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Marzo 14, 2010
My apologies to chance...
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as
my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories
fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook
each second.
Wislawa Szymborska, "Under One Small Star"
Posted by sarita at 9:42 PM
The branch that breaks
The branch that breaks
Is called rotten, but
Wasn't there snow on it?
Bertolt Brecht, "On Sterility"
Posted by sarita at 9:42 PM
History says, don't hope
History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
Seamus Heaney, "Voices from Lemnos"
Posted by sarita at 9:42 PM
But the poor person...
If I define my neighbor as the one I must go out to look for, on the highways and byways, in the factories and slums, on the farms and in the mines - then my world changes. This is what is happening with the "option for the poor." for in the gospel it is the poor person who is the neighbor par excellence...
But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible.
They are marginalized by our social and cultural world.
They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.
Gustavo Gutierrez, The Power of the Poor in History
Posted by sarita at 9:41 PM
Pathologies of Power
"This communities of providers and scholars believes that "the vitality of practice" lends a corrective strength to our research and writing."
240 pathologies
"True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity." Freire, quoted in pathologies of power, p 154
Posted by sarita at 3:04 PM
Marzo 11, 2010
Mountain Dulcimer
Where does such sadness in wood come
from? How could longing live in these
wires? The box looks like the most fragile
coffin tuned for sound. And laid
across the knees of this woman
it looks less like a baby nursed
than some symbolic Pietà ,
and the stretched body on her lap
yields modalities of lament
and blood, yields sacrifice and sliding
chants of grief that dance and dance toward
a new measure, a new threshold,
a new instant and new year which
we always celebrate by
remembering the old and by
recalling the lost and honoring
those no longer here to strike these
strings like secrets of the most
satisfying harmonies, as
voices join in sadness and joy
and tell again what we already
know, have always known but forget,
from way back in the farthest cove,
from highest on the peaks of love.
Robert Morgan
Posted by sarita at 12:13 PM
Marzo 8, 2010
Two wolves...
One day an old Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson.
He said, "There are two wolves fighting inside all of us - the wolf of fear and hate, and the wolf of love and peace."
The grandson listened, then looked up at his grandfather and asked, "Which one will win?"
The grandfather replied, "The one we feed."
Posted by sarita at 11:23 AM