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Quote by Algernon Blackwood

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The Listener and Other Stories

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Author

Algernon Blackwood
Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood was an English writer known for his supernatural and horror fiction. His works often explore the boundaries between human consciousness and the supernatural, enjoying great popularity among readers. more

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“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.”

NatureHealingDespairEcologyIndigenousRestorationEnvironmentalismReciprocityIndigenous WisdomEcological Restoration
Book:Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
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“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.”

DespairAutumnNovember
Book:A Play of the Cosmos: Script of the Stars
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“Under ground, under ground! Down in the safe soft womb of earth, where there is no getting of jobs or losing of jobs, no relatives or friends to plague you, no hope, fear, ambition, honour, duty - no duns of any kind. That was where he wished to be. Yet it was not death, actual physical death, that he wished for. It was a queer feeling that he had. It had been with him ever since that morning when he woke up in the police cell. The evil, mutinous mood that comes after drunkenness seemed to have set into a habit. That drunken night had marked a period in his life. It had dragged him downward with strange suddenness. Before, he had fought against the money-code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself - to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being underground. He liked to think about the lost people, the underground people, tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition.”

DespairSinkingSelf DestructionLowSinkUnderground
Book:Keep the Aspidistra Flying
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