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The process of transformation consists mostly of decay.

Rebecca Solnit

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Rebecca Solnit
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: June 26
Art Historian
Author
Environmentalist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Decay
Consists
Mostly
Transformation
Process

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It's hardly surprising that the corporate aliens lie when it comes to the relationship between doing something about climate change and the economy.
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To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.
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I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
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People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.
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The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.
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There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
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To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
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Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
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Anarchists believe that we can govern ourselves in the absence of coercive and centralized authority the underlying premise about human nature (to use an infinitely problematized but necessary term here) is fundamentally positive. And the evidence that in disasters people are really pretty kind, generous, brave, resourceful and creative fed that.
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I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.
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There is no one as dangerous as he or she who has nothing to lose.
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I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.
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Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
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Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.
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For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening.
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The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
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What gets called 'the sixties' left a mixed legacy and a lot of divides. But it opened everything to question, and what seems the most fundamental and most pervasive in all the ensuing changes is the loss of faith in authority: the authority of government, of science, of patriarchy, of progress, of capitalism, of violence, of whiteness.
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The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).
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A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
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Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
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