Sara > Recent Status Updates

“This is the challenge that most of us meet on our spiritual path. How do we become one with a force greater than ourselves without losing ourselves?

"'The pain is of our own making, Kira.' He pressed a finger against her forehead. 'It only hurts as much as we let it.'
Maybe so, but Kira still felt terrible. Pain was pain, and it insisted on making itself known."

“Where people are on the community level are taking back their lives. Where people are prioritizes and flaws are part of the human narrative.”

"The world tells me that achievement has to look one way, but I struggle with that."

"We reflect on what Pacquiao had said about how there's a long history of oppression, a history that often feels like it has seeped into the land, and how part of the work of running is to be able to uncover that and break that up. So that 'violence doesn't get incorporated any further into our cultures, getting passed down like a hereditary gene'"

"Chapito tells me that the road to happiness is also the road to sadness."

"And unlike those helpless migrants who tumbled from trees and dropped everything they had to run to safety, I ran away, knowing that I would do so on my own terms and with love - not fear. I would travel wherever I wanted, on my own terms. Confronting the unfamiliar and integrating the beauty of life with my very being."

"Two beautiful men mending the hurt within them, unafraid to let their love wash over this street."

"Laughter is what keeps us strong. I sing about the nature of growing up in a harsh world. The world can be harsh. That's why we must sing the pain away."

"as my desire to believe in something spiritual grows stronger every day for me, especially as I begin to understand the power of the Native American imagination - that a person can be who he imagines himself to be, and that if he fails to imagine, he fails also to exist."

"'Nowadays the elite don't shoot us directly, but hand us the guns and we kill ourselves.'"

“Consciousness is both our final destination and the means of travel.”

......You tolerate what you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them."

"Our times call for being pro-African-American, pro-woman, pro-Latino, pro-Asian, pro-indigenous, pro-humanity in all its manifestations. In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray slush that collects at the crosswalk in winter....

“We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil.’”

“‘My message would be to take off the fake crown. It will cost you more to keep it than to let it go. It is not real. It is jus another marker of your programming. You will be happier and freer without it. You will see all of humanity. You will find your true self.’”

"But unlike any other labor, running relives me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people. I still don't know that it is okay to be unexceptional, ordinary, unremarkable. That there is greatness and pride to being common, so to speak. But I am learning to believe it is okay to be flawed, imperfect. Running is helping me to see that."

"I't is women who have sustained our communities, and it will be women who will bring back life into our lands,' one speaker concludes."

"Still every day I try gathering words as our people do apples, ones to help keep me moving forward. Words that help me imagine what I struggle to imagine in this town.
That I am worth something."

"We still seem trapped in the cycles of Carver's narratives, as if his words condemned us to a world of loneliness, tarnished relationships and violence. Seen differently, his words urge youth like us to rewrite ourselves out of these sinkholes.
To sprint out of them."

"I run hard until my thighs burn, toward the tributary of the Yakima River, until I can finally clear my throat of anger, slapping my face and chest to remind myself of this heavy flesh - the burden of being human."

"I conjure the good hours, when I'm not at work, when I am among other Latinos who sit on their lawns BBQing carne asadas, sipping beer, listening to music, happy that another day has been endured."

"But I hate that success means that I must see myself as something 'better,' as non-Mexican."

"But my parents have lost the spark between them. Love for them has become just another part-time job on top of two or three other jobs. The thing about love is that it doesn't put food on the table."

"People show a greater sense of joint responsibility to one another when they see their fellow citizens as like themselves, as in the nations of western Europe or in Australia, a diverse country with a looser hierarchy. Societies can be more magnanimous when people perceive themselves as having an equal stake in their lives of their fellow citizens."

"'if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?'
We let that settle in the air, neither of us willing to hazard a guess to that one."

...For their part, Democrats constitute a diffuse majority of the electorate, but seem at times to be lukewarm toward a base that he party has often lectured to or taken for granted, chided, if ever there is lower-than-expected turnout, despite voter suppression, sadly buying into caste assumptions rather than bolstering their most loyal voters as do the Republicans with theirs."

"For the Republicans, the singularity of focus, the sense of rallying around an existential threat, combined with the inherent cast advantages of the collective wealth and influence of its voters overall, gives the GOP a seeming advantage in firing up its supporters against Democratic opposition.....

....What they had not considered was that the people voting this way were in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest."

"Caste gives insights, too, into the Democrats' wistful yearning for white working-class voters that they believe should respond in higher numbers to their kitchen table appeals. Why, some people on the left kept asking, why, oh, why, were these people voting against their own interests? The questioners on the left were unseeing and yet so certain....