“I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action. The participatory role of people in the well-being of the land has been lost, our reciprocal relations reduced to a KEEP OUT sign.”
Source: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
“It is not the trauma itself that is the source of illness but the unconscious, repressed, hopeless despair over not being allowed to give expression to what one has suffered and the fact that one is not allowed to show and is unable to experience feelings of rage, anger, humiliation, despair, helplessness, and sadness. This causes many people to commit suicide because life no longer seems worth living if they are totally unable to live out all these strong feelings that are part of their true self.”
Source: For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence
“One day you’ll be blind, like me. You’ll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me.
One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down. Then you’ll say, I’m hungry, I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up. You’ll say, I shouldn’t have sat down, but since I have I’ll sit on a little longer, then I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up and you won’t get anything to eat.
You’ll look at the wall a while, and you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I’ll feel better, and you’ll close them. And when you open them there’ll be no wall any more.
Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.
Yes, one day you’ll know what it is, you’ll be like me, except that you won’t have anyone with you, because you won’t have had pity on anyone and because there ain’t be anyone left to have pity on.”
Source: Endgame
“It is a common trick of Nature – and a profoundly
significant one – that, just when despair is deepest,
she waves a wand before the weary eyes and does
her best to waken an impossible hope.”
Source: The Listener and Other Stories
“Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth… Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. ...
Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.”
Source: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
“How mightily sometimes we make us comforts of our losses!”
Source: All's Well That Ends Well
“This is one of the things I’ve learned about happiness: when you feel it, it’s good to say so. That way, if and when you say later in depression or despair, “I’ve just never been happy,” there will be a trail of audible testimony in your wake indicating otherwise.”
Source: On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
“You can be whatever you want to be. Without a doubt, never doubt yourself.”
Source: The Wall and The Flower: The Wellspring Series Book 1
“Le monde n'a pas d'âge. L'humanité se déplace, simplement.
(The world has no age. Humanity simply changes place.)”
Source: A Season in Hell and the Drunken Boat
“November evenings are often cold and dry. It is a season of loss and a season of despair. The world is brown and yellow and naked. The bears had hibernated and the migrants from the north had moved to the south. It was a time of no harvest – and a time of no plantation. All that the people around knew were to sit around the warmth of the bukharis and spend family time with their loved ones. It was the beginning of the spell of despondency. It was the parallel of summer and the heart the autumn-winter transitions. It was a season of sweaters and yathras and jackets. The earth around was cold and barren.”
Source: A Play of the Cosmos: Script of the Stars