Category: landscape

A lane of Yellow led the eye
Unto a Purple Wood
Whose soft inhabitants to be
Surpasses solitude
If Bird the silence contradict
Or flower presume to show
In that low summer of the West
Impossible to know -

Emily Dickinson

Through the young and awkward hours
my lady perfectly moving,
through the new world scarce astir
my fragile lady wandering
in whose perishable poise
is the mystery of Spring
(with her beauty more than snow
dexterous and fugitive
my very frail lady drifting
distinctly, moving like a myth
in the uncertain morning, with
April feet like sudden flowers

From “Puella Mea” [Through the young and awkward hours], E. E. Cummings

‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, […], who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”

“Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.” – Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses.

As a form, it is both specific, that is, recognizable, and infinitely transmutable; it transforms itself easily to thrive in different times and places.

Always situated in a particular place, a territory, a neighborhood, a forest, a specific milieu, the commune form is about “producing” spaces

– Kristin Ross

“Let me start again. Paradox is not new. In this unsteady
moment, being okay with uncertainty is what I
need to do to have a calm sense of anything. “

Abecedarian at the Threshold, Laura Van Prooyen (SWWIM)

Winter Worm, Summer Grass, Mimosa Echard. Longlati Foundation.

Arizona, John Edgar Wideman (NewYorker). Always!!

The community programs obviously addressed real needs. Objectively, however, they were more important to the existence of the party as an organization than they were to the survival of the black community. Survival programs were originally instituted not only to serve the people but also to improve the party’s image in the black community by providing positive, disciplined activities for the membership.

The Panther Party also envisioned the community programs as introducing socialism in practical and concrete terms. Donations solicited from businesses were a means of redistributing wealth from the haves to the have-nots.

Survival pending revolution : the history of the Black Panther Party, Paul Alkebulan. 2007.

and lose himself in the mechanics of the ordinary

was there any point in being alive without helping one another?

the small things […] when added up, amounted to a life.

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (Oprah’s Book Club)