Frances > Frances's Quotes

“It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible....It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant--birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so--and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths--change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not--safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope--the entire possibility of freedom disappears.”
― James Baldwin

“Resilient strength is the opposite of helplessness. The tree is made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. These roots take nourishment from the ground and grow strong. Grounding also allows the tree to be resilient so that it can yield to the winds of change and not be uprooted. Springiness is the facility to ground and ‘unground’ in a rhythmical way. This buoyancy is a dynamic form of grounding. Aggressiveness is the biological ability to be vigorous and energetic, especially when using instinct and force. In the immobility (traumatized) state, these assertive energies are inaccessible. The restoration of healthy aggression is an essential part in the recovery from trauma. Empowerment is the acceptance of personal authority. It derives from the capacity to choose the direction and execution of one’s own energies. Mastery is the possession of skillful techniques in dealing successfully with threat. Orientation is the process of ascertaining one’s position relative to both circumstance and environment. In these ways the residue of trauma is renegotiated.”
― Peter A. Levine Ph.D., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“It was as if the region were just putting the finishing touches on its seamless, corporatized hegemony, complete with just enough of a gesture of sentimental respect for the nature around it; complete with fresh, new ways of keeping the body toned and healthy; a rhetoric of inclusiveness that kept all the classes in their place; and a final transformation of the land they'd stolen from its aborigines. But at the same time, ragged marginals, fueled by deep resentment--hand in hand with savage Nature--could be plotting, perhaps even unconsciously, its violent downfall. How much I wanted to be a part of their imagined doomsday scenario!”
― Bruce Benderson, Pacific Agony

“Nonetheless, as Seattle's leaders and residents would discover, this new urban environment was a palimpsest of exploitation, conflict, compromise, adaptation, and defeat. Physical forces and creatures beyond human control always pushed back. So, too, did the people who suffered from the changes. The new urban ecology was never the result of purely natural forces but the combination of human power magnified or thwarted by an unpredictable physical environment. The non-human environment that enfolded the city was not predetermined, nor was the poverty that the decades of shaping and reshaping Seattle had aggravated. In the end, the ecology of urban poverty was altogether a human creation.”
― Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle

“How is it that people look at the same city and see such very different places? The answer lies in history, or, more accurately, in how people have chosen to remember the past. The habit of regarding culture and nature as binary categories has shaped how we view cities and their dynamic environments. The result is a kind of intellectual myopia in which 'history is experienced as nostalgia and nature as regret--as a horizon fast disappearing behind us.”
― Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle

“Because salmon have both united and divided a people, they present us with an opportunity to think ethically about this place, Seattle. The challenge, though, is to move beyond the habit of trying to dominate nature to the more feasible goal of governing ourselves, and to tame our reflexive impulse to put ideas into neat categories. An evolving ethic of place, like any ethic, is neither a divine commandment nor doctrinaire mandate. It is a product of history and thus it is ever changing. It must be, in other worse, a deliberate and enduring dialogue between humans and their environments.”
― Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle

“We are all the product of our worldviews--even scientists who claim pure objectivity. Their predictions for sweetgrass were consistent with their Western worldview, which sets human beings outside of ‘nature’ and judges their interactions with other species as largely negative. They had been schooled that the best way to protect a dwindling species was to leave it alone and keep people away. But the grassy meadows tell us that for sweetgrass, human beings are a part of the system, a vital part.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants