January 1 *** THE EARTHIf the earth were only a few feet in diameter, floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it. People would walk around it, marvelling at its big pools of water, its little pools and the water floating between the pools. People would marvel at the bumps on it, and the holes in it, and they would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas. The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of the ball, and at the creatures in the water. The people would declare it precious because it was the only one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt. The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to behold it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty and to wonder how it could be. People would love it, and defend it with their lives, because they would somehow know that their lives, their own roundness, could be nothing without it. If the earth were only a few feet in diameter.

January 2 *** The ideals of radical democracy (include) an equality in which no one is allowed to dominate others by such intangible qualities as verbal facility, flashy personality, or strength of ego.Bread and Roses January 3 *** A Wyandot Cradle SongHush thee and sleep, little one,The feathers on thy board sway to and fro;The shadows reach far downward in the water,The great old owl is waking, day will go. Sleep thee and dream, little one,The gentle branches swing you high and low;The father far away among the huntersHas loosed his bow, is thinking of us now. Rest thee and fear not, little one,Flitting fireflies come to light you on your wayTo the fairyland of dreams, while in the grassesThe merry cricket chirps his happy day. Mother watches always o'er her little one,The great owl cannot harm you, slumber onTill the pale light comes shooting from the eastward,And the twitter of the birds says night has gone.Hen-toh, Carlisle Indian School student newspaper January 4 ***

In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.from The Great Law of the Haudenosaunee

January 5 *** The struggle against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Czech Historian

January 6 ***Once upon a time there was a small village on the edge of a river. The people there were good and so was life in the village. One day a villager noticed a baby floating down the river. The villager quickly jumped in the river and swam out to save the baby from drowning. The next day the same villager was walking along the river bank and noticed two babies in the river. He called for help, and both babies were rescued from the swift water. And the following day four babies were seen caught in the turbulent current. And then eight, and still more. The villagers organised themselves efficiently. The rescue squads were now snatching many children each day. Groups were trained to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Others prepared formula and provided clothing for the chilled babies. Many were involved in making clothing and knitting blankets. Still others provided foster homes and placement. While not all the babies could be saved, the villagers felt they were doing well to save as many as they could each day. One day, however, someone raised the question, "But where are all these babies coming from? Who is throwing them into the river? Why? Let's organise a team to go upstream and see who's doing it." The seeming logic of the elders countered: "And if we go upstream who will operate the rescue operations? We need every concerned person here." "But don't you see," cried the one lone voice, " if we find out who is throwing them in, we can stop the problem and no babies will drown. By going upstream we can eliminate the problem." "It's too risky." And so the number of babies who drown increases daily. Those saved increases, but those who drown increase even more. January 7 *** No matter how long the night, the day is sure to come.Congo proverb

January 8 ***

Two eyes see better than one. Mauritanian proverb

January 9 *** "To Understand" is to "Stand Under"which is to "Look Up To"Which is a good wayto UnderstandSister Corita

January 10 *** Restless feet may walk into a snake pit. Ethiopian proverb January 11 *** By trying often, the monkey learns to jump from the tree. Cameroon proverb

January 12 *** The poor man and the rich man do not play together. Ashanti proverb

January 13 ***Knowledge is like a garden: if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.Guinean proverb

January 14 *** The person who is being carried does not realize how far the town is.Nigerian proverb

January 15 *** Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.Nigerian proverb

January 16 *** Ideals are like the stars. We never reach them, but we chart our course by them.

January 17 *** A borrowed fiddle does not finish a tune.Zimbabwean proverb

January 18 *** Those who are absent are always wrong.

Congo proverb

January 19 *** Dialogue is the encounter between people, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming - between those who deny other people the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression.Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

January 20 *** Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which people transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. People are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

January 21 *** Every relationship of domination, of exploitation, of oppression, is by definition violent, whether or not the violence is expressed by drastic means. In such a relationship, dominator and dominated alike are reduced to things - the former dehumanized by an excess of power, the latter by lack of it. And things cannot love. When the oppressed legitimately rise up against their oppressor, however, it is they who are usually labelled "violent," "barbaric," "inhuman" and cold. (Among the innumerable rights claimed by the dominating consciousness is the right to define violence, and to locate it. Oppressors never see themselves as violent.)Paulo Freire

January 22 ***I look into the air and find the spaces where our children's children might be; among the rain and the sun and the leaves those bodies are realizable; and I feel with a terrible hope how lovely life is - and how unbearable is the thought that by our blindness, by our lack of memory and courage, by our slackness we could end it.Susannah York

January 23 *** Be realistic, demand the impossible.

January 24 *** i found god in myselfand i loved her / i loved her fiercelyNtozake Shangefor colored girls whohave considered suicide /when the rainbow is enuf

January 25 *** The universe is made of stories,not of atomsMuriel Rukeyser

January 26 *** It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don't believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

January 27 *** The importance of the Goddess symbol for women cannot be overstressed. The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance

January 28 *** Winter Poemonce a snowflake fellon my brow and i lovedit so much i kissedit an it was happy and called its cousinsand brothers and a webof snow engulfed me theni reached to love them alland i squeezed them and they becamea spring rain and i stood perfectlystill and was a flower

Nikki Giovanni, Our House

January 29 *** It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are - perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.Chief Joseph, Nez Percé

January 30 *** Solidarity is based on the principle that we are willing to put ourselves at risk to protect each other.Starhawk

January 31 *** If you are here to help me, then you are wasting your time, but if you are here because your liberation is bound up in mine then let us begin. Lily Walker

February 1 *** This life is not a jokeYou must take it seriously,Seriously enough to find yourselfUp against a wall, maybe, with your wrists bound.

Nazim Hikmet, "Of Life" 1950

February 2 *** What if this present werethe world's last night

John Donne

February 3 *** In a dark time,The eye begins to see

Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time

February 4 *** The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. "Live," Nietzchse says, "as though the day were here." It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

February 5 *** Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.Paulo Freire

February 6 *** There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes "the practice of freedom," The means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.Richard Shaull (intro to Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

February 7 *** Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen. It is predominantly critical, loving, humble and communicative, and therefore a positive stance. The man who has made a radical option does not deny another man's right to choose, nor does he try to impose his own choice. He can discuss their respective positions. He is convinced he is right, but respects another man's prerogative to judge himself correct. He tries to convince and convert, not to crush his opponent. The radical does, however, have the duty, imposed by love itself, to react against the violence of those who try and silence him - of those who, in the

name of freedom, kill his freedom and their own. To be radical does not imply self-flagellation. Radicals cannot passively accept a situation in which the excessive power of a few leads to the dehumanization of all.Paulo Freire

February 8 *** Before The Balance, TomorrowWhen the enthusiasmof our timeis recountedfor thoseyet to be born,but who announce themselveswith a kinder face,we will come out winners,we who have suffered most. To be aheadof one's timeis to suffer much. But it is beautiful to love the worldwith the eyesof thosestillto be born. And splendidto know oneself already victoriouswhen everything aroundis still so cold, so dark.

Otto René Castillo

February 9 *** ... There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example - where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the morning that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound: only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

February 10 *** WaterThe world turns softly

Not to spill its lakes and rivers,The water is held in its armsAnd the sky is held in the water.What is water,That pours silverAnd can hold the sky?

Hilda Conkling

February 11 *** Bedtime StoryOnce upon a timeThere was grass instead ofastro-turf,more trees than telephone polesand the sky was bluewhen the sun came out.

Susan Johnson

February 12 *** We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as "wild". Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was for us the "Wild West" began.Chief Luther Standing Bear, of the Oglala Sioux

February 13 *** We had no word for the strange animal we got from the white man - the horse. So we called it sunka wakan, "holy dog". For bringing us the horse we could almost forgive you for bringing us whisky. Horses make a landscape look more beautiful.Lame Deer, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

February 14 *** There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More

than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one's work for peace. It destroys one's inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes works fruitful.Thomas Merton

February 15 *** In Germany they first came for the communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me - and by that time there was no one left to speak up.Pastor Martin Niemoller

February 16 *** If there is no struggle, there is no progress - Those who profess to favor freedom and yet renounce controversy are people who want crops without plowing the ground.Frederick Douglas, Abolitionist Leader 1817 - 1895

February 17 *** A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.Albert Einstein

February 18 *** The role of the educator is to present to the people in a challenging form, the issues they themselves have raised in a confused way.Mao Tse Tung

February 19 *** I hear and I forgetI see and I rememberI do and I understand

Chinese saying

February 20 ***

And he will teach them to smell history in the wind, to touch it in stones polished by the river, and to recognize its taste by chewing certain herbs, without hurry, as one chews on sadness.Eduardo Galeano

February 21 *** If the defense of human rights is subversive, then I am a Subversive.Archbishop Oscar Romero

February 22 *** The oppressor does not want the mirror to reflect anything to the oppressed but its quicksilver surface. What process of change can activate a people that doesn't know who it is, nor from whence it comes? If it doesn't know who it is, how can it know what it deserves to become?Eduardo Galeano

February 23 *** If a system is making people sick, should we attempt to cure the people and place them back in the system or should we change the system.Ernest Mann

February 24 *** BEING A MIDWIFEThe wise leader does not intervene unnecessarily. The leader's presence is felt, but often the group runs itself. Lesser leaders do a lot, say a lot, have followers, and form cults.

Even worse ones use fear to energize the group and force to overcome resistance.

Only the most dreadful leaders have bad reputations.Remember that you are facilitating another person's process. It is not your process. Do not intrude. Do not control. Do not force your own needs and insights into the foreground.

If you do not trust a person's process, that person will not trust you.Imagine that you area midwife; you are assisting at someone else's birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge.

When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: "We did it ourselves!"John Heider, Tao of Power

February 25 *** Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark wood, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred, and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lake tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of insects' wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around a pool at night? I am a red man and do not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond, and the smell of the wind itself, cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with the pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath - the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And the wind must also give our children the spirit of life. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man may go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet, is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the

land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befall the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground they spit upon themselves.

This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

So if we sell you our land, love it as we've loved it. Care for it as we've cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you take it. And with all your strength, with all your mind, with all your heart, preserve it for your children, and love it...as God loves us all.Ted Perry and Chief Seattle

February 26 *** ...I do not have a bad opinion of doubt. I think doubt has been a factor in the movement of history. I have grown to appreciate doubt more and more and, at the same time, to distrust those compañeros who only offer certainty. They seem too much like the wooden men which the Popul Vuh in Mayan mythology describes as one of the mistakes the gods made when they attempted to create man and didn't know how to construct him and finally they made him out of corn and he came out alright. But one of those attempts consisted of creating him out of wood.

The wooden man was just like a man except that no blood ran through his veins; he had no spirit or courage and didn't speak a word. I believe he had nothing to say because he had no courage and therefore was never discouraged. The proof that one has courage lies in the fact that one can be discouraged. And the proof that one can arrive at certainties that are truly capable of transforming reality lies in the ability to entertain fertile doubts before arriving at certainty; doubts that buzz around in one's head, one's conscience, one's heart, in the imagination, like tenacious flies. We need neither fear doubt nor discouragement: they are proof that our endeavors are human. And we are fortunate that these endeavors are human. Otherwise, these would be the endeavors of false men, men of wood, that is to say bureaucrats, dogmatic men, people who choose models over reality. Discouragement and doubt indicate that one sees reality as it really is.Eduardo Galeano

February 27 ***

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not have otherwise occurs. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no one could have dreamt would have come her way."Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."Goethe

February 28 *** The Language of Paradise

The Guaraos, who live in the suburbs of Earthly Paradise, call the rainbow snake of necklaces, and the firmament overhead sea. Lightening is glow of the rain. One's friend, my other heart. The soul, sun of the breast. The owl, lord of the dark night. A walking cane is a permanent grandson; and for "I forgive," they say I forget.Eduardo Galeano, Memories of Fire, Genesis

February 29 *** Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up their illusions about their condition is the demand to give up a condition that requires illusion. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chains not so that man may bear chains without any imagination or comfort, but so that he can throw away the chains and pluck living flowers.Karl Marx

March 1 *** The eye is a menace to clear sight, the ear is a menace to subtle hearing, the mind is a menace to wisdom, every organ of the senses is a menace to its own capacity...Fuss, the god of the Southern Ocean, and Fet, the god of the Northern Ocean, happened once to meet in the realm of Chaos, the god of the centre. Chaos treated them very handsomely and

they discussed together what they could do to repay his kindness. They had noticed that, whereas everyone else had seven apertures, for sight, hearing, eating, breathing and so on, Chaos had none. So they decided to make the experiment of boring holes in him. Every day they bored a hole, and on the seventh day, Chaos died.Chuang Tzu (Arthur Whaley, tr.)

March 2 *** And one morning all that was burningone morning the bonfiresleapt out of the earthdevouring human beings -and from then on fire,gunpowder from then on,and from then on blood.Bandits with planes and Moors,bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,bandits with black friars spattering blessingscame through the sky to kill childrenand the blood of the children ran through the streetswithout fuss, like children's blood.

Pablo Neruda

March 3 *** We did not ask the white man to come here. The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home. You had yours. We did not interfere with you. The Great Spirit gave us plenty of land to live on, and buffalo, deer, antelope and other game. But you have come here; you are taking my land from me; you are killing off our game, so it is hard for us to live. Now, you tell us to work for a living, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work, but to live by hunting. You white men can work if you want to. We do not interfere with you, and again you say, why do you not become civilized? We do not want your civilization! We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them.Crazy Horse, Touch The Earth

March 4 *** The earth was created by the assistance of the sun, and it should be left as it was... The country was made without lines of demarcation, and it is no man's business to divide it... I see the whites all over the country gaining wealth, and see their desire to give us lands which are worthless... The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same. Say to us if you can say it, that you were sent by the

Creative Power to talk to us. Perhaps you think the Creator sent you here to dispose of us as you see fit. If I thought you were sent by the Creator I might be induced to think you had a right to dispose of me. Do not misunderstand me, but understand me fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with it as I chose. The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who created it. I claim a right to live on my land, and accord you the privilege to live on yours.Chief Joseph, Touch The Earth

March 5 *** To the extent that you emphasize a military solution in El Salvador, you are going to be buttressing one of the most out-of-control, violent, bloodthirsty groups of men in the world. They have killed, at a minimum, five or six thousand kids, just on the mere suspicion that they were involved with the leftists.Robert E. White, U.S. Ambassador toEl Salvador under President Carter

March 6 *** Let my death be for the liberation of my people. And as a witness of hope in the future. Archbishop Oscar Romero

March 7 *** When a dictatorship seriously violates human rights and attacks the common good of the nation, when it becomes unbearable and closes all channels of dialogue, of understanding, of rationality; when this happens, the church speaks of the legitimate right of insurrectional violence. Archbishop Oscar Romero

March 8 *** Let my blood be a seed of freedom. As a Christian I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will arise in the Salvadoran people.Archbishop Oscar Romero

March 9 *** With the absence of remorseless time and space, the past becomes lost and falls into nothingness. ... God abandons life, to inhabit the eternal domain of death. No longer present within the cycles of time, no longer the hub of these cycles, he becomes an absent, waiting presence. All the calculations underline how long he has already waited or will wait. The proofs of his existence cease to be the morning, the returning season, the newborn;

instead they become the "eternity" of heaven and hell and the finality of the last judgement. Man now becomes condemned to time, which is no longer a condition of life and therefore something sacred, but the inhuman principle which spares nothing. Time becomes both a sentence and a punishment.John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos

March 10 *** After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which He made a SCAB. A SCAB is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water-logged brain and a combination backbone made of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts he carries a tumour of rotten principles. A strikebreaker is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.Jack London, 1904

March 11 *** ...I heard the songOf the world's last whaleAs I rocked in the moonlightAnd reefed the sail.It'll happen to youAlso without failIf it happens to meSang the world's last whale.

Pete Seeger

March 12 *** when god decided to inventeverything he took onebreath bigger than a circus tentand everything began when man determined to destroyhimself he picked the wasof shall and finding only whysmashed it into because

e.e. cummings

March 13 *** It is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important. It is our responsibility, collectively and individually, to distinguish between mere speaking that is about self-aggrandizement, exploitation of the exotic "other", and that coming to voice which is a gesture of resistance, an affirmation of struggle.bell hooks, Talking Back - Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

March 14 *** The distinctive feature of our species is its humanity; but this quality in us is potential only and needs to be duly fostered. We do not bring it with us ready-made when we are born; it must become the object of our earthly endeavours, the epitome of our activities, our title to value... Even the divine part of our make-up is the result of fostering humanity in ourselves... This fostering (of humanity) is a task to be pursued unremittingly...J.G. von Herder (German poet, 1744-1803)

March 15 *** the golden rule Christianity: As ye would that men should do unto you, do ye also to them likewise.Buddhism: Hurt not others with that which pains yourself.Judaism: What is hurtful to yourself do not to your fellow man.Islam: No one is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.Hinduism: Do naught to others which if done to thee, would cause thee pain.Confucianism: Do not unto others what you would not they should do unto you.Jainism: We should refrain from inflicting upon others such injury as would appear undesirable to us if inflicted upon ourselves.Taoism: Regard your neighbour's gain as you own gain; and regard your neighbour's loss as your own loss.Zoroastrianism: That nature only is good when it shall not do unto another whatever is not good for its own self.from Ideas and Action

March 16 *** My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.black domestic woman to Martin Luther Kinghalf-way through the year-long Montgomerybus boycott answer to: "aren't you tired?"

March 17 *** When women and men understand that working to eradicate patriarchal domination is a struggle rooted in the longing to make a world where everyone can live fully and freely, then we know our work to be a gesture of love. Let us draw upon that love to heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our courage and strengthen our commitment. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist/Thinking Black

March 18 *** This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

March 19 *** During the last fourteen years I have worked on and off for civil rights, the anti-war movement, Native American rights, environmental issues, etc. I have often noticed the high casualty rate among movement people - breakdowns, burn-outs, the irreversible damage done to personal relationships, suicides. We must be clear and very honest about where we are right now and we need to acknowledge the darkness around us and inside us before we can move on.Letter form English Professor, Michigan; Despair and Empowerment

March 20 *** I drew this because this is what the army did when the helicopter bombed us. They burned our fields, captured our people and cut off their hands, feet and arms. They capture families and shoot them in the stomach and hang them from trees. Because of this we cannot live in Guatemala. In any place they find us, they kill us. They do not kill us fast; they cut out our eyes, our throat. If we run and they cannot catch us, they shoot us... I am from Huehuetenango and I am ten years old. Guatemalan refugee

March 21 *** Several months ago an American writer travelled to a village in nicaragua to inquire about a story. She had heard that, in 1978, school children were sewing a Sandinista flag in their classroom when a battalion of National Guard arrived in the village. Some went into the schoolhouse. When they saw what the children were doing, the guardsmen chopped off their hands.

The writer met a teenage girl without hands, fetching water at a well. The girl said simply, "It was worth the pain for what we have now." from Bread and Puppet, Stories of Struggleand Faith from Central America

March 22 ***

(On June 17, 1744, the commissioners from Maryland and Virginia negotiated a treaty with the Indians of the Six nations at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Indians were invited to send boys to William and Mary College. The next day they declined the offer as follows.)

We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges, and that the Maintenance of your young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces: they were instructed in all your Sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods... neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counsellors, they were totally good for nothing.

We are, however, not the less oblig'd by your kind Offer, tho' we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them.Touch the Earth

March 23 *** It requires no great effort to identify the apocalyptic features of our century: world wars , massacres, the spectre of nuclear war, the enslavement of millions by technology and totalitarian regimes, the threat to the earth's ecological balance, the depletion of energy sources, the increase in drug addiction - the list could go on and on. Yet the same century has also brought us knowledge that is utterly new in human history and could bring about a decisive change in our lives if its full significance was to penetrate public consciousness. I am referring to the discovery that the period of early childhood is of crucial importance for a person's emotional development. The more distinctly we come to see that the most ominous events of the present and recent past are not the products of mature rationality and the more clearly we come to recognize the absurdity and unpredictability of the arms race, the more urgent becomes the need to investigate the origins and nature of the human destructiveness whose helpless victims we all are.

The magnitude of destructiveness that we read about in the newspapers every day actually represents the last chapter of long

stories we are usually ignorant of. We are victims, observers, reporters, or mute witnesses of a violence whose roots we do not see, a violence that often takes us by surprise, outrages us, or simply makes us stop and think, but we lack the inner ability (i.e., parental or Divine permission) to perceive and take to heart the simple and obvious explanations that are already available. Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

March 24 *** But please remember, especially in these times of group think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow or be as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labour so to bring into the world. That is why historians are generally the enemy of women, certainly of blacks, and so are, all too often, the very people we must sit under in order to learn. Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.Alice Walker In Search of Our Mother's Gardens

March 25 *** Children who are respected learn respect. Children who are

cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grow out of the experience of love.

I have been told more than once that someone who was able to let his true self unfold during childhood would become a martyr in our society because he would refuse to adapt to some of its norms...Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

March 26 *** I try hard to be simple. Not in my lovingbecause I am never happy unless stretched.But simple in loyalty. I try hard to remember alwaysto ask for whom what is done is done.Who gets and who loses? Who paysand who rakes off the profit? Whoselife is shortened? Whose heatis shut off? Whose children endshooting up or shot in the streets?Marge Piercy

March 27 *** "It is categories in the mind and guns in their hands that keep us enslaved." Somehow facing the guns in their hands makes clear to us which categories in our minds are their agents. Larry Mitchell and Starhawk

March 28 *** If we had a keen visionand feeling of all ordinary human life,it would be like hearing the grass growand the squirrel's heart beat,and we should die of that roarwhich lies on the other side of silence.

George Eliot

March 29 *** Children who become too aware of things are punished for it and internalise the coercion to such an extent that as adults they give up the search for awareness. But because some people cannot renounce this search in spite of coercion, there is justifiable hope that regardless of the ever-increasing application of technology to the field of psychological knowledge, Kafka's vision of the penal colony with its efficient, scientifically minded persecutors and their passive victims is valid only for certain areas of our life and perhaps not forever. For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.Alice Miller

March 30 *** "There is always something to do.There are hungry people to feed, nakedpeople to clothe, sick people to comfort andmake well. And while I don't expect you to savethe world, I do not think it's asking too muchfor you to love those with whom you sleep, sharethe happiness of those whom you call friend,engage those amongst you who arevisionary and remove from your lifethose who offer you depression, despairand disrespect.

Nikki Giovanni

March 31 *** Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore

our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths. Audre Lorde

April 1 *** For we have built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression and these must be altered at the same time that we alter the living condition which are the result of those structures. For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house. Audre Lorde

April 2 *** Rebellion is our very life asserting itself, willing to settle for nothing less than freedom. But if our rebellion is have any hope of achieving that freedom, it must transform itself into resistance.

Resistance challenges the framework of reality defined by systems of punishment. Rebellion can be the first step towards resistance, but we must avoid the sidetracks of self-destruction along the way.

Resistance differs from rebellion because it embodies a reality incongruent with that of domination. We do more than defy reality: we present its alternatives, communicating our beliefs and values.Starhawk

April 3 *** Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets and it's different with every shore. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

April 4 *** The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

April 5 ***

Liberation is from sin. That is, from selfishness, from injustice, from misery, from ignorance, from everything that is oppressive. That liberation is in our wombs, it seems to me.Andrea of Solentiname, discussing Luke 1:39-56

April 6 *** (In the following passage an old holy Wintu woman speaks sadly about the needless destruction of the land in which she lived - a place where gold mining and particularly hydraulic mining had torn up the earth.)

The white people never cared for land or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots we make little holes. When we built houses, we built little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don't chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the White people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The tree says, "Don't. I am sore. Don't hurt me." But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. The Indians never hurt anything, but the White people destroy all. They blast rocks and scatter them on the ground. The rock says, "Don't. You are hurting me." But the White people pay no attention. When the Indians use rocks, they take little round ones for their cooking... How can the spirit of the earth like the White man?... Everywhere the White man has touched, it is sore. Touch the Earth

April 7 *** Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For

some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

April 8 *** Most humans didn't love one another nohow, and this mis-love was so strong that even common blood couldn't overcome it all the time. She had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the marketplace to sell. Been set for still-bait. hen God had made the Man, he made him out of stuff that

sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness of the sparks make them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb. Like all the other tumbling mudballs, Janie has tried to show her shine.Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

April 9 *** Whoever inquires about our childhood wants to know something about our soul. If the question is not just a rhetorical one and the questioner has the patience to listen, he will come to realize that we love with a horror and hate with an inexplicable love whatever caused us our greatest pain and difficulty. Erika Burkart

April 10 *** It is time for thevoice of the mother to beheard in education.

Nel Noddings, Caring

April 11 *** We have always lived here: we have the right to go on living where we are happy and where we want to die. Only here can we feel whole; nowhere else would we ever feel complete and our pain would be eternal. Popul Vuh

April 12 *** Don't wait for strangers to remind you of your duty, you have a conscience and a spirit for that. All the good you do must come from your own initiative. Popul Vuh

April 13 *** In any society the destiny of the aged is decided by the community and reflects its deepest human values, which on the individual level speak to the value each of its members places on his or her own life. The fate of those who are now old is there waiting for the next generation. In civilizations concerned with maintaining their tradition, the old retain power; their memories, which preserve the traditions, give them a special place in the society. They are admired for the great number of years they have lived, respected

for their wisdom, and in some cases feared for their presumed supernatural powers. In such a society the aged may become sacred, priest and priestesses, with powers similar to those possessed by ghosts, the spirits they will soon become.Margaretta Mitchell

April 14 *** <<See the world>> <<See the world!When you sow seed on it,And when you pour water on it,And you let the sun shine on it,It will grow.And the birds feed on it,And the children of the world eat it,And the grandmothers and the grandfathers sing HallelujahBut,When you put fire to the world,And when you poison it,The world will cry,And the children will die.>>

Bread and Puppet

April 15 *** SONG OF THE SKY LOOM (Pueblo Indian rain ritual)O our Mother the Earth, O our Father the Sky,Your children are we, and with tired backsWe bring you the gifts that we love.Then weave for us a garment of brightness;May the warp be the white light of morning,May the weft be the red light of evening,May the fringes be the falling rain,May the border be the standing rainbow.Thus weave for us a garment of brightnessThat we may walk fittingly where birds singThat we may walk fittingly where grass is green,O our Mother the Earth, O our Father the Sky.

Tewa

April 16 *** Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits, andAre melted into air, into thin air;And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,the solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare, The Tempest

April 17 *** When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

April 18 *** The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them.George Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple

April 19 *** The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

April 20 *** There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

April 21 *** Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

April 22 *** There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant

April 23 *** It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill.Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud

April 24 *** The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau, Walden

April 25 *** A man sits as many risks as he runs.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

April 26 *** We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.Henry David Thoreau, Walden April 27 *** "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer." (If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.) Voltaire

April 28 *** I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Voltaire

April 29 *** Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

April 30 *** It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees!Emiliano Zapata

May 1 *** Beware that you do not lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. Aesop, The Dog and the Shadow

May 2 *** To see a World in a grain of sandAnd a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

May 3 *** It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of

wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

May 4 *** Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad. (Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat)Euripides

May 5 *** No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. H.L. Mencken

May 6 *** How sweet to be a CloudFloating in the Blue!

A.A. Milne

May 7 *** Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. George Orwell, 1984

May 8 *** Government, even in its best state,is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.Thomas Paine, Common Sense

May 9 *** Treat your visitor as a guest for two days, on the third day give him a hoe.Tanzanian proverb

May 10 *** Property is theft. [La propriété c'est le vol.] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la propriété

May 11 *** My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I've just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes. Ronald Reagan, [remark in a microphone test, Aug. 1984]

May 12 *** Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

May 13 *** What's in a name? That which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet.William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

May 14 *** Be passionately aware that you could be completely wrong.dian marino

May 15 *** If we know that our world is necessarily the world we bring forth with others, every time we are in conflict with another human being with whom we want to remain in co-existence, we cannot affirm what for us is certain (an absolute truth) because that would negate the other person. If we want to coexist with the other person, we must see that his(sic) certainty - however undesirable it may seem to us - is as legitimate and valid as our own because, like our own, that certainty expresses his(sic) conservation of structural coupling in a domain of existence - however undesirable it may seem to us. Hence, the only possibility for coexistence is to opt for a broader perspective, a domain of existence in which both parties fit in the bringing forth of a common world.Humberto Maturana and Fransisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge

May 16 *** ESSENTIAL NATUREA student asked, "Can Essential Nature be destroyed?"Coyote said, "Yes, it can."The student asked, "How can Essential Nature be destroyed?"Coyote said, "With an eraser."Robert Aitken, from Coyote Roshi Goroku

May 17 *** the poet's positionFrom their backs pour waterAnd in their passing reflectAs aquariums the colours ofmoving fish in afternoon windowsThey are the water people

and live on landwith neighbours who take baths

Spike Hawkins

May 18 *** InstructedBy impatient schoolmasters, stands the poor man and is toldThat the world is the best of worlds and that the holeIn the roof of his hovel was planned by God in person.Truly he finds it hardTo doubt this world.Bertolt Brecht

May 19 *** AND I ALWAYS THOUGHTAnd I always thought: the very simplest wordsMust be enough. When I say what things are likeEveryone's heart must be torn to shreds.That we'll go down if we don't stand up for ourselvesSurely you see that.

Bertolt Brecht and dian marino

May 20 *** The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ourselves, "Are these words true?" If so, we let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate we ask, "Are they necessary?" At the last gate, we ask, "Are they kind?" Eknath Easwaran

May 21 ***I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God's way of comforting His broken children. Mark Helprin

May 22 *** I like reality. It tastes of bread.Jean Anouilh

May 23 *** The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.Artur Schnabel

May 24 ***

Always pee before a long cartrip. Martin Mull

May 25 *** All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop. Kabir

May 26 *** WHY WE TELL STORIES for Linda Foster1Because we used to have leavesand on damp daysour muscles feel a tug,painful now, from when rootspulled us into the ground and because our children believethey can fly, an instinct retainedfrom when the bones in our armswere shaped like zithers and brokeneatly under their feathers and because before we had lungswe know how far it was to the bottomas we floated open-eyedlike painted scarves through the sceneryof dream, and because we awakened and learned to speak 2We sat by the fire in our caves,and because we were poor, we made up a taleabout a treasure mountainthat would open only for us and because we were always defeatedwe invented impossible riddlesonly we could solve,monsters only we could kill,women who could love no one elseand because we had survivedsisters and brothers, daughters and sons,we discovered bones that rosefrom the dark earth and sangas white birds in the trees 3Because the story of our lifebecomes our life Because each of us tells

the same storybut tells it differently and none of us tells itthe same way twice Because grandmothers looking like spiderswant to enchant the childrenand grandfathers need to convince uswhat happened happened because of themand though we listen onlyhaphazardly, with one ear,we will begin our storywith the word andLisel Mueller

May 27 *** It takes a long time to understand nothing. Edward Dahlberg

May 28 *** Apart from the known and unknown, what else is there? Harold Pinter

May 29 *** It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb and said, "They all feed one another," and called it good. Charlotte Perkins Gilman

May 30 *** By the time I was three, I was spending every waking moment at the keyboard, standing, placing my hands on the keyboard, and pushing notes. And I would choose very carefully what tones I would play because I knew that when I would play a note I would become that note. Lorin Hollander

May 31 *** Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought it or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or die a little, even. Daniel Berrigan

June 1 ***

There are essential and inessential insanities... Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression and pre-adolescent anxiety - garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively senses are virtuous and correct, even though peers may regard them as cuckoo. In essential insanities get one in trouble with oneself. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. It's always preferable to be in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential. Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker.

June 2 *** On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space towards the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious. Edgar Mitchell

June 3 *** There once dwelt, in the region of Naucratis in Egypt, one of the old gods, an inventor, named Theuth. One day he came before Thamus, the king, and presented his newest inventions of calculation, astronomy, geometry and more. But when he came to the invention of writing and said: "Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories: my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom," the king answered: "No, Theuth, you have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If people learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is not a recipe for memory, but for reminder." Plato, Phaedrus, R. Hackforth,tr.

June 4 *** An anthropologist brought a television to an indigenous community that had never seen broadcast media before. The town was enraptured and night after night people gathered before the television, ignoring the storyteller. Two weeks later everyone was back listening to the storyteller. The anthropologist asked one of the villagers, "Don't you think the television knows more stories than your old man?" "Yes," the villager said, "the TV knows more stories - but the storyteller knows me."

June 5 *** If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. Jesus Christ, The Nag Hammadi

Library

June 6 *** It isn't important in which sea or lake you observe a slick of pollution, or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out, or on which continent a hurricane arises. You are standing guard over the whole or our earth.Yuri Artyukhin

June 7 *** The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic.Alexei Leonov

June 8 *** Now I know why I'm here.Not for a closer look at the moon,But to look backAt our homeThe Earth

Alfred Worden

June 9 *** "But must we be your enemies? Will you not receive us as friends if we are neutral and remain at peace with you?""No, your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship; for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness." Dialogue at Melos reported by Thucydides

June 10 *** God wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit because he wanted them to grow up, to know their divinity. But as they left the garden God turned to the serpent and said "I want them to go with their divinity but where shall I put it?" The serpent said "Put it inside them, they'll never think to look there."

June 11 *** In telling stories, we obey certain principles and laws of drama and melodrama, of crisis and resolution, of impact and silence. We generate an energy through our stories that helps to define who we are and where we are going. We are all creatures of narrative, and these narratives are important to us even if they are tragic narratives. It certainly has been my observation for many years that individuals would much rather have a tragic narrative than no narrative at all, and they will cling to suffering in order to discover

the material for such a narrative.David Spangler

June 12 *** Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support.'Someone ought to do it, but why should I?" is ever the re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.'Someone ought to do it, so why not I?" is the cry of some earnest servant of humanity, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution. Mrs. Annie Besant, Autobiography

June 13 *** I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flowers you hung all your associations with flowers on my flowers and you write about my flowers as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't. Georgia O'Keefe (?)

June 14 *** I worry when 'activists' are lionized that people will say, Oh, that is such an extraordinary person - look at all she does - she must be some kind of Superwoman. We all want models and examples to inspire us. But it seems to me that the single mother who campaigns for daycare is the activist, the woman who works for battered women, the ex-battered woman who turns her experience into a teaching project for school children, the precinct worker, leafleter, petition circulator, the person who supports with letters and money and/or physical presence the fight for reproductive rights or divestment from South Africa, who opens her doors or her church's to Central American refugees, who takes whatever small but firm bites out of her small or large resources to end religious, racial or political persecution ANYWHERE, and she who gives of some part of herself to prevent nuclear disaster - she is where the action is.Ronnie Gilbert

June 15 *** It is obviously possible that what we call waking life may be only an unusual, and persistent nightmare.Bertrand Russell

June 16 *** Only three things have ever astonished me: a dream within a dream, voices in an empty room, and fire the colour of ice. Silvina Ocampo, from a letter to Alberto Manguel

June 17 *** The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness and astonishment of heart. Deuteronomy 28:28

June 18 *** There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our imagination, if it were done but once. John Donne, LXXX Sermons

June 19 *** I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favourite trees step out and promenade up, down, and around, very curiously - with a whisper from one, leaning down as he pass'd me, "We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you. Walt Whitman, Speciman Day

June 20 *** If I had been out on the hills of Bethlehem on the night of the birth of Christ, with the angels singing to the shepherds, I think that I should not have heard any angels singing. The reason why I think so is that I do not hear them now, and there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped. Northrop Frye, The Critical Path

June 21 *** Everything said is said by someone.Everything known is known by someone.

June 22 *** Percy (bursting out of cupboard door)No, no, no!I cannot breath in there - the mothballs, Kite!Ah, let me gulp a little air again -A little air - a little of that spaceThat gentle Einstein curved for our amusement...Mervyn Peake, The Wit to Woo

June 23 ***

The Function of Art/1Diego had never seen the sea. His father, Santiago Kovadloff, took him to discover it. They went south. The ocean lay beyond high sand dunes, waiting. When the child and his father finally reached the dunes after much walking, the ocean exploded before their eyes. And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it. And hen he finally managed to speak, trembling, stuttering, he asked his father: "Help me to see!"Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces June 24 *** Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that two and two be not four. Ivan Turgenev, Prayer

June 25 *** "One can't believe impossible things.""I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."Lewis Carroll, through the Looking Glass

June 26 *** So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper.G.K. Chesterton, A Defense of Nonsense

June 27 *** I don't want realism. I want magic... I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth.Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

June 28 *** I wonder if that is why we sleep at night, because the darkness still...frightens us? They say we sleep to let the demons out - to let our mind go raving mad, our dreams and nightmares all our logic gone awry, the dark side of our dreams. Edward Albee, A Delicate Balance

June 29 ***

Keep difficult company. dian marino

June 30 *** Metaphysics is not reality... Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page menu and no food. Robert Pirsig

July 1 *** Once, when David Shulman and I sat through a conference on methodology in the history of religions, he had a dream; he dreamed that we were in a restaurant, and the waiter brought the menu, which we perused hungrily; but when we began to order (I ordered fresh oysters and Peking duck and mangoes), the waiter interrupted: "I'm sorry, Madam," he said, "but in this restaurant, you eat the menu." Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Other Peoples' Myths

July 2 *** Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground."What have you lost, Mulla?" he asked. "My key," said the Mulla.So they both went down on their knees and looked for it. After a time the other man asked: "Where exactly did you drop it?""In my own house.""Then why are you looking here?""There is more light here than inside my own house."Idries Shah

July 3 *** If God didn't want man to hunt, he wouldn't have given us plaid shirts. Johnny Carson

July 4 *** Because human consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain, to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Alan Watts

July 5 *** Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops. H.L. Mencken

July 6 ***

I think we are responsible for the universe, but that doesn't mean we decide anything. René Magritte

July 7 *** I want to see ordinary people feeling their own worth and seeing the same worth in other people. This cannot be done from the top down, but only by ordinary people imbued with their own power. Doris Marshall

July 8 *** You can hitch your wagon to the stars, but you can't haul corn or hay if its wheels aren't on the ground.Mordecai Pinkney Horton

July 9 *** Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, Reason and Common Sense

July 10 *** My job is to try to provide opportunities for people to grow, not to make them grow because no one can do that, but to provide a climate in which people can learn. My job as a gardener or as an educator is to know that the potential is there and that it will unfold. People have a potential for growth; it's inside, it's in the seed...Myles Horton

July 11 *** I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered people have torn down, other-centered people can build up. Martin Luther King, Jr.

July 12 *** Our independence was born in fire. Agostinho Neto

July 13 *** We are distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter. Joseph Addison

July 14 *** Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, None but ourselves can free our minds.

Bob Marley

July 15 *** Home is where the heart is. Pliny the Elder

July 16 *** As the twig is bent, the tree inclines. Virgil

July 17 *** We are rich in proportion to the things we can leave alone. Henry David Thoreau

July 18 *** LIFE'S GIFTS I saw a woman sleeping. In her sleep she dreamt Life stood before her, and held in each hand a gift - in the one Love, in the other Freedom. And she said to the woman, "Choose!" And the woman waited long: and she said, "Freedom!" And Life said, "Thou hast well chosen. If thou hadst said, 'Love,' I would have given thee that thou didst ask for; and I would have gone from thee, and returned to thee no more. Now, the day will come when I shall return. In that day I shall bear both gifts in one hand." I heard the woman laugh in her sleep.Olive Schreiner, Dreams

July 19 *** Ache's EndMy sweet acheis gone.Sweet and painfulcaramel, honeyin a broken tooth.You were with melike a light coldin the bones,a rainy day gnawing.An awarenessthat would turn downto a faint humto an edging of static.This caringcolored my life,a wine badly fermented

with sugar and vinegarin suspension.A body can grow usedto a weight,used to limpingand find it hardto learn againto walk straight.

Marge Piercy

July 20 *** Visit the sick, feed the hungry and free the captives. Prophet Muhammad

July 21 *** For increase, it is beneficial to go somewhere; it is beneficial to cross great rivers. I Ching

July 22 *** Justice is like a train that's nearly always late. Yevgeny Yevtushenko

July 23 *** SUN OR MOON?They came to him one day and said, "Hodja Nasrudin, can you tell us which is more important - the sun or the moon?" He thought about it for a while and replied, "The moon is surely more important than the sun, for the moon shines at night when it's dark; the sun shines in the daytime when it's already light outside." collected by Dan Yashinsky

July 24 *** The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed.Steve Biko

July 25 *** There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you. Peter De Vries

July 26 *** Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

July 27 *** Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot? The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

July 28 *** If there ain't no dancing you can count me out. Emma Goldman

July 29 *** If I can't dance then I don't want to be part of your revolution. Emma Goldman

July 30 *** Unless freedom is universal, it is only extended privilege. Christopher Hill

July 31 *** There is that difference between being kicked in the teeth and reading a description of being kicked in the teeth -some call it existential. Gita Mehta

August 1 *** It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.Mark 10:25

August 2 *** The town is new every day. Estonian proverb

August 3 *** You are what you eat. Ludwig Feuerbach

August 4 *** Aboriginal achievement is like the dark side of the moon, it is there but so little is known. Ernie Dingo

August 5 *** If everybody lived by the sweat of their brow, the earth would become a paradise. Mahatma Gandhi

August 6 *** The best things in life are free.

August 7 *** Live simply that others might simply live. Bumpersticker

August 8 *** Anyone who welcomes a child like this in my name welcomes me. Matthew 18:5

August 9 *** Kindness in giving creates love. Lao Tzu

August 10 *** If someone comes to you asking for help, do not say in refusal, "Trust in God. He will help." Rather, act as if there were no God, and no one to help him except you. Hassidic teaching

August 11 *** The soul that projects itself entirely into activity, and seeks itself outside itself in the work of its own will, is like a madman who sleeps on the sidewalk in front of his house instead of living inside where it is quiet and warm.Thomas Merton

August 12 *** Everything is a little bit of darkness, even the light. Antonio Porchia

August 13 *** A little girl, after hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for the first time, asked, "What do we do now?"Quoted by Richard Kehl, Further Departures

August 14 *** We will go before God to be judged, and God will ask us, "Where are your wounds?" And we will say, "We have no wounds." And God will ask, "Was nothing worth fighting for?" Rev. Allan Boesak

August 15 *** Acknowledging the agency of the world in knowledge makes room

for some unsettling possibilities, including a sense of the world's independent sense of humour. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

August 16 *** Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of 'objective' knowledge. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

August 17 *** A rabbi, whose grandfather had been a disciple of the Baal Shem, was asked to tell a story. "A story," he said, "must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself." And he told: "My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour on he was cured of his lameness, That's the way to tell a story." Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters

August 18 *** Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow. And he answered: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives? When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater." But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your

board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

August 19 *** All of us lie in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Oscar Wilde

August 20 *** The way of your ancestors are goodThey cannot be blown away by the windsBecause their roots reach deep into the soil.Okot P'Bitek

August 21 *** Hate the sin and love the sinner. Mohandas Gandhi

August 22 *** Soon must come the dayWhen the righteous have their wayUnjustly tried are freed.

Tracy Chapman

August 23 *** 1983: Buenos Aires WHAT IF THE DESERT WERE OCEAN AND THE EARTH WERE SKY?The mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are frightening. For what would happen if they tired of circling in front of the Pink House and began signing government decrees? And if the beggars on the cathedral steps grabbed the archbishop's tunic and biretta and began preaching sermons from the pulpit? And if honest circus clowns began giving orders in the barracks and courses in the universities? And if they did? and If?Eduardo Galeano

August 24 *** Whenever any form of government becomes destructive... It is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.U.S. Declaration of Independence

August 25 *** In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart. Anne Frank

August 26 *** Give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. Teach them to fish,

you feed them for life. Chinese proverb

August 27 *** It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.Peter Benenson

August 28 *** The flowers which fall from the tree are to prepare the land for new and more beautiful flowers to bloom in the next season. Samora Machel

August 29 *** Solidarity is not an act of charity, but mutual aid between forces fighting for the same objective. Samora Machel

August 30 *** There are few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress...as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. Charles Dickens

August 31 *** You can observe a lot just by watching. Yogi Berra

September 1 *** Comparison and conformity go together; they breed nothing but suppression, conflict and endless pain. Krishnamurti

September 2 *** Grub first, then ethics. Bertolt Brecht

September 3 *** It is a great shock at the age of five or six to find that in a world of Gary Coopers you are the Indian.James Baldwin

September 4 *** To live is to hope. Cambodian proverb

September 5 *** Forests precede civilizations, deserts follow them.

Vicompte de Chateaubriand

September 6 *** Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. Aldous Huxley

September 7 *** 'Listen to the music of the revolution!' is eternal, for revolution is protean and, despite what pessimists may say, the revolution in human consciousness will never end. Yevgeny Yevtushenko

September 8 *** What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.Jose Ortega Y Gasset

September 9 *** If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

September 10 *** For love... makes a little room, an everywhere. John Donne

September 11 *** Drink to me only with thine eyes,And I will pledge with mine;Leave a kiss but in a cup,And I'll not look for wine.

Ben Jonson

September 12 *** Fame is the perversion of the human instinct for validation and attention. Heathcote Williams

September 13 *** Misunderstandings don't exist - only the failure to communicate. Senegalese proverb

September 14 ***

The crew of the spaceship Discovery photographed a smoke cloud over the Amazon rainforest of a million square miles. Over Europe, it would stretch from London to Moscow. NI Third World Almanac

September 15 *** Suffer fools gladly; they may be right. Holbrook Jackson

September 16 *** A friend in the market is better than money in the chest.

September 17 *** Until the lions have historians, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter.

September 18 *** Everyone wants to make money out of the Amazon... We live there and we are scared. Paulinho Paiakan

September 19 *** When a man has boils or scabies, he isn't disgusted with himself; he puts his infected hand in his dish and he licks his fingers without any repugnance. But if he sees a small sore on someone else's hand, he can't swallow his food. It's the same with moral blemishes: when you see defects such as indifference, pride, and lust in yourself, they don't bother you; but as soon as you notice them in others, you feel hurt and resentful. Rumi

September 20 *** One cannot build life from refrigerators, politics, credit statements and crossword puzzles. That is impossible. Nor can one exist for any length of time without poetry, without colour, without love. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

September 21 *** For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul? Matthew 16:26

September 22 *** Each family has its own football team. Maghreb saying

September 23 *** MYTHLong afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked theroads. He smelled a familiar smell. It wasthe Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question.Why didn't I recognize my mother?" "You gave thewrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was whatmade everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said."When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,Man. You didn't say anything about woman.""When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include womentoo. Everyone knows that." She said, "That's whatyou think."Muriel Ruckeyser

September 24 *** WHILE LOVE IS UNFASHIONABLEWhile Love Is Unfashionablelet us liveunfashionably.Seeing the worlda complex ballin small hands;love our blackest garment.Let us be poorin all but truth, and couragehanded downby the oldspirits.Let us be intimate withancestral ghostsand musicof the undead. While love is dangerouslet us walk bareheadedbeside the Great River.Let us gather blossomsunder fire.

Alice Walker

September 25 *** Josina, you are not dead. The Earth must be nourished and the more fertile it is the better do its trees flourish, the bigger are the shadows they cast, the sweeter are their fruits.

Samora Machel

September 26 *** Never-neverMissing is a painin everyplacemaking a toothacheout of a day.But to miss somethingthat never was:the longest guiltthe regret that come downlike a fine ashyear after yearis the shadow of whatwe did not dare.All the days that go outlike neglected cigarettes,the days that dribble away.How often does love strike?We turn into ghostsloitering outside doorwayswe imagined entering.In the lover's roomthe floor creaks,dust sifts from the ceiling,the golden bed has been hauled awayby the dealerin unused dream.

Marge Piercy

September 27 *** I thought it good fortune to go to the Magic Monastery for Christmas. But at the foot of the hill sat a blind beggar, and when I drew near to give him some money, I heard him ask, "Who will lead me into the heart of God?" I couldn't go on. Who would lead him into the heart of God? I sat down in front of him. I took his hands. "Together," I said. "Together we'll go into the heart of God." Tales From the Magic Monastery

September 28 *** Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.Ursula K. LeGuin

September 29 ***

There are those who forget that death will come to all. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.The Dhammapada

September 30 *** In a field, I am the absence of the field. This is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing.Mark Strand

October 1 *** The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. Willa Cather

October 2 *** When someone steals another's clothes, we call him a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. Basil the Great

October 3 *** How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. Henry David Thoreau

October 4 *** I wonder why love is so often equated with joy when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excessive value, and losing it again. It is recognition, often of what you are not but might be. It sears and it heals. It is beyond pity and above law. It can seem like truth. Florida Scott-Maxwell

October 5 *** I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.Bernard Malamud

October 6 *** We communicate because we grant meaning to one another's words. When I speak, you don't question the meaning of every word, reducing it to nonsense; you allow me to mean something. If

you are generous, you grant me significance. At any moment, of course, you can withdraw your assent and leave me again babbling nonsense. To make meaning here and now is a cooperative act. In effect, I cannot mean anything without you. Kenneth J. Gergen

October 7 *** THE FUNCTION OF THE READER/2It was half a century since the death of César Vallejo, and there were celebrations. In Spain, Julio Vélez organized lectures, seminars, memorial publications and an exhibition offering images of the poet, his land, his time and his people. But then Julio Vélez met José Manuel Castañon, and all homage seemed insignificant. José Manuel Castañon had been a captain in the Spanish War. Fighting for Franco, he had lost a hand and won various medals. One night, shortly after the war, the captain accidentally came upon a banned book. He took a look, he read one line, he read another, and he could no longer tear himself away. Captain Castañon, hero of the victorious army, sat up all night, captivated, reading and rereading César Vallejo, poet of the defeated. Next morning he resigned from the army and refused to take a single peseta more from the Franco government. Later, they put him in jail, and he went into exile.Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

October 8 *** When I was young I admired clever people. Now that I am old I admire kind people. Abraham Joshua Heschel

October 9 *** Life is not long, and too much of it must not be spent in idle deliberation of how it shall be spent. Samuel Johnson

October 10 *** Fear grows out of the things we think; it lives in our minds. Compassion grows out of the things we are, and lives in our hearts. Michael Garrison

October 11 *** There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. W. Somerset Maugham

October 12 *** Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God is manifest everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without God. It's impossible. It's simply impossible. Thomas Merton

October 13 *** Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Susan Ertz

October 14 *** The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn. Henry S. Haskins

October 15 *** CARROTSCarrots are fuckingthe earth. A permanenterection, they push deeperinto the damp and dark.All summer longthey try so hard to please.Was it good for you,was it good?

Perhaps because the earth won't answerthey keep on trying.While you stroll through the gardenthinking carrot cake,carrots and onions in beef stew,carrot pudding with caramel sauce,they are fucking their brains outin the hottest part of the afternoon.

Lorna Crozier

October 16 *** ONIONSThe onion loves the onion.It hugs its many layers,

saying O, O, O,each vowel smallerthan the last. Some say it has no heart.It doesn't need one.It surrounds itself,feels whole. Primordial.First among vegetables. If Eve had bitten itinstead of the apple,how differentParadise.

Lorna Crozier

October 17 *** When you have a lot of things to do, get your nap out of the way first. Jo Andersen

October 18 *** He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.Proverbs XVI.32

October 19 *** Tracey Hill was a child in a Connecticut town who amused herself as befitted a child of her age, like any other tender little angel of God in the state of Connecticut or anywhere else on this planet. One day, together with her little school companions, Tracey started throwing lighted matches into an anthill. They all enjoyed this healthy childish diversion. Tracey, however, saw something which the others didn't see or pretended not to, but which paralysed her and remained forever engraved in her memory: faced with the dangerous fire, the ants split up into pairs and two by two, side by side, pressed closer together, they waited for death.Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces

October 20 *** Maybe journey is not so much a journey ahead, or a journey into space, but a journey into presence. The farthest place on earth to journey is into the presence of the person nearest to you. Nelle Morton

October 21 *** If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the

library? Lily Tomlin

October 22 *** First be a good animal. Ralph Waldo Emerson

October 23 *** We live with one another on a rare life-sustaining planet as it makes a few dozen turns around its modest and finite star. The real news on this planet is love - why it exists, where it came from, and where it's going. How love fares against hate and indifference is the only reliable measure of historical progress that we have. Gil Bailie

October 24 *** Nasrudin, ferrying a pedant across a rough piece of water, said something ungrammatical to him. "Have you never studied grammar?" asked the scholar. "No." "Then half of your life has been wasted." A few minutes later Nasrudin turned to the passenger. "Have you ever learned how to swim?" "No. Why?" "The all your life is wasted - we are sinking!"Idries Shah

October 25 *** Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit. Rudolph Arnheim

October 26 *** I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. Duke Ellington

October 27 *** People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates. Thomas Szasz

October 28 *** Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, "Grow,grow." The Talmud

October 29 *** A clay pot sitting in the heat of the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain. Mildred Witte Struven

October 30 *** Gaining enlightenment is like the moon reflecting in the water.The moon does not get wet, nor is the water disturbed.Although its light is extensive and great...The whole moon and the whole sky are reflectedin a dew-drop in the grass, in one drop of water.Enlightenment does not disturb the person,just as the moon does not disturb the water.A person does not hinder enlightenment, just as a dew-dropdoes not hinder the moon in the sky.The depth of the drop is the height of the moon.Eihei Dogen, Actualization of the Koan

October 31 *** Why 300,000 varieties of beetles? The great English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane was once cornered by a distinguished theologian who asked him what inferences one could draw, from a study of the created world, as to the nature of its Creator. Haldane answered, "An inordinate fondness for beetles." David Quammen

November 1 *** Do not be a magician, be magic. Leonard Cohen

November 2 *** I knew a physicist at the University of Chicago who was rather crazy like some scientists, and the idea of the insolidarity, the instability of the solid world, impressed him so much that he used to go around in enormous padded slippers for fear he should fall through the floor. Alan Watts

November 3 ***

To live several lives, you have to die several deaths. Francoise Giroud

November 4 *** When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed. E.B. White

November 5 *** I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: what the hell good would that do?Ronnie Shakes

November 6 *** I noticed in New York, where the traffic is so bad and the air is so bad, everything, and the food, and the coffee, everything, and the streets are falling to pieces, you get into a taxi and frequently the poor taxi driver is just beside himself with irritation. And one day I got into one and the driver began talking a blue streak, accusing absolutely everyone of being wring. You know, he was full of irritation about everything, and I simply remained quiet. I did not answer his questions, I did not enter into a conversation, and very shortly the driver began changing his ideas and simply through my being silent he began, before I got out of the car, saying rather nice things about the world around him. John Cage

November 7 *** Life is short, but it's wide. Spanish proverb.

November 8 *** Science has got us doing cartwheels in space. We have reached the moon. Can we reach the face across the breakfast table, or over the back fence, or across the railroad tracks? Have we ever thought of investigating the wilderness in the seat next to us? Or exploring the constellations locked up in our own skulls? We are in orbit, all right, alone, sealed off as no astronaut ever was - out of communication, all our lives calling out, "This is my name! This is my name! Can you hear me? Do you hear my voice? Who are you? Speak!" Agnes de Mille

November 9 *** Some objects demand to be used as metaphors - such as tubes of toothpaste that seem to be all but empty but keep delivering more

for days and days. Rudolph Arnheim

November 10 *** To view your life as blessed does not require you to deny your pain. It simply demands a more complicated vision, one in which a condition or event is not either good or bad but is, rather, both good and bad, not sequentially but simultaneously. In my experience, the more such ambivalences you can hold in your head, the better off you are, intellectually and emotionally. Nancy Mairs

November 11 *** There's a certain Buddhistic calm that comes from having...money in the bank. Tom Robbins

November 12 *** Theory is just a practice forced into a new form of self-reflectiveness on account of certain grievous problems it has encountered. Like small lumps on the neck, it is a symptom that all is not well.

Whether and when this actually happens to a human practice is a highly variable matter. A long time ago, for example, people used simply to drop things from time to time. But nowadays we have physicists to inform us of the laws of gravity by which objects fall; philosophers to doubt whether there are really any discrete objects to be dropped at all; sociologists to explain how all this dropping is really the consequence of urban pressures; psychologists to suggest that we are really trying to drop our parents; poets to write about how all this dropping is symbolic of death; and critics to argue that it is a sign of the poet's castration anxiety. Now dropping can never be the same again. We can never return to the happy garden where we simply wandered around dropping things all day without a care in the world. What has happened, rather, is that the practice has been forced to take itself as its own object of enquiry. Theory is just human activity bending back upon itself, constrained into a new kind of self-reflexivity. And in absorbing this self-reflexivity, the activity itself will be transformed, as the production of literature is altered by the existence of literary criticism.

This, however, would seem to involve a curious paradox. For one of the effects of rendering our practices self-conscious in this way, of formalizing the tacit understandings by which they operate, may well be to disable them. Perhaps we only did what we did because we were not conscious of the problematical

assumptions underlying out conduct. Indeed many theorists, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Sigmund Freud and Louis Althusser, have claimed that such amnesia or oblivion is an essential condition for any purposive action whatsoever. To objectify a procedure is to turn it into a potential object of contestation, which is why it is always safer for a ruling order to follow the English path and not do anything as vulgar and perilous as actually committing its constitution to paper. If you think too hard about how to kiss someone you are bound to make a mess of it. Theory, then, potentially destabilizes social life; but I have said already that it is also a conservative force, It is conservative in so far as it often seeks to supply us with new rationales for what we do, ordering and formalizing our meanings; but it cannot do this without making us freshly conscious of what we do, and this may always raise the possibility that we should do something else for a change. Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory

November 13 *** My heart is so moved by all I cannot save:so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with thosewho age after age, perversely with no extraordinary powerreconstitute the world.

Adrienne Rich

November 14 *** Do not use a hatchet to remove fly from your friend's forehead. Chinese Proverb

November 15 *** The wheel's hub holds thirty spokes. Utility however, depends on the hole through the hub. Lao Tzu

November 16 *** I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society...it is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. Nelson Mandela

November 17 *** What comes from the lips reaches the ear. What comes from the heart, reaches the heart. Arab proverb.

November 18 *** The only way to have a friend is to be one. Anon

November 19 *** When you are not separate from the creative process, time ceases to exist. You might start to feel tired and suddenly realize that much time has passed. It isn't necessarily a happy time - and may be very difficult to start if it is a job or an obligation. But if' you start with all the concrete needs and proceed in a thorough way - the creative process will take over and you will forget whether it is work or play. Working in the here and now is one of the most uncontaminated ways to work. Corita Kent

November 20 *** When asked what makes a good dancer, the master replied:First, to be a good dancer, one must know the music as well as the dance.And what else?To be a better dancer, one must understand the stories and be able to interpret the characters being played.Is there more?The best dancer is the one who has all those things I have told you aboutand is a farmer.Javanese proverb

November 21 *** Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave,eats a bread it does not harvest,and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine press.Kahlil Gibran

November 22 ***There are only two lasting bequests we can give our children: one is roots and the other is wings. Anon

November 23 *** Come to the edge, he said.Come to the edge,he said.They said:We are afraid.Come to the edge, he

said.They came.He pushed them...and they flew.

Guillaume Apollinaire

November 24 *** I write music as a sow piddles. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

November 25 *** Enjoy the earth gentlyFor if the earth isspoiledIt cannot be repairedEnjoy the earth gently.

Yoruba poem

November 26 *** A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know. Diane Arbus

November 27 *** "But the Emperor has nothing on at all!" cried a little child. Hans Christian Andersen.

November 28 *** The trick is to have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones. Linus Pauling

November 29 *** The artist has so much love to give back to the universe that it spills over, and the fallen drops become 'works of art'. It is love in another form. Nancy Jackson

November 30 *** Be like the birdThe pausing in her flightAwhile on boughs too slightFeels them give waybeneath her, yet singsKnowing that she has wings.

December 1 ***

When we say "NO!" we mean a deeper "YES!".

December 2 *** Eat first, poetry later. Chinese proverb

December 3 *** God respects me when I work but He loves me when I sing. Rabindranath Tagore

December 4 *** Namaste: "I greet the light in you."Hindi greeting

December 5 *** I was dead, but now you've come, I live again. Bushmen greeting

December 6 *** When we put them back into our everyday life they will be somehow ennobled on our grocery shelves and in our kitchens. When we see them every day they will remind us of this good day... and heaven and earth will not b so far apart. Ordinary things will be signs for us of our neighbours' needs, of our responsibility.Corita Kent

December 7 *** ...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all. G.K. Chesterton

December 8 *** When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements into new things. Look at things until their import, identity, name, use, and description have dissolved. Corita Kent

December 9 *** There was once a man who was successful in all things. He had a fine wife, a loving family, and a craft for which he was justly famous. But still he was not happy. "I want to know Truth," he said to his wife. "Then you should seek her," she replied.

So the man put his house and all his worldly goods in his wife's name (she being adamant on that point) and went out on the road a beggar after Truth. He searched all over the land for Truth. For weeks and miles and months and leagues he searched. Until one day, he heard tell of a cave on a mountaintop. He found the mountain and the cave and within sat Truth. Truth was a wizened old woman with but a single tooth left in her head. Her hair hung down onto her shoulders in lank, greasy strands. The skin on her face was the brown of old parchment and as dry, stretched over prominent bones. But when she beckoned him forward and spoke, her voice was lyrical and pure and it was then that he was sure he had found Truth. He stayed a year and a day with her and learned all that she had to teach. And when the year and a day was up, he stood at the mouth of the cave ready to leave for home, "My Lady Truth," he said, "you have taught me so much and I would do something for you before I leave. Is there anything you wish?" Truth lowered her head and thought. She looked up and said, "When you speak of me, tell them I am young and beautiful."Jane Yolen

December 10 *** William James, a noted scientist and philosopher of the nineteenth century, travelled widely to speak on evolution and the origins of the solar system, among other important scientific subjects of the time. On one occasion, after listening patiently to James' summary of the views of the scientific community, an aging Indian woman approached him from the audience and shared the story of creation from her tradition, which ended with the Earth riding on the back of an enormous turtle. When she was finished, James was determined to convince her that it was a fallacy to believe the Earth rested forever on the laboured shell of a turtle. "Ma'am, I find your story very interesting, but one point is hard for me to reconcile," James said. "If the Earth is supported by the turtle, then what is that holds the turtle up?" "Why, another turtle Mr. James." "But don't you see that there would be nothing to hold up the second turtle?" he asked. To which she replied, "I'm sorry, Mr. James, but it's turtles all the way down."Michael Caduto and Joseph Bruchac

December 11 *** I am your foolish and deceitful, your shrewdness and your joker,

your, demon, your sensuous, your sinister, your ridiculous, your hideous, your fearful, your humiliation, your irrational, your bloodthirsty, your aster, your slave. Your "objectivity" is a weapon constantly taking aim and firing at us. Drawn by colonialism our borders are yours. Our development disagrees with you. Our stability is you nemesis. You think of teams with your making the rules and others playing along.You screw our cultures up with others getting them all wrong. You exclude or trivialize all radical public opposition. Our standards are treacherous, yours are divine. Your experts are functional props, practical tools. You abuse, us, romanticize us, brutalize us, bribe us, exoticize us, dismiss us, invade us, deny us, remove us, colonize us, exploit us, tempt us, reject us, feed us lies, promise us, indoctrinate us, and expect our gratitude. You make costumes out of our culture. Our resources are yours, our rights contemptuous. You fetishize military hardware and ignore the fact of death. You enact high-sounding doctrines where domination is your aim. You set the deadlines, "negotiate" unilaterally, accept only your conditions and refuse to compromise. You are threatened by our activism, our justice and our disobedience. Your "peace process" is anything but. Your "constructive engagement" is destructive tolerance. Aggression is fine if it's in your interests. International law and economic justice are foreign to you. you are a war-fare state, a security state, an intervention state, a client state and a mercenary army. you deny us our humanity and ascribe to us all your crimes. You make us recent enemies and age old slaves. You glorify the weapons of our death and worship our destruction. You opposed diplomacy - it negates force. Payoffs and kill fees, world bodies are at your beck and call. You thrive on greed, corruption, violence, ignorance, addiction, crime, racism, unemployment, poverty, disease, starvation, terror and neglect. You feign disbelief then acquiesce to your lies. Who the fuck are you. Jayce Salloum

December 12 *** 1909: New York CharlotteWhat would happen if a woman woke up one morning changed into a man? What if the family were not a training camp where boys larn to command and girls learn to obey? What if there were daycare for babies, and husbands shared the cleaning and cooking? What if innocence turned into dignity and reason and emotion went arm in arm? What if preachers and newspapers told the truth? And if no one were anyone's property?

So Charlotte Perkins Gilman raves, while the press attacks her, calling her an unnatural mother. Yet the fantasies that inhabit her soul and bite at her guts attack ger far more fiercely. It is they,

those terrible enemies inside, that sometimes bring her down. She falls but recovers again, some impulse to go forward never abandoning her entirely. This stubborn wayfarer travels tirelessly around the United States, announcing a world upside down.Eduardo Galeano

December 13 *** 1945: Princeton EinsteinAlbert Einstein feels as if his own hand had pressed the button. Although he didn't make it, the atomic bomb wouldn't have been possible without his discoveries about the liberation of energy. Now Einstein would like to have been someone else, to have devoted himslef to some inoffensive task like fixing drains or building walls instead of investigating the secrets of life that others now use to destroy it.

When he was a boy, a professor said to him: "You'll never amount to anything."

Daydreaming, with the expression of someone on the moon, he wondered how light would look to a person able to ride on a beam. When he became a man, he found the answer in the theory of relativity, won a Nobel Prize, and deserved many more for his answers to other questions born in his mind of the mysterious link between Mozart's sonatas and the theorem of Pythagoras, or of the defiant arabesques that the smoke from his extra-long pipe drew in the air.

Einstein believed that science was a way of revealing the beauty of the universe. The most famous of sages has the saddest eyes in human history.Eduardo Galeano

December 14 *** 1701: Salinas Valley The Skin of GodThe Chirigua Indians of the Guarani people sailed down the Pilcomayo River years or centuries ago, and reached the frontier of the empire of the Incas. Here they remained, beneath the first of these Andean heights, awaiting the land without evil and without death. The Chiriguans discover paper, the written word, the printed word, when after a long journey the Fransiscan monks of Chuquisaca appear carrying sacred books in theor saddlebags. As they didn't know paper or that they needed it, the Indians had no word for it. Today they give it the name skin of God, because paper is for sending messages to friends far away.Eduardo Galeano

December 15 ***

The Ceiba Tree"Good evening,mother Ceiba. Bless you." The imposing ceiba tree is a mystery. The ancestors and the gods favor it. The flood respected it. It is secure from lightenings and hurricanes. One may not turn one's back on it or walk in its shade without permission. Anyone striking an ax to its sacred trunk feels the ax-blow on his own body. They say that at times it consents to die by fire, fire being its favorite son. It opens when you ask it for shelter, and to defend the fugitive it covers itself with thorns.Eduardo Galeano

December 16 *** The SinnerOne afternoon, as the Blue Donkey was reciting some verse before an audience, an ordinary grey donkey marched up to her, fell at her feet and cried out in a loud voice, 'Sister, I have sinned! I seek absolution.' The Blue Donkey was most embarrassed. She bent down and whispered hurriedly, 'Oh do get up. As for sinning, please, that's quite all right.' 'But you don't understand,' the grey donkey moaned. 'You are my sister, and it's against you I have sinned.' Now the Blue Donkey was perfectly sure that the donkey at her feet was not her sister. 'Please,' she said politely, 'there must be some mistake. I am not your sister. Indeed, I don't think we've met. So, you see, there's no need to moan. You can't have sinned.' 'Oh yes I have.' The donkey at her feet refused to budge. 'I have been snotty and snobbish and often thought to myself that I despise blue donkeys and would never go near one or have one for a friend.' 'Well there you are.' The Blue Donkey was losing patience. 'That's an excellent reason for removing yourself.' 'But you must listen. I've changed completely,' the grey donkey wailed. 'I believe in sisterhood. I'm going to be your friend.' The Blue Donkey hesitated; there were limits, she decided, even to good manners. 'No,' she replied. 'No. that won't do at all.' 'What? After everything I've said? Who exactly do you think you are?' The grey donkey was beside herself. 'Well,' the Blue Donkey soothed, 'you asked for absolution, but you haven't done penance.' 'What must I do?' 'Fall at the feet of the other donkeys here and explain to them - as you did to me - that you excuse their greyness.' 'But - I don't understand.' The Blue Donkey pushed her away. 'Why let that stop you? They, I am sure, will make you understand.'Suniti Namjoshi

December 17 *** And, on the eighth day, it is said, God invented storytelling.

Midrash

December 18 *** The grass and the trees are our flesh, the animals are our flesh. Susie Tutcho, Fort Franklin

December 19 *** We are not looking back. We do not want to remain static. We do not want to stop the clock of time. Our old people, when they talk about how the Dene ways should be kept by young people... they are not looking back, they are looking forward. They are looking as far ahead into the future as they possibly can. So are we all. George Erasmus, Yellowknife

December 20 *** One lady never wants to get married, so her father asks her to marry a dog and she does. When she gets children, they are puppies, so she puts them into the bottom of her boots and lets them float away, out into the sea. The ones she tells: 'You will be white people, kablunaat, and you will make things, big things, smart, intelligent.' The others she tells: 'You will be Indians, you will hunt with bow and arrow.' And they disappear. That is why kablunaat have so much hair and are coloured like dogs. We call ourselves Inuit, human beings, not animals. But we call you Inuit anyway when we see you in distance. Armand Taqurnaaq, Baker Lake

December 21 *** Between Kosev and Kitev there's a forest where the Baal Shem Tov goes walking. The Baal Shem Tov was a healer and a teacher and a bit of a heretic. He led a movement of renewal in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe in the 18th century. He is the legendary founder of the Hassidim. And he was a great storyteller. In the days of the Baal Shem Tov, whenever the community was threatened by a pogrom or by a natural disaster, he would go to a secret place in the forest and make a sacred fire. And then he would say a prayer, and the catastrophe would be averted. After his death, in the next generation, his disciple, the Maggid of Mezritch, would go to the same place, but he would say, ribbono shel olam, God, I can no longer make the sacred fire, but I still know how to find this place, and I can still say the prayer and that must be sufficient. And it was sufficient. And again the catastrophe was averted. Now, in the third generation, Moyshe Leyb of Sassov, who was the disciple of the Maggid of Mezritch, would go to the same place in the forest, and he would say, ribbono shel olam, God, I never knew

how to maken the sacred fire, and I have forgotten the prayer, but I still know how to find this place, and that must be sufficient. And it was sufficient. And again, the catastrophe was averted. Now, in our time, we say, ribbono shel olam, God, the way of making the sacred fire is long-forgotten, and we too have forgotten the prayer, and we can no longer find the place; all we know is the story and this we can tell and that must be sufficient. And it was. December 22 *** PEOPLE IN MY FAMILYIn my familypeople who are 82 are very differentfrom people who are 92 The 82-year old people grew upThe year was 1914This is what they knew World War IWar World War WarThat's why when they speak to the grandchildthey say poor little one The 92-year old people grew upThe year was 1905

They went to prisonThey went into exileThey said ah soon

That's why when they speak to the grandchildthey say first there will be revolutionthen there will be revolution then once morethen the earth itself will turn and turnand cry out Oh I have been made sick

then you my little budwill flower and save it.

Grace Paley

December 23 *** It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poetIt is the responsibility of the poet to be a womanIt is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners

giving out poems and beautifully written leafletsalso leaflets they can hardly bear to look atbecause of the screaming rhetoric

It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy to hang out andprophecy

It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxesIt is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory

towers and two-room apartments on avenue Cand buckwheat fields and army camps

It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a womanIt is the responsibility of the female poet to be a womanIt is the poet's responsibility to speak truth to power as the

Quakers sayIt is the poet's responsibility to learn the truth from the

powerlessIt is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no

freedom without justice and this means economicjustice and love justice

It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all theoriginaland traditional tunes of singing and telling poems

It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass iton in the way story tellers decant the story of life

There is no freedom without fear and bravery. There is nofreedom unlessearth and air and water continue and children also continue

It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye onthis world and cry out like Cassandra, but belistened to this time.

Grace Paley

December 24 *** THE NAMESI didn't write them on the roof-beams because they were famous, but because they were companions. Rojas Gimenez, the nomad, nocturnal, pierced with the grief of farewells, dead with joy, pigeon breeder, madman of the shadows. Joaquin Cifuentes, whose verses rolled like stones in the river. Federico, who made me laugh like no one else could and who put us all in mourning for a century, Paul Eluard, whose foget-me-not color eyes are as sky-blue as always and retain their blue strength under the earth. Miguel Henandez, whistling to me like a nightingale from the trees on Princesa Street until they caged my nightingale. Nazim, noisy bard, brave gentleman, friend. Why did they leave so soon? Their names will not slip from the rafters. Each one of them was a victory. Together they were the sum of my light. Now, a small anthology of my sorrows.Pablo Neruda

December 25 *** Once there was a very old man who used to meditate early every morning under a large tree on the bank of the Ganges River in India. One morning, having finished his meditation, the old man

opened his eyes and saw a scorpion floating helplessly in the strong current of the river. As the scorpion was pulled closer to the tree,it got caught in the long tree roots that branched out far into the river. The scorpion struggled frantically to free itself but got more and more entangled in the complex network of the tree roots. When the old man saw this, he immediately stretched himself onto the extended tree roots and reached out to rescue the drowning scorpion. But as soon as he touched it, the animal jerked and stung him wildly. Instinctively, the man withdrew his hand, but then having regained his balance, he once again stretched himself out along the roots to save the agonized scorpion. But every time the old man came within reach, the scorpion stung him so badly with its poisonous tail that his hands became bloody and his face distorted by pain. At that moment, a passer-by saw the old man stretched out on the roots struggling with the scorpion and shouted, "Hey, stupid old man, what's wrong with you? Only a fool risks his life for the sake of an uglu, useless creature. Don't you know that you may kill yourself to save that ungrateful animal?" Slowly the old man turned his head and, looking calmly in the stranger's eyes, he said, "Friend, because it is the nature of the scorpion to sting, why should I give up my own nature to save?"

December 26 *** A turtle and a scorpion met a river bank one day. "Please, friend turtle," said the scorpion, "can you help get to the other side of the river?" The turtle lookied skeptically at the small scorpion and said, "you are a poisonous beast and I am afraid that, as is your nature, you will sting me to death, should I let you near enough to me." "I am desperate to reach the other side," said the scorpion. "Please help me and I promise not to sting you." "What guarantee can you give me of this?" asked the turtle. The scorpion thought for a moment and said, "Look, I would be a fool to sting you while we cross, would I not, for surely it would mean my own death as well. When we are close to the far bank you can make me climb away on a tree root. You will be safe. You have my promise." The turtle was persuaded by this reasoning and said, "Okay, get on my head then." The scorpion climbed on the turtle and they set off. Halfway across the river, as the turtle negotiated the strongest current the scorpion stung the turtle. The turtle died and the scorpion drowned in the roiling current.

December 27 *** I want to beg you as much as I can... to be patient toward all that is unsloved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Do not now seek answers that cannot be given you because you

would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.Rainer Maria Rilke

December 28 *** King Solomon once commanded his councillors to fashion him a ring and inscribe on it something that when read would turn his mood of joy to sorrow, and a mood of sorrow to joy. The councillors worried over this conundrum for some time and after much thought and work presented Solomon with a ring. Solomon took the ring and was pleased when he read the inscription: This Too Shall Pass.

December 29 *** Whenever you are in doubt or the self becomes too much with you, try the following expedient: Recall the face of the poorest and most helpless person you have ever seen and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be for any use to him or to her... Then you will find your doubts and your self melting away. Gandhi

December 30*** A stream was working itself across the country, experiencing little difficulty. It ran around the rocks and through the mountains. Then it arrived at a desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared. After many attempts it became very discouraged. It appeared that there was no way it could continue the journey. Then a voice came in the wind. "If you stay the way you are you cannot cross the sands, you cannot become more than a quagmire. To go further you will have to lose yourself." "But if I lose myself," the stream cried, "I will never know what I am supposed to be." "O, on the contrary, if you lose yourself you will become more than you ever dreamed you could be." So the stream surrendered to the dying sun. And the clouds into which it was formed were carried by the raging wind for many miles. Once it crossed the desert, the stream poured down from the skies, fresh and clean, and full of the energy that comes from storms. Sufi tale

December 31 *** I am not going to resign. Placed in a critical moment of history, I will pay with my life for the loyalty of the people. And let me tell you that I am sure the seed we sowed in the dignified conscience of

Chileans will definitely not be destroyed. They have the force. They might be able to overcome us, but social processes cannot be stopped with crime or force. History is ours and the people make it... Workers of my country: I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will surmount this grey and bitter moment, much sooner than later, great avenues will once again open up through which free mankind shall pass to build a better society. Long live Chile, long live the people, long live the workers! These are my last words. I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain. Salvador Allende