quotes

It took me 30 years to learn that Dr. King was a radical and I didn’t learn about the Poor People’s Campaign he organized before his assassination until this year. (It involved 3,000 people camping on the Washington Mall for 6 weeks! You’d think someone would have mentioned it!)

Anyway, here’s a quote from the man himself:

And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society.

Despite all the work I’ve done on myself, despite trying to reframe creative endeavors as a process, not a binary, I realized I still expect myself to be able to do the new job perfectly after less than a month. Because it’s just writing! I should be able to do that, I’ve done it forever, it’s easy…except when it isn’t.

Austin Kleon linked this last week in his newsletter and it blew my mind. It’s from a book by Verlyn Klinkenborg, as blogged by Mandy Brown:

If you think that writing—the act of composition—should flow, and it doesn’t, what are you likely to feel?
Obstructed, defeated, inadequate, blocked, perhaps even stupid.
The idea of writer’s block, in its ordinary sense, exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow.

But if you accept that writing is hard work, and that’s what it feels like when you’re writing,
then everything is as it should be.
Your labor isn’t a sign of defeat.
It’s a sign of engagement.
The difference is all in your mind, but what a difference.

It’s  a new week and here are some words for it, from Sister Corita Kent.

It’s hard not to look at the date of this (40 years ago) and be discouraged at how far we still have to go to “share as equals” but… the crocuses have always come up.

Hey have you paid attention to the news lately?  Nationally, we get to watch one old white guy with a history of inappropriate touching try to beat another old white guy with a history of inappropriate touching. Globally, we might all die/see the collapse of society as we know it! NOT A GOOD TIME for people with anxiety.

So I’m doing what I can: staying off Twitter, reading books, keeping my personal life raft of loved ones and home and hobbies afloat. And I remembered this post from Austin Kleon, where he shared a quote from Leonard Woolf’s autobiography (it ended up inspiring Kleon’s latest book, Keep Going):

 The last months of peace…were the most terrible months of my life, for, helplessly and hopelessly, one watched the inevitable approach of war. One of the most horrible things at that time was to listen on the wireless to the speeches of Hitler—the savage and insane ravings of a vindictive underdog who suddenly saw himself to be all-powerful. We were in Rodmell during the late summer of 1939, and I used to listen to those ranting, raving speeches. One afternoon I was planting in the orchard under an apple-tree iris reticulata, those lovely violet flowers…Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.” Last March, twenty-one years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.

I was reading Death on the Nile and found this passage:

Jam maker, therapist, world’s greatest detective–what can’t Poirot do?

(Quote via Austin Kleon)