Sing in Silence

We struggle not because we think we will win, but because we cannot accept that which exists. Screaming against a system that dehumanises us needs no justification. It is simply an expression of what we understand to be our humanity. Our anti-capitalism is based on the horrors of the capitalist system, not in any confidence that we can create something else. Our struggles are not a means to an end, they are a dignity, a refusal, that arises from the depths of our being.

““Hell is other people” is only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also “Heaven is each other”. Hell is separateness, uncommunicability, self-centeredness, lust for power, for riches, for fame. Heaven on the other hand is very simple, and very hard: caring about your fellow beings. And that’s possible on a sustained basis only in collectivity.”

What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.

“Why love what you will lose? / There is nothing else to love.”

“It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully.”

“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pickup truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”