robbing is a beating, a rape, and/or death.
In particular, we have to be able to get water.
The only real defense against automatic rifles is concealment and silence.
“And taking care of other people can be a good cure for nightmares like yours and maybe hers.”
The Self must create Its own reasons for being. To shape God, Shape Self.
The nice thing about sitting and working alongside someone you don’t know very well, someone you’d like to know much better, is that you can talk with him or be quiet with him. You can get comfortable with him and with the awareness that you’ll soon be making love to him.
I kept quiet and began to understand Earthseed.” “Began to invent Earthseed,” he said. “Began to discover it and understand it,” I said. “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.
He nodded. “All right. But tell me, what do people have to do to be good members of an Earthseed Community?” A nice, door-opening question. “The essentials,” I answered, “are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.”
“Human beings are good at creating hells for themselves even out of richness.”
The question drove me deep into myself.
“What you are now,” he said after a long silence, “is a very unusual young woman.”
but as he spoke, I decided he had told me at least one lie. He might be as displaced and in distress as he appeared to be, but he wasn’t just wandering north. He wasn’t looking for just anywhere he could be paid for his services and not robbed or murdered. He wasn’t the kind of man who wandered. He knew where he was going.
Best of all, he took a lot of uncomplicated pleasure in my body, and I got to share it with him. It isn’t often that I can enjoy the good side of my hyperempathy. I let the sensation take over, intense and wild. I might be more in danger of having a heart attack than he is. How had I done without this for so long?
