Surviving Racism Through Storytelling

BtS i1

There was a moment at the river with my mother long ago, when I asked her why we pray. She told me that prayer was not begging, or asking for things, but an expression of gratitude for the way things are. She looked at me, and behind her the river was not rushing. There were so many spirals in the current of the river, and many undertows.

She saw what I was staring at. “That is your power too,” she said. “The undertow can drown people.” I knew she was pointing to the chaos of what we cannot see, and that the undercurrent—the chaos and conflict beneath every surface—is necessary.

via Surviving Racism Through Storytelling – Pacific Standard

Black Sun: The singularity at the heart of the Anthropocene 

Source: Black Sun: The singularity at the heart of the Anthropocene – Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene

Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist

Books and things (the good ones) are like half-drawn maps of independent explorations into undiscovered lands. But to map the unknown means that first you have to get lost.

I seem to have been born that way: lost, with a question mark over my head.

via Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist.

Falling

I have some personal experience here. Like a lot of other people, I started life comfortably middle-class, maybe upper-middle class; now, like a lot of other people walking the streets of America today, I am poor. To put it directly, I have no money. Does this embarrass me? Of course, it embarrasses me—and a lot of other things as well. It’s humiliating to be poor, to be dependent on the kindness of family and friends and government subsidies. But it sure is an education.

via IASC: The Hedgehog Review – Volume 16, No. 3 Fall 2014 – Falling –.