“
A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.
(pg. 63, "Racism and the Economy")
”
”
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
“
My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.
”
”
Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow)
“
The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.
”
”
Wendell Berry (The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership)
“
The Earth is so integral in the unity of its functioning that every aspect of the Earth is affected by what happens to any component member of the community. Because of its organic quality, Earth cannot survive in fragments….The integral functioning of the planet must be preserved.
”
”
Thomas Berry
“
Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.
(pg.95, "The Body and the Earth")
”
”
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
“
Theoretically, there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have. But then this person must meet herself coming beck. Theoretically, there always is a better inhabitant of this place, a better member of this community, a better worker, spouse, and friend than she is. This surely describes one of the circles of Hell, and who hasn't traveled around it a time or two?
”
”
Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow)
“
If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.
”
”
Wendell Berry (The Hidden Wound)
“
All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude.
”
”
Wendell Berry (Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food)
“
All right then. In that case, I only have one question.” Kyoshi cast her gaze around the room. “Are you sure this is all of you?” The Triad members glanced at each other. Mok’s face swelled with rage, reddening like a berry in the sun. It wasn’t insolence so much as pragmatism, her instinct for tidiness and efficiency rising to the surface. “If not, I can wait until everyone arrives,” Kyoshi said. “I don’t want to have to go back and check each floor.” “Tear her apart!” Mok screamed. The hatchet men charged from all directions. Kyoshi drew one of her fans. Two would have been a bit much.
”
”
F.C. Yee (Avatar: The Shadow of Kyoshi (The Kyoshi Novels, #2))
“
Especially the call for a 28th Amendment. Alex had long been a proponent of changing the Constitution to ensure that every federal statute also applied equally to members of Congress. He’d hated how the legislative branch liked to exempt itself from laws imposed on everyone else, elevating Congress into some sort of ruling class.
”
”
Steve Berry (The Lost Order (Cotton Malone #12))
“
The idea that people can be improved by being offended will finally have to meet the idea (espoused some of the time by some of the same people) that books, popular songs, movies, television shows, sex videos, and so on are "just fiction" or "just art" and therefore exist "for their own sake" and have no influence. To argue that works of art are "only" fictions or self-expressions and therefore cannot cause bad behavior is to argue also that they cannot cause good behavior. It is, moreover, to make an absolute division between art and life, experience and life, mind and body - a division that is intolerable to anyone who is at all serious about being a human or a member of a community or even a citizen.
”
”
Wendell Berry (THE ART OF THE COMMONPLACE The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
“
Theoretically, there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have. But then this person must meet herself coming back: Theoretically, there always is a better inhabitant of this place, a better member of this community, a better worker, spouse, and friend than she is. This surely describes one of the circles of Hell, and who hasn’t traveled around it a time or two?
”
”
Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow)
“
He’d ventured from the White House only to say goodbye to a former friend—Warren Davis of South Carolina, elected twice to Congress, once as an ally, a Jacksonian Democrat, the other as a Nullifier. His enemy, the former vice president John C. Calhoun, had concocted the Nullifier Party, its members actually believing that states could choose what federal laws they wanted to obey. The devil’s work was how he’d described such foolishness. There’d be no country if the Nullifiers had their way—which, he supposed, was their entire intent. Thankfully, the Constitution spoke of a unified government, not a loose league where everyone could do as they pleased. People, not states, were paramount.
”
”
Steve Berry (The Jefferson Key (Cotton Malone, #7))
“
Let's see, we've got the Empress of Manticore, the President of the Republic of Haven, the Protector of Grayson, the chairman of the Beowulf Board of Directors, Queen Berry, and the Andermani emperor's first cousin. Not to mention your own humble self as Steadholder Harrington and the commander of the Grand Fleet, followed by a scattering of mere planetary grand dukes, dukes, earls, members of the Havenite cabinet, three other members of the Beowulf Board of Directors, the chairman of the Alliance joint chiefs of staff, the First Space Lord, the Havenite chief of naval operations, the Beowulfan chief of naval operations, High Admiral Yanakov, Admiral Yu, two or three dozen ambassadors, and God alone only knows who else.
”
”
David Weber (A Rising Thunder (Honor Harrington, #13))
“
As you’ll remember, the first generation of iPhones had a tendency to disconnect in the middle of calls. The obligatory antenna required in the phone did not deliver. It wasn’t until Apple fixed that problem that the iPhone moved from Apple baseline cult first generation adopters (its Genre experts) to middle managers abandoning their BlackBerrys. The core fanatics cut Apple some slack on the first iteration of the iPhone, but they didn’t evangelize to non-cult members until all of the bugs were out of it. It’s the very same thing for books. Win over the experts and keep banging away at the keyboard. When you’ve knocked out something extraordinary, the experts will beat down their neighbors’ doors to get them to read your book.
”
”
Shawn Coyne (The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know)
“
In the Gospels the sinfulness of all humans is assumed. It is neediness that is exceptional, and in Jesus’s ministry need clearly takes a certain precedence over sin. His kindness is best exemplified by his feedings and healings with no imputation at all of deserving. But the wealth of this idea of kindness is not exhausted by kindnesses to humans. It is far more encompassing. From some Christians as far back as the twelfth century, certainly from farther back in so-called primitive cultures, and from some ecologists of our own time, we have the idea of a great kindness including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water, the air, the stones. All, ultimately, are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in this world. From the point of view of Genesis 1 or of the 104th Psalm, we would say that all are of one kind, one kinship, one nature, because all are creatures. Much happiness, much joy, can come to us from our membership in a kindness so comprehensive and original. It is a shame, as I know from long acquaintance with myself, to be divided from it by the autoerotic pleasure of despising other members.
”
”
Wendell Berry (Our Only World: Ten Essays)
“
What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on. If you could go back into the story of Uncle Ive and Verna Shoals, you would find, certainly before and maybe after, somebody who loved them both. It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.
”
”
Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow)
“
A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one Creation, and we are its members.
”
”
Wendell Berry (What Are People For?)
“
We know pretty well the makeup of the party of the global economy, but who are the members of the party of local community? They are people who take a generous and neighborly view of self-preservation; they do not believe that they can survive and flourish by the rule of dog eat dog; they do not believe that they can succeed by defeating or destroying or selling or using up everything but themselves. They doubt that good solutions can be produced by violence. They want to preserve the precious things of nature and of human culture and pass them on to their children. They want the world's fields and forests to be productive; they do not want them to be destroyed for the sake of production. They know you cannot be a democrat (small d ) or a conservationist and at the same time a proponent of the supranational corporate economy. They believe-they know from their experience-that the neighborhood, the local community, is the proper place and frame of reference for responsible work. 'They see that no commonwealth or community of interest can be defined by greed. They know that things connect-that farming, for example, is connected to nature, and food to farming, and health to food-and they want to preserve the connections. They know that a healthy local community cannot be replaced by a market or an entertainment industry or an information highway. They know that contrary to all the unmeaning and unmeant political talk about "job creation," work ought not to be merely a bone thrown to otherwise unemployed. They know that work ought to be necessary; it ought to be good, it ought to be satisfying and dignifying to the people who do it, and genuinely useful and pleasing to the people for whom it is done.
”
”
Wendell Berry
“
Yet biologists feel that animals are no strangers to aesthetic expression. The New Guinean bowerbird's nest decorations are as good an example as any. The thatched nests can be so large and well-constructed that they once were mistaken for the huts of timid people, who never showed up. The nests often have a doorway with carefully arranged colorful objects, such as berries, flowers, or iridescent beetle wings. The male who built the bower keeps flying in new ornaments, shifting everything around with a critical eye, fussing over the arrangement, moving back to look at the whole from a distant anglelike a human painter with his painting-and then continuing the rearrangement. He is very sensitive to the fading of his flowers, replacing them with fresh ones as soon as necessary. Young males build crude "practice" bowers, tearing them down, then starting over again, until the construction holds up as it should. They also frequently visit the completed bowers of adult males in the neighborhood and see how the ornaments are laid out. There are ample learning opportunities here, and it has been noted that bower decorations differ in color and arrangement from region to region, which suggests culturally transmitted styles.
Is this art? One could counter that it isn't: howerbird males are genetically programmed to engage in this activity just to attract females. Yet, while it is true that females select mates on nest quality and their equivalent of a stamp collection, the argument is not nearly as good as it sounds. To contrast these birds with our species requires that one demonstrates that human art does not rest on an inborn aesthetic sense and is produced purely for its own sake, not to impress anyone else. Both are unlikely. In fact, Geoffrey Miller argues in a recent book that impressing others, especially members of the opposite sex, may be the whole point of human art!
What if our artistic impulse is ancient, antedating modern humanity, and perhaps even our species? What if it rests on a delight in self-created visual effects and a penchant for certain color combinations, shapes, and visual equilibriums that we share with other animals? Would admission in any of these areas diminish the significance of and pleasure derived from human art? Isn't it possible that our basic distinctions in art, our musical scales, and our preference for symmetrical compositions, go deeper than culture, and relate to basic features of our perceptual systems?
”
”
Frans de Waal (The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist)
“
Buckingham, Nicks’s former lover and a bandmate of hers since the late ’60s, when both were members of a Bay Area group called Fritz, admits to having always considered her songs “a little flaky.” But, “there’s obviously something about her material that people relate to. She’s always been a little bit hard for me to take seriously, because I really appreciate a beat, having been weaned on Elvis and Little Richard and Chuck Berry.
”
”
Sean Egan (Fleetwood Mac on Fleetwood Mac: Interviews and Encounters (Musicians in Their Own Words Book 10))
“
We were wrapping up our Monday morning Risk Committee meeting, which was basically twelve of the firm’s most senior staff members sitting around the big conference table and voting on which cases to take and which to turn down. It was your typical undercaffeinated Monday morning gathering: stifled yawns and low energy, throat-clearing and doodling, and furtive glances at BlackBerrys. Except for Jay, who paced around the room because he couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes.
”
”
Joseph Finder (Vanished (Nick Heller, #1))
“
Continuing pursuit of the ideal of service and not profit. 2. Continuing primary and sincere concern for the care and welfare of each individual patient. 3. Continuing interest by every member of the staff in the professional progress of every other member.
”
”
Leonard L. Berry (Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic)
“
when a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another. How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help each other, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lose one another’s help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued.
”
”
Wendell Berry
“
The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.
”
”
Wendell Berry (It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays)
“
The agency had set up fake local internet cafes equipped with key-logging software. This allowed GCHQ to hack delegates’ passwords, which could be exploited later. GCHQ also penetrated their BlackBerrys to monitor email messages and phone calls. A team of 45 analysts kept a real-time log of who phoned whom during the summit. Turkey’s finance minister and 15 other members of his delegation were among the targets. This had, of course, nothing whatever to do with terrorism. The
”
”
Luke Harding (The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man)
“
p. 371 – 372
Living in a paradise of magnificent meadows and forests abundant with wild game, berries, and nuts, the Utes were self-supporting and could have existed entirely without the provisions doled out to them by their agents at Los Pinos and White River. In 1875 agent F. F. Bond at Los Pinos replied to a request for a census of his Utes: “A count is quite impossible. You might as well try to count a swarm of bees when on the wing. They travel all over the country like the deer which they hunt.” Agent E. H. Danforth at White River estimated that about nine hundred Utes used his agency as a headquarters, but he admitted that he had no luck in inducing them to settle down in the valley around the agency. At both places, the Utes humoured their agents by keeping small beef herds and planting a few rows of corn, potatoes, and turnips, but there was no real need for any of these pursuits.
The beginning of the end of freedom upon their own reservation came in the spring of 1878, when a new agent reported for duty at White River. The agent’s name was Nathan C. Meeker, former poet, novelist, newspaper correspondent, and organizer of cooperative agrarian colonies. Most of Meeker’s ventures failed, and although he sought the agency position because he needed the money, he was possessed of a missionary fervor and sincerely believed that it was his duty as a member of a superior race to “elevate and enlighten” the Utes. As he phrased it, he was determined to bring them out of savagery through the pastoral stage to the barbaric, and finally to “the enlightened, scientific, and religious stage.” Meeker was confident he could accomplish all this in “five, ten, or twenty years.”
In his humourless and overbearing way, Meeker set out systematically to destroy everything the Utes cherished, to make them over into his image, as he believed he had been made in God’s image.
”
”
Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West)
“
The "environmental crisis," in fact, can be
solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the "environmental crisis" is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an "environmental crisis" because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world.
”
”
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)
“
And now above and beyond the birds' song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light's music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light.
”
”
Wendell Berry (Remembering)
“
Indie House's members behave like a post-modern nuclear family, with each person alternating the role of parent. Sometimes Johnston cooks and sometimes Berry cleans; somehow everything gets done and the house stays standing. (You might even call the place clean, if you ignored the mountain of loose Netrunner cards stacked between the living room and kitchen.)
”
”
Anonymous
“
Berry and three other old Etonians, James Bolton, Alex Lyle and Christian De Lotbiniere, were the brains behind “Ski Bob” travel. This was a company, named after their Eton housemaster Bob Baird, which had been formed when they discovered that they were too young legally to book holidays themselves. So these young entrepreneurs started their own company and within the twenty-strong group, which mainly compromised old Etonians, the greatest accolade was to be called “Bob.”
Diana was soon Bob, Bob, Bobbing along. “You’re skating on thin ice,” she yelled in her Miss Piggy voice as she skied dangerously close behind members of the group. She joined in the pillow fights, charades, and satirical singsongs. Diana was teased mercilessly about a framed photograph of Prince Charles, taken at his Investiture in 1969, which hung in her school dormitory. Not guilty, she said. It was a gift to the school. When she stayed in the Berry chalet she slept on the living-room sofa. Not that she got much sleep. Medical student, James Colthurst, liked to regale the slumbering throng with unwelcome early morning renditions of Martin Luther King’s famous “I had a dream” speech or his equally unamusing Mussolini impersonation.
”
”
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
“
To Berry, the solution to the race problem was the rediscovery of community. And unlike the Twelve Southerners, Berry argued that the antebellum South never developed true communities as he understood the term, as “community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any of its members.
”
”
George Hawley (Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism)
“
In one of Wendell Berry’s short stories, the character Burley Coulter says: “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”16
”
”
C. Christopher Smith (Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus)
“
Are you familiar with an organization called Love International?” she asked. I whipped around to see Dad’s reaction. His first response would be my clue to how he felt, since he’d gotten so good at wearing a neutral face for me over the years. “Yes, she wrote an amazing piece on them the year she went missing, and she was a member of their organization. Do they have something to do with this?” Confusion twisted his expression. Camille nodded. “It appears that she’s been with them since she went missing.
”
”
Lucinda Berry (When She Returned)
“
The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't." Burley Coulter
”
”
Wendell Berry (The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership)
“
You wear a crown of roses.
You’ve fully entered the next phase of your life: a crone and member of the wise council of women.
You will be a part of the shift of ages.
You will keep the flame of women’s work and women’s stories alive. You will change the world by doing so.
It turns out, you’ve been a fire-walker your whole life.
Now, you will teach others.
”
”
Shavawn M. Berry (Evanescent Creature: Poems & Meditations)
“
But, as field supervisor, he’d ordered the tape destroyed to protect the identity of the interrogators. Which drew the attention of Congress. What had Mark Twain said? Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Yep.
”
”
Steve Berry (The Last Kingdom (Cotton Malone, #17))
“
The White Rose student resistance movement to Hitler also rose here, its core members all arrested and executed. But at least they tried. Seventy
”
”
Steve Berry (The Last Kingdom (Cotton Malone, #17))
“
And so there is the Territory of self-righteousness. It is easy to assume that we do not participate in what we are not in the presence of. But if we are members of a society, we participate, willy-nilly, in its evils.
”
”
Wendell Berry (What Are People For?)
“
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
”
”
Steve Berry (The Last Kingdom (Cotton Malone, #17))
“
When he “stood up against this southern way of life,” he had to stand alone; the other members of the union fled. He knew the exultation of his stand: “That made me merry in a way. I done what was right . . . ”But he also knew its tragedy: “When they shot me it didn’t shake me, when they arrested me it didn’t shake me. But it shook me to see my friends was but few.
”
”
Wendell Berry (What Are People For?)
“
This Nutrition Hacks Blood Balance Formula is made of White Mulberry Leaf extricate. The promising part about this fixing is that it welcomes a stunning impact on your general glucose levels. Along with that, it causes you shed down and lose weight. Juniper Berry is another fixing which is a significant piece of this enhancement. This fixing is a characteristic cancer prevention agent. It includes calming properties and keeps you made sure about against type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Below we have recorded down further fixings without them this item is nothing! These fixings are likewise natural, regular and sound. Furthermore, cases to give 100% good results. The job of Magnesium is to go about as one of the central members as for improving your overall wellbeing. It protects you from ischemic coronary illness, diabetes just as from uneasiness issues, and obesity. Zinc go about as indispensable fixing. It figures out how to improve and improve your prosperity, notwithstanding, it update protein amalgamation and help out your body with respect to tissue fixing. Vanadium is a sort of mineral present in Blood Balance Formula. ts significant job and capacity is to decrease insulin levels. Visit Official Website to Guaranteed Lowest Price in Market Nutrition Hacks Blood Balance Formula Pills:
”
”
Which Make Nutrition Hacks Blood Balance Formula Unique Ingredients?
“
Though self-abandonment is something most people struggle with in some way or another, motherhood is a breeding ground for this insidiously self-destructive behavior. From the time children are born, their needs are intense, relentless, and literally screamed in our faces. Luckily for them (and the human race) we are biologically wired to respond to their needs, even when it means setting aside our own. While our nurturing, self-sacrificial instincts are beautiful and life preserving, they’re also a fast track to burnout, resentment, exhaustion, and destruction, if we’re not careful. It’s natural to minimize our needs in the interest of the beautiful beings we love, but it’s not natural that we’re raising our children in isolation and that the bulk of their needs are falling on one person instead of a tribe of extended family members and friends. This, and other profoundly affecting gaps within our culture, makes self-awareness and self-nurturing that much more essential. Unfortunately for some of us, it isn’t until we’re so emotionally or physically wrecked by our self-abandonment that we realize how disconnected from crucial parts of ourselves we really are.
”
”
Beth Berry (Motherwhelmed)
“
One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction. Imagine a Sapiens band reaching a Balkan valley where Neanderthals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years. The newcomers began to hunt the deer and gather the nuts and berries that were the Neanderthals’ traditional staples. Sapiens were more proficient hunters and gatherers – thanks to better technology and superior social skills – so they multiplied and spread. The less resourceful Neanderthals found it increasingly difficult to feed themselves. Their population dwindled and they slowly died out, except perhaps for one or two members who joined their Sapiens neighbours. Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
I have tried not to call her my mother. I started to believe that a person cannot own land or a family member.
”
”
Terese Marie Mailhot (Heart Berries)
“
(This was the Second Great Awakening, a massive movement for religious revival. Before it began in the 1790s, about one in ten Americans were members of churches, but by its end in the 1840s, eight in ten were.)
”
”
Kate R Walker (The Through Line: 200 Years of the Berry Street Essay)