22 Words You Oughtta Read

For a time....(I) am free.

The Peace of Wild Things

BY WENDELL BERRY

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things" from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press.

Source: Collected Poems 1957-1982 (Counterpoint Press, 1985)

"I’ve met very few baby boomer liberals who understand what it means to be a young person facing the reality of climate change. It means that we’re never going to have the opportunities that our parents’ and our grandparents’ generations had, and that we’ve got this massive burden weighing on our future."

"There’s an opportunity now to build a society in the ashes of this one that is much more in line with our values. There’s the opportunity for this disruption to be sort of a mass reflection where we realize that basing society on greed and competition was not the best way to go about things.

Maybe we can do better. But that’s not inevitable any more than the ugly path is inevitable, which to me is why our engagement now is really, really critical."

The Boomers "Failed" Us: Climate Activist Tim DeChristopher on Anger, Love, and Sacrifice

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/the-power-of-story/boomers-failed-us-america-s-most-creative-climate-criminal-anger-love

Memorize this Great World

 “Fight like hell. But be a witness, too. Go see the whales, the rainforests. There’s no guarantee we’ll save them all. Memorize this great world, the one we were born into. Tell others in the future. Their mistakes might be fewer if they know the greatness we once saw.”

~Bill McKibben, 2005, speech at Middlebury College

As cited by Mike Tidwell in his "Rites of Passage" piece:

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/8165