Octavia Butler Meditation

"All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God 

is Change."

(am's note: from a set of beliefs called Earthseed that is practiced by the main characters in Parable of the Sower)

“The child in each of us 
Knows paradise.
Paradise is home.
Home as it was 
Or home as it should have been.

Paradise is one's own place,
One's own people,
One's own world,
Knowing and known,
Perhaps even 
Loving and loved.

Yet every child 
Is cast from paradise-
Into growth and new community,
Into vast, ongoing
Change.” ― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” ― Octavia E. Butler

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.” ― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

With gratitude to Rosemarie at 37 Paddington for bringing the work of Octavia Butler to my attention last year.  Along with Toni Morrison and, in the past few days, Daša Drndić, I know of no writer who has reached me and moved me on a visceral level in the way that Octavia Butler did in Parable of the Sower.