Rebekah

“What has stayed constant between us is this cycle of losing and finding, this unending transference of vitality, without which we might feel directionless. Love of this sort, however, isn't about making a roadmap to an other who then becomes your compass. It is a proposition to nest in the unrepayable and every-mounting debt of care that stands in opposition to the careless and transactional practices of state power that mire the lives of NDNs and other minoritized populations. Having inherited your philosophy of love, which is also a theory of freedom, nôhkom, I can write myself into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race that stalks me as it does you and our kin.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“To my mind, joy is a constitutive part of the emotional rhetoric and comportment of those against whom the present swells at an annihilating pace. With joy, we breach the haze of suffering that denies us creativity and literature. Joy is art is an ethics of resistance.”
― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

“We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.”
― Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

“Writing was a forbidden game, Bei Dao (the Chinese dissident poet) said, that could cost one’s life. The poetry they published amounted to a new language, since “for thirty years the Chinese language there had no personal voice at all.” The official line on Bei Dao’s poetry was that it was politically subversive because it expressed intimate thoughts, asserting the rights of the individual by his or her own private experience. And the more obscure Bei Dao’s poems became, the more subversive the authorities considered him. He said, 'on the one hand, poetry is useless. It can’t change the world materially. On the other hand it is a basic part of human existence. It came into the world when humans did. It’s what make human beings human.”
― Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real