“Sometimes, when I catch myself emptying a bucket of my own shit, butchering a deer, shifting manure in the pissing rain, or doing any of the thousand other small things which make up my life—things that, at other times, would have seemed hare-brained, unethical, absurd—a feeling of ‘how the hell did I get here?’ comes over me. This was never part of the programme. Like everyone, I had dreams of success and the good life, but somewhere along the track, a place I can’t quite put my finger on, the definition of those words began to change, and my life with it.”
— Mark Boyle / Long Way Home: Tales from a life without technology
“The first cop that handcuffed me / [was my father] / left me bound / till my fingers blued.”
— Torrin A. Greathouse / “On Confinement”
“What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
— Henry David Thoreau / “Walking”
“Reflecting here, I think I understand something more of why Henry journaled, and why there is so much good writing in it, so little lazy writing, so many elaborate metaphors and full sentences. Writing is willing permanence.”
— Ben Shattuck / Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
“Draw an imaginary map.
Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go.
Go walking on an actual street according to your map.
If there is no street where it should be according to the map, make one by putting the obstacles aside.
When you reach the goal, ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet.
The map must be followed exactly, or the event has to be dropped all together.
Ask your friends to write maps.
Give your friends maps.”
— Yoko Ono / Map Piece
“… In 2021, full-time, year-round working women typically earned 84 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts … CAP analysis also shows that if the gender wage gap continues to shrink at the rate it has between the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and 2021, median full-time, year-round working women will not achieve pay parity with men until 2056… Women and their families cannot afford another 30 years of suffering the negative economic consequences of the wage gap, and even this rate of progress is not necessarily guaranteed—particularly without any structural change.”
— Rose Khattar & Sara Estep / “What To Know About the Gender Wage Gap as the Equal Pay Act Turns 60” / Center For American Progress
“I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didnt. I dont blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”
— Cormac McCarthy / No Country for Old Men
“When human beings look at other human beings in their midst and instead of seeing other human beings see a threat, see something monstrous, or don’t see at all, our very humanity is at stake.”
— Elizabeth Alexander / The Trayvon Generation
What I’m Listening To:
“I wonder where I am I wonder if the water is swallowing the land I wonder if an image is realer than the thing”
“… human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future … Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics.”
Jamaica Plain, MABridgewater, MAMassasoit State Park, MAEast Bridgewater, MAHingham, MAMilton, MA
What I’m Reading:
“Traveling alone, you get to be whoever you want. I don’t mean lie. I mean you get to be a blank slate. You can’t leave behind your skin color, or your height, or the handsomeness or homeliness of your face. But you can leave your story behind. If you’ve broken hearts, the new place doesn’t know. If you’ve lost trust in people and yourself, the new place doesn’t know.”
— Jedediah Jenkins / To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
“Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.”
— Cormac McCarthy / The Passenger
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?”
— Cormac McCarthy / All the Pretty Horses
“Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.”
— Cormac McCarthy / Suttree
“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever … You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.”
— Cormac McCarthy / The Road
“Your god must once have stood at a dawn of infinite possibilities, and this is what he’s made of it. You tell me that I want God’s love? I don’t.”
— Cormac McCarthy / The Sunset Limited
“The point is there ain’t no point.”
— Cormac McCarthy / No Country for Old Men
“When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?”
— Cormac McCarthy / Stella Maris
What I’m Listening To:
“Now he sits all alone And it’s no place like home It’s empty skin A bag to keep life’s souvenirs in”
thee istsfor manity reader 