Words I Needed Last Week 8/21
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
Words I saved, read, wrote down, and savored last week. From possessing less, to the vocabulary of silence, to the seriousness of language, to attention being prayer, to bearing our transience and minding our business.
Happy Monday, friends.
—Nneka
“The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.”
—Charles Bowden
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”
“I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.”
―Muriel Rukeyser
“Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.”
“Not all speed is movement.”
—Toni Cade Bambara
**Step by step, slow and steady, dust yourself off and stay in the race.
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”
—Simone Weil
“Everything we make, everything we do, is a bid for bearing our transience.”
—Maria Popova
“There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.”
"If, after spending time with a person, you feel as though you've lost a quart of plasma, avoid that person in the future.”
—William S. Burroughs
**Audibly LOL’d at the quart of plasma. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t felt this a few times this year.
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
—James Baldwin
"The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”
—Oscar Wilde
"Not all speed is movement" - This one hit home.
“The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.” — It's this one for me, for sure. Moving towards a space of imagining ease as a norm, being captivated by simplicity, craving it, is very much my vision for life. Thanks for offering these!