Sixty stories and more to come!
Yesterday I published the 60th story on this site in as many days. There are 20 meaningful tales and 40 inspiring true stories (33 stories about individuals, five on communities and people’s movements, and two from the corporate sector).
From now on, I will be publishing 2-4 stories every week, since I need time for other writing work. I will also try to improve the website.
For today, here are some more quotations on hope and action during dark times. The stories will resume later this week.
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Martin Keogh
If what is happening is so utterly different than anything we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, how do I live in the face of such loss? If our world is really looking down the barrel of an environmental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?
None of us knows for sure which side of the tipping point we are on. But I imagine that you share with me the desire to look back at the end of our lives and feel that we have lived each moment fully engaged, knowing that we’ve each contributed our small share. To do this, we need the humility to recognize that we are not going to figure this out alone. So much of what we face is unfathomable. We need to develop the capacity to reach out to one another, and to call on something intangible beyond ourselves.
Martin Keogh is the founder of The Dancing Ground, an organization that produces conferences and symposia on gender, race, and mythology. He edited the book Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World.
Paul Hawken
If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.
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There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider.
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The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author. He is the author/editor of several books including Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming; Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World; Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution; and The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability.
Michael N. Nagler
All crises are opportunities, if you know how to find them. The crisis we are facing now is huge, simply unprecedented in all of human history; and I believe, logically enough, that the opportunity hidden in its coils is just as great. While there is no guarantee that we’ll take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity, or even that we will make any change at all to save ourselves, it is perfectly possible that in the face of such peril the world can come to its senses, become aware of itself in a much deeper way than ever before and set human progress on a new course.
It is fundamentally a spiritual crisis. All the misguided policy we’re seeing is embedded in a culture; and underlying that culture itself is a disastrously materialistic vision of the human being and reality in general, leading inevitably to emptiness, despair, greed, and violence.
Stop asking people to make do with less. Instead we should be offering them the prospect of shifting their aspirations to something higher, something that will in fact make them happier, more fulfilled, much more efficiently than the consumption of unnecessary goods or services that brings in its wake the inevitable alienation from and competition with others that we see around us.
Michael N. Nagler is an American academic, nonviolence educator, mentor, meditator, and peace activist.
I agree with the statements of Michael N. Nagler. The less one consumes and the less materialistic one is, we contribute a great deal to this world for its sustenance. Happiness does not come because of any possession but comes from spiritual realisation. It is not difficult to reach this stage, but requires a conscious decision to do with less. If you turn around and ask why do we crave and why do we accumulate, it may be answered in two ways. Animal instinct to be superior to others and the other, the fear of the unknown. A fear of the future catastrophe for the ‘I’ as the individual. A collective catastrophe is ignored altogether, because of the cynicism that I may do it but others wont. So why bother. Alternatively, if we, as individuals, can free ourselves from the clutches of the materialistic world and the rate race, I am sure the fragrance can spread around and the light at the end of the tunnel cannot be far off.
“it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, re-imagine, and reconsider”, what a pregnant statement for all of us to believe and hope for.