Looking at the mid-June sky / Listening while doing yoga practice / "What If We Get This Right?"

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This poem by a young woman was read during the interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson titled "What If We Get This Right?"

 "On Another Panel About Climate, They Ask Me to Sell the Future and All I’ve Got Is a Love Poem."

“What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.

“Whole cities breathe and bad luck is bested by a promise to the leaves.

“To withstand your own end is difficult.

“The future frolics about, promised to no one, as is her right.

“Rage against injustice makes the voice grow harsher yet.

“If the future leaves without us, the silence that will follow will be an unspeakable nothing.

“What if we convince her to stay?

“How rare and beautiful it is that we exist.

“What if we stun existence one more time?

“When I wake up, get out of bed, my seven year old cousin

“with her ruptured belly tags along.

“Then follows my grandmother, aunts, my other cousins
and the violent shape of their drinking water.

“The earth remembers everything,
our bodies are the color of the earth and we
are nobodies.

“Been born from so many apocalypses, what’s one more?

“Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.

“But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over

“Commit to life unto life, as the trees fall and take us with them.

“I’d follow love into extinction.”

-- Ayisha Saddiqa

(Note:  I was unable to get the font sizes to match each other in this poem which was copied from the transcript of the interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson)

The voice of a 92 year old and the voice of a Vietnam War combat veteran who became a Zen Buddhist and the voice of a Nobel Prize winner and the voice of a commencement speaker

Abe Markman

As a white man living in a black family for the last fifty-eight years, and having served people of color as a social worker in inner cities, I can attest to having prejudice toward blacks and learning how to act without it. The key, I think, is to fully acknowledge it. Malcolm Gladwell discusses this phenomenon in his 2005 book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. He quotes a psychologist, Keith Payne, who writes that, “When we make a split-second decision, we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.” Gladwell goes on to write that when one of our own hidden biases flashes before us, “we need to wait a beat before identifying the object in an unbiased way… the giant computer in our unconscious needs a moment to do its work.” (from an article in The Humanist)

In the following talks, Claude AnShin Thomas addresses what I perceive as the same process of learning not to act out of previous conditioning, of learning to act in ways that don't promote endless suffering.





Claude AnShin Thomas

Again and again, I find myself asking, "How much violence are we willing to tolerate so that we don't have to feel uncomfortable?"  And, "How much violence are we willing to tolerate so that we don't have to alter our lifestyle?" These are questions that echo in my mind as I move from place to place.  They apply not only to the obvious fighting taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan; they address the roots of violence that exist within me and within each one of us.  (from At Hell's Gate, p. 162)

Toni Morrison -- 1993 Nobel Lecture 

... She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience ...

... It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence. 

"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."

(quotes from the Nobel Lecture)

(Transcript from the Nobel Lecture)



Louise Erdrich

"Do your best for this beautiful world." (from the 2009 commencement speech)

This all took some time to listen to.  It was worth the time.