Morgan Lampley > Recent Status Updates

This past Thursday, my grandmother died. She loved hummingbirds and always had them buzzing around her porch.

This evening, an older widow at our church who has become our friend let me go through books of her late husband. He had many Mary Oliver books.

The second poem in the one I randomly chose to read tonight was entitled “Hummingbirds”

Life is awful and beautiful.

“The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom.”

“It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victims, one sees oneself.” (p 71)

“We [America] have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, the myth of America to which we cling so desperately” p. 7

I’ve only read the introduction so far and already I’ve underlined several things. I have yet to regret ever picking up anything by Baldwin

“It’s not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it’s a system. How do you fight a system?”

“You try”