“In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
—W. E. B. Du Bois
Dear Family,
Mom noted today that I’m not doing anyone any favors by spewing anger concerning the COVID lockdowns. She said it more nicely than that, but I kinda got her drift. Love is better than hate and Little Pitchers Have Big Ears and all that.
“Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.”
Dear Family,
"The notion that we need the same type of economic system for all areas of life is ridiculous. For big things like cars, airplanes, computers, etc, capitalism is appropriate and works very well. For public services, education, utilities and (I believe) natural resources, a kind of socialism is the appropriate model. But for things like food, farming, clothing, low-tech manufacturing, etc, the best model is free enterprise (which is different from capitalism)."
—Sally Fallon
——
"In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I"
—Adrienne Rich
——
Dear Family,
Dear Family,
While American unemployment skyrockets and millions of people face Food Insecurity, I wish so much that every human had access to good, safe living conditions and real food to eat, and the luxury to nourish our bodies toward better health and better immunity.
Holding these wishes in my heart, I am now going to tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the crazy dietary adventure we had the luxury to begin last July, which continues to yield amazing if slightly unpredictable results. And I won’t be talking about COVID 19 for the rest of this letter.
“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
― John F. Kennedy (Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962)
——
Ivyisms:
“The more fragmented, the more specialised we become in terms of problem solving, the more problems we create and the less we solve. I have a need to address my life-threatening illness with alternative techniques, but the caveat there is that the treatment of symptoms can pre-empt the search for the ultimate cause of this illness. If we see ourselves as manifestations of this organism that’s called Earth, and we, as a manifestation, are developing absolutely outrageous levels of this illness called cancer, the only thing this can mean is that the organism called Earth has cancer.
“We have peered into a new world, and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way.”
—Vera Rubin
——
Dear Family,