Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  15. Absalom Jones: Abolitionist Priest 116 Jones wrote to Congress on their behalf. His petition was rejected, but it marked the first petition to Congress by African Americans asserting their natural rights. Two years later, Jones wrote again, this time petitioning against the renewal of the slave trade in Maryland—but his petition was much more than that, implicitly calling for the abolition of slavery. He continued to found organizations for the benefit of his parishioners and the community. In 1804, he became the first Black Episcopal priest in the United States. However, St. Thomas had to strike a bargain for his ordination: The Episcopal authorities would waive requirements for knowledge of Latin and Greek if the church would give up its right to send a representative to the annual meeting where Episcopal policy was made. It must have been a blow, when they had chosen the Episcopalians precisely because they might have more of a voice in their own affairs, but the parishioners evidently considered it worth the sacrifice to have Absalom Jones as their minister. Jones’s ordination should have capped his extraordinary career, but it was only the beginning of his challenges. From 1805 onward, there was a marked atmosphere of hostility toward African American residents in Philadelphia, compounding racism with working Whites’ aggressive territoriality over employment. Jones and his allies were kept busy funding schools to help freed slaves and immigrants gain literacy and job skills, circulating petitions for abolition advocacy, combating dangerous legislation, and providing spiritual support. They also had to fend off recolonization schemes intended to deport free African Americans to either the Appalachians or West Africa. In 1808, Congress finally banned the slave trade. Reverend Jones was perhaps the first Black preacher to begin the tradition of a thanksgiving sermon on January 1, the day the ban was enacted. In a petition to Congress, Jones explicitly likened the Black struggle for freedom from slavery to the country’s struggle for freedom from Great Britain. 117 15. Absalom Jones: Abolitionist Priest Absalom Jones died in 1818 and was mourned by the Black community of Philadelphia as a brave spokesman, staunch leader, and kind minister who knew and carefully tended to each member of his congregation. He is commemorated by the Episcopal Church on February 13. The Episcopal Church raises funds annually for a scholarship to two historically Black colleges and universities in his name. Reading Boles, Richard J. Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Pre s s, 1991.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Besides, he proposed we should occupy the cabin alternate afternoons; for example, he’d take it next day and I mustn’t come near it, and if at any time one of us found the door locked, he was to respect his chum’s privacy. I agreed to it all with enthusiasm and went to sleep in a fever of hope. Would Jessie risk her father’s anger and come to me? Perhaps she would: at any rate I’d write and ask her and I did. In one hour the same sailor came back with her reply. It ran like this: “Dear love, father is mad, we shall have to take great care for two or three days: as soon as it’s safe, I’ll come—your loving Jess”, with a dozen crosses for kisses. That afternoon, without thinking of my compact with Ponsonby, I went to our cabin and found the door locked: at once our compact came into my head and I went quietly away. Had he succeeded so quickly? and was she with him in bed? The half certainty made my heart beat. That evening Ponsonby could not conceal his success but as he used it partly to praise his mistress. I forgave him. “She has the prettiest figure you ever saw”, he declared, “and is really a dear. We had just finished when you came to the door. I said it was some mistake and she believed me. She wants me to marry her but I can’t marry. If I were rich I’d marry quick enough. It’s better than risking some foul disease”, and he went on to tell about one of his colleagues, John Lawrence, who got Black Pox, as he called syphilis, caught from a negress. “He didn’t notice it for three months”, Ponsonby went on, “and it got into his system; his nose got bad and he was invalided home, poor devil. Those black girls are foul”, he continued, “they give everyone the clap and that’s bad enough, I can tell you; they’re dirty devils.” His ruttish sorrows didn’t interest me much, for I had made up my mind never at any time to go with any prostitute. I came to several such uncommon resolutions on board that ship, and I may set down the chief of them here very briefly. First of all, I resolved that I would do every piece of work given to me as well as I could, so that no one coming after me could do it better. I had found out at school in the last term that if you gave your whole mind and heart to anything, you learned it very quickly and thoroughly. I was sure even before the trial that my first job would lead me straight to fortune. I had seen men at work and knew it would be easy to beat any of them. I was only eager for the trial.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  In that regard, she helped to clarify one of the major critiques of Black Power that precipitated the development of a clearly articulated Black feminist political stance in the ensuing years, as articulated by groups like the National Black Feminist Organization and the Combahee River Collective, and by self-described “cultural workers” like Toni Cade Bambara. The Negro Woman and Revolutionary Possibility Toni Cade Bambara took up the politics of revolution, family, and knowledge production with decidedly less ambivalence than Murray. Her 1970 collection of essays, poetry, and cultural criticism, Black Woman, offered a resounding response to the cultural and intellectual discombobulation that had framed the works of Pierce and Cruse. Exemplary of Brooks’s definition of a Negro woman intellectual, “who observes and/or claws out facts and ideas, worries them, turns them inside out, assembles them, relates them, and—on the highest level—enhances or nourishes them,” Bambara and her colleagues considered a range of issues relevant to Black women’s lives, turning them inside out, interrogating their relevance, discarding the ideas that were not useful, and offering a new set of conceptual frames for thinking and writing about Black women’s lives and organizing for Black liberation. Bambara and her comrades did not see Black women’s lives through the framework of a problem. Rather, like Cooper, they looked at Black women’s lives and their embodied experience as a space of possibility. The year 1970 was auspicious in terms of increasing Black women’s cultural and intellectual legibility. With the publication of first novels by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou’s publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the posthumous editing and publication of Ida B. Wells’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice, and the launch of Essence Magazine, Black women created a veritable Black women’s literary renaissance. Echoing the creative literary and political ferment of the early 1890s, these women challenged existing institutional categories of knowledge production, storming the gates and making a way for themselves. At the same time, the placing of Angela Davis on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List made clear the violent material conditions that Black women faced and the consequences of having Black radical politics. Bambara’s text entered into a cultural moment eager to articulate and celebrate the multiplicity of Black women’s lives. But the clarity that animates the intellectual project of Black Woman should be seen as a corrective to the crisis narrative that Harold Cruse propagated in Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. As her forebears like Williams and Terrell and Victoria Earle Matthews had done, Bambara’s introduction to Black Woman laid out an ambitious plan of study about Black women’s lives, while the essays pressed the case for a vibrant, burgeoning, politically informed, and culturally conscious Black women’s movement.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Throughout this book, I talk about the named lists of Black women that other Black women intellectuals created as a form of archive and memorial to their colleagues who joined them in the project of uplifting African American communities. It is fitting to end this study, in which I interrogate how exclusionary gender politics and conservative ideas about knowledge production continue to shape our ideas about Black intellectual life, by offering a named list of my own. These are women whose lives and work did not make it into this study in any substantive way. They are women that I encountered in various forms along the way—newly discovered archival material, a mention in a book or newspaper article, or another encounter with their already prodigious legacy—but whose lives and thought work I could not do justice to within the bounds of this study. Still they are a part of the story that this book tells. Their names and their work constitute additional markers in the intellectual genealogy and geography that this book has built, and they provide some direction as to where future scholarship might proceed: Sojourner Truth. Sarah Mapps Douglass. Hallie Quinn Brown. Jane Edna Hunter. Mary McLeod Bethune. Sadie Daniel. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander. Ella Baker. Fannie Lou Hamer. Lorraine Hansberry. Jessie Fauset. Callie House. Gertrude Elise Johnson MacDougald Ayer. Dorothy Height. Era Bell Thompson. Ellen Tarry. Claudia Jones. Fanny Jackson Coppin. Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Lucille Clifton. Maritcha Lyons. Angela Davis. Assata Shakur. Frances Beale. Patricia Roberts-Harris. The women under examination in this book and the women listed here attest that Black women’s intellectual leadership traditions are long, robust, multigenerational, and continuing. Still, the intellectual contributions of many of these women languish in relative obscurity because of an enduring politics of racial manhood that places the mantle for race leadership in the hands of men—always men—who are deemed more capable, more critical, and more appropriate. I hope that through the careful excavation of Black women’s ideas, this book reinvigorates and augments the study of Black women’s intellectual traditions pioneered by Gertrude Mossill, Victoria Earle Matthews, Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, Mary Helen Washington, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Hazel Carby, and others. Black women are serious thinkers, and it is our scholarly duty to take them seriously. NotesPrologue

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  “They can’t pick up the phone and call us,” says Jackson . . . “They can’t put their arms around us and hug us. But they can find ways to do the symbolic equivalent of those things and let us know that they are with us. And when you have that experience, when you get that sign, it becomes a truth to you and it changes the way you’re living: You know that death does not exist except for the physical and that you have a team of light rooting for you, supporting you, and guiding you at all times.” Turn your life into a treasure hunt: Pain may be loud, but reassurance is quiet. It waits for us to be aware. So whether you’re in a season of grief or peace, turn your life into a treasure hunt. Look for signs each day of the ways you are being offered love, joy, peace, and reassurance. Look for how you’ve grown during this time, how your heart has expanded and your wisdom has enriched you. Look for the continuity of the love. It’s still there. The goodness is still with you, just as real and sacred as the grief. You just have to keep searching for signs and say a silent Thank you whenever you see them. CHAPTER 9AWKWARD TIMES, AWKWARD PEOPLE [image file=image_rsrc1VT.jpg] In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers. — MR. ROGERS Awkward times create awkward people—including you. Whether you’re dealing with a full-blown crisis or you’re trying to pick up the pieces after a significant loss, there are bound to be awkward and disorienting moments with those in your circle. They will say unbelievably weird and cringey things, and you will respond in weird and cringey ways too. You’ll feel discomfort when you have to ask for help because your normal bandwidth for managing life is compromised. And you’ll endure the rawness that comes from being out in the world while your heart is bleeding. When we’re in the midst of intense change, our interpersonal exchanges are subject to change, too. The rupture gives familiar dynamics the heave-ho—cue the awkwardness. But it also provides opportunities to get comfortable with discomfort. To learn new ways to express ourselves and our needs. Yay! (Just what you wanted.) This chapter, filled with tips and real-world scenarios, is meant to help both people who are grieving as well as those who love and care for them. My hope is that we all emerge feeling a little more prepared, a little less awkward, and a lot more forgiving—of ourselves and each other.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As he began to get better on the Trail, thanks to the good air, regular exercise and absence of drink, he became obstreperous from time to time and I at any rate forgot about his ailment. The defection of the Boss made a serious difference to us; Reece and Dell with three or four Mexicans and Peggy went on slowly buying cattle; but Bob and Bent put a new scheme into my head. Bent was always preaching that the Boss’s defection had ruined Reece and that if I would put in, say five thousand dollars, I could be Reece’s partner and make a fortune with him. Bob, too, was keen on this and told me incidentally that he could get cattle from the Mexicans for nothing. I had a talk with Reece who said he’d have to be content with buying 3000 head for cattle had gone up in price twofold and the Boss’s swindle had crippled him. If I would pay Bent’s, Charlie’s and Bob’s wages, he’d be delighted, he said, to join forces with me: on Bob’s advice, I consented and with his help, I managed to secure three thousand head for little more than three thousand dollars. And this is how we managed it. For some reason or other, perhaps, because I had learnt a few words of Spanish, Bob had taken a fancy to me and was always willing to help me except when he was mad with drink. He now assured me that if I would go with him down the Rio Grande a hundred miles or so, he’d get me a thousand head of cattle for nothing. I consented, for Bent, too, and Charlie, were on Bob’s side. The next morning before sunrise we started out and rode steadily to the southeast. We carried enough food for two or three days. Bob saw to that without any question, but generally he brought us about eight o’clock near some house or other where we could get food and shelter. His knowledge of the whole frontier was as uncanny as his knowledge of cattle. On the fourth or fifth day about nine in the morning he stopped us by a little wooded height looking over a gorge of the river. To the left the river spread out almost to a shallow lake, and one did not need to be told that a little lower down there must be one or more fords where cattle could cross almost without wetting themselves.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  What does this mean for each one of us? I think it means that I must choose to define my difference as you must choose to define yours, to claim it and to use it as creative before it is defined for you and used to eradicate any future, any change. You must decide what it means to excel and to persevere beyond competence and why you do it. Or else this ability, this difference defined as good right now because it appears to promise a continuation of safety and sameness, this difference will be used to testify against your creativity, it will be used to cordon off those other differences defined/regarded as bad, improper, or threatening, those differences of race, sex, class, gender, and age, all those ways in which a profit economy defines its excess (different) people. And ultimately, it will be used to truncate your future and mine. The house of your difference is the longing for your greatest power and your deepest vulnerability. It is an indelible part of your life’s arsenal. If you allow your difference, whatever it might be, to be defined for you by imposed externals, then it will be defined to your detriment, always, for that definition must [be] dictated by the need of your society, rather than by a merging between the needs of that society and the human needs of self. But as you acknowledge your difference and examine how you wish to use it and for what—the creative power of difference explored—then you can focus it toward a future which we must each commit ourselves to in some particular way if it is to come to pass at all. This is not a theoretical discussion. I am talking here about the very fabric of your lives, your dreams, your hopes, your visions, your place upon the earth. All of these will help to determine the shape of your future as they themselves are born from your efforts and pains and triumphs of the past. Cherish them. Learn from them. Our differences are polarities between which can spark possibilities for a future we cannot even now imagine, when we acknowledge that we share a unifying vision, no matter how differently expressed; a vision which supposes a future where we may all flourish, as well as a living earth upon which to support our choices. We must define our differences so that we may someday live beyond them, rather than change them. So this is a call for each of you to remember herself and himself, to reach for new definitions of that self, and to live intensely. To not settle for the safety of pretended sameness and the false security that sameness seems to offer. To feel the consequences of who you wish to be, lest you bring nothing of lasting worth because you have withheld some piece of the essential, which is you.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  The question imposed itself: “Was I too to sink to fatness? wallow in sensuality, degrade myself for a nerve-thrill?” “No!” I cried to myself, “ten thousand times, no! No! I’ll go and seek the star-lit deserts of Truth or die on the way!” I closed the book and with it and the second volume of it in my hand went to Mrs. Trask. “I want to buy this book”, I said, “it has a message for me that I must never forget!” “I’m glad”, said the little lady smiling, “what is it?” I read her a part of the passage: “I see”, she exclaimed, “but why do you want the books?” “I want to take them with me”, I said, “I mean to leave Lawrence at once and go to Germany to study!” “Good gracious!” she cried, “how can you do that? I thought you were a partner of Sommerfeld’s; you can’t go at once!” “I must”, I said, “the ground burns under my feet: if I don’t go now, I shall never go: I’ll be out of Lawrence tomorrow!” Mrs. Trask threw up her hands and remonstrated with me: such quick decisions were dangerous; “why should I be in such a hurry?” I repeated time and again: “If I don’t go at once, I shall never go: ‘the ignoble pleasures’ will grow sweeter and sweeter to me and I shall sink gradually and drown in the mud-honey of life.” Finally seeing I was adamant and my mind fixed: she sold me the books at full price with some demur, then she added: “I almost wish I had never recommended Emerson to you!” and the dear lady looked distressed, almost on the verge of tears. “Never regret that!” I cried, “I shall remember you as long as I live because of that and always be grateful to you. Professor Smith told me I ought to go; but it needed the word of Emerson to give me the last push! The buds of poetry and science and art shall not perish in me as they have ‘perished already in a thousand, thousand men!’ Thanks to you!” I added warmly, “all my best heart-thanks: you have been to me the messenger of high fortune.” I clasped her hands, wished to kiss her, but foolishly feared to hurt her and so contented myself with a long kiss on her hand and went out at once to find Sommerfeld. He was in the office and forthwith I told him the whole story, how Smith had tried to persuade me and how I had resisted till this page of Emerson had convinced me: “I am sorry to leave you in the lurch,” I explained; but “I must go and go at once.” He told me it was madness: I could study German right there in Lawrence; he would help me with it gladly. “You mustn’t throw away a livelihood just for a word”, he cried, “it is madness, I never heard a more insane decision!”

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Start with talk therapy: Both grief and trauma need to be witnessed, and one of the most healing things we can do for ourselves and others is to tell our stories. Tell your story. Allow your feelings to move through your body: When you’re ready, explore working with body sensations to reach the unexamined parts of yourself, possibly for the very first time. Deep breaths, full-body sobs, gut-wrenching screams, ecstatic dance—whatever helps you release your emotions. Here are some therapeutic tools that may help: Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based approach to healing trauma and stress-related disorders, developed by Dr. Peter Levine. During a Somatic Experiencing session, the therapist will guide you through various physical sensations and experiences, such as breathing exercises, movements, and other techniques that help you become more attuned to your bodily experience. The therapist will also help you identify and release tension and stress from your body, using techniques such as gentle touch or guided imagery. Somatic Experiencing is a gentle, noninvasive therapy that can be helpful for a wide range of issues related to trauma and stress, including PTSD, anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. It can be particularly helpful for people who have difficulty expressing themselves in traditional talk therapy sessions. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a type of psychotherapy originally developed to treat symptoms associated with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). During an EMDR session, the therapist will ask you to recall a traumatic memory while simultaneously tracking a visual or auditory stimulus, such as the therapist’s finger moving back and forth or a series of beeps. This is thought to facilitate the processing of the memory and reduce the intensity of the associated emotions and physical sensations. EMDR is a relatively brief therapy, typically lasting between 6 and 12 sessions. EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) , also known as “tapping,” combines elements of traditional Chinese medicine with modern psychology. It’s based on the idea that negative emotions and beliefs can lead to imbalances in your body’s energy system, which in turn leads to physical and emotional symptoms. Tapping on specific acupuncture points, while addressing the root cause of distress, sends a calming signal to the brain. This allows you to feel relaxed and in control. It’s a simple and noninvasive technique that can be learned and practiced on your own. And it can be used to address a wide range of emotional and physical issues, including anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic pain, and addictions. Trust your instincts: When it comes to finding the right healing modality, trust your instincts. Your healing may need you to experiment with different techniques in order to find what clicks for you. Remember, nobody does healing better than any other. We’re all walking different roads to the same destination.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  A lush space full of all kinds of budding life—all working in harmony. Standing in that garden, we begin to realize that there’s no single choice that’s going to determine whether it’s healthy or not. Instead, there are dozens of factors that make a difference: the quality of the soil, the quality of the water, whether there’s enough sunlight, the presence or absence of pollutants, the presence or absence of nutrients, and so on. Whether you’re aware of it or not, there are dozens of decisions you make every day that help your garden either thrive or lose its vibrancy. The scientific study of the choices and conditions that determine whether your garden thrives is called epigenetics. Epi- literally means “above.” So these are the factors that have nothing to do with your genes but can still determine how they behave. Now, it’s true that your genes influence many aspects of your well-being. They’re like the seeds that were planted in your garden long before you ever got there. You had no control over those early seeds. But thankfully, those inherited seeds don’t have to determine your future. Your genes are not your destiny. Which is why self-care is health care—it’s that important. Even more so when we’re shells of our former selves. Regardless of the DNA blueprint you were born with, you can help determine where your health goes from here. Once I learned about epigenetics, I never looked back. True, cancer was still in my body, but now I had an answer as to what I could do to help. I could create an environment in my body where cancer and other diseases were less likely to thrive and health was more likely to flourish. People often ask me, “What’s one thing I can do to support my health?” My answer is always the same, whether you’re a patient or you hope to never become one: “Tend to your garden.” THE FIVE PILLARS OF WELLNESS In my online community, I teach simple practices to support what I call the Five Pillars of Wellness : the five areas that will have the biggest impact on your well-being—body, mind, and spirit. I’m going to walk you through a condensed version of the pillars to help you jump-start your own self-care practice, but if you want to go deeper, or get coaching from me, go to my website ( kriscarr.com ) for more details. The Five Pillars are as follows: being mindful of what you’re eating , drinking , and thinking , and how you’re resting and renewing . I designed this holistic approach for one very important purpose—to combat the number one garden killer: inflammation.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  That evening I sat down to the Latin grammar, and in an hour or so had learned all the declensions and nearly all the adjectives and pronouns. Next day I was trembling with hope of praise and if the form-master had encouraged me or said one word of commendation, I might have distinguished myself in the class work, and so changed perhaps my whole life; but the next day he had evidently forgotten all about my backwardness. By dint of hearing the other boys answer I got a smattering of the lessons, enough to get through them without punishment, and soon a good memory brought me among the foremost boys, though I took no interest in learning Latin. Another incident fed my self-esteem and opened to me the world of books. Vernon often went to a clergyman’s who had a pretty daughter, and I too was asked to their evening parties. The daughter found out I could recite, and soon it became the custom to get me to recite some poem everywhere we went. Vernon bought me the poems of Macaulay and Walter Scott and I had soon learned them all by heart, and used to declaim them with infinite gusto: at first my gestures were imitations of Willie’s; but Vernon taught me to be more natural and I bettered his teaching. No doubt my small stature helped the effect and the Irish love of rhetoric did the rest; but every one praised me and the showing off made me very vain and—a more important result—the learning of new poems brought me to the reading of novels and books of adventure. I was soon lost in this new world: though I played at school with the other boys, in the evening I never opened a lesson-book; but devoured Lever and Mayne Reid, Marryat and Fenimore Cooper with unspeakable delight. I had one or two fights at school with boys of my own age: I hated fighting; but I was conceited and combative and strong and so got to fisticuffs twice or three times. Each time, as soon as an elder boy saw the scrimmage, he would advise us, after looking on for a round or two, to stop and make friends. The Irish are supposed to love fighting better than eating; but my school-days assure me that they are not nearly so combative or perhaps I should say, so brutal, as the English. In one of my fights a boy took my part and we became friends. His name was Howard and we used to go on long walks together. One day I wanted him to meet Strangways, the Vicar’s son, who was fourteen but silly, I thought; Howard shook his head: “he wouldn’t want to know me”, he said, “I am a Roman Catholic.” I still remember the feeling of horror his confession called up in me: “A Roman Catholic! Could anyone as nice as Howard be a Catholic?”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I am on the cusp of change, and the curve is shifting fast. In the bleakest days I am kept afloat, maintained, empowered, by the positive energies of so many women who carry the breath of my loving like firelight in their strong hair. May 23, 1986 New York City I spoke with Andrea in New Orleans this morning. She and Diana are helping to organize a Black Women’s Book Fair. Despite its size, there is not one feminist bookstore in the whole city. She’s very excited about the project, and it was a real charge talking to her about it. There are so many young Black women across this country stepping out wherever they may be and making themselves felt within their communities in very real ways. These women make the early silence and the doubts and the wear and tear of it all worth it. I feel like they are my inheritors, and sometimes I breathe a sigh of relief that they exist, that I don’t have to do it all. It’s a two-way street, and even I don’t always realize it. Like the little sister from AA who stood up at my poetry reading last week and talked about how much courage I’d given her, and I was quaking in my boots because when she began I’d thought she was about to lay a heavy cancer rap on me in public, and I just wasn’t quite ready for that yet. I feel very humbled behind that little episode. I want to acknowledge all those intricate connections between us by which we sustain and empower each other. June 20, 1986 Bonnieux, France How incredibly rich to be here in the south of France with the Zamani Soweto Sisters from South Africa. Gloria and I became acquainted with them through Ellen Kuzwayo and our fundraising work with the Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa. They are one of the groups we help support through contributions. I’m only sorry that Ellen couldn’t be here also, but at least I had a chance to share time and space with her in London on June 16, the anniversary of the Soweto uprising. I learn tremendous courage from these women, from their laughter and their tears, from their grace under constant adversity, from their joy in living which is one of their most potent weapons, from the deft power of their large, overworked bodies and their dancing, swollen feet. In this brief respite for us all made possible by Betty Wolpert’s kindness, these women have taught me so much courage and perspective. June 21, 1986 Bonnieux

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with the renewed courage to try them out. And we must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply, and so many of our old ideas disparage. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors. For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core—the fountain—of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt—of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead—while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths. * From “Black Mother Woman,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 53.The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  5.​Openness (receptivity) Perceive even what is unpleasant in an unfettered, nonprejudiced way. 6.​Harmony (perseverance) Work toward balancing the other five. As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces—growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying—and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces. December 16, 1985 Arlesheim I brought some of my books with me, and reading The Cancer Journals in this place is like excavating words out of the earth, like turning up a crystal that has been buried at the bottom of a mine for a thousand years, waiting. Even Our Dead Behind Us—now that it has gone to the printer—seems prophetic. Like always, it feels like I plant what I will need to harvest, without consciousness. This is why the work is so important. Its power doesn’t lie in the me that lives in the words so much as in the heart’s blood pumping behind the eye that is reading, the muscle behind the desire that is sparked by the word—hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all [of] the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win. But some of them we do. December 17, 1985 Arlesheim When I read in Basel last June, I never imagined I would be here again, four miles away, in a hospital. I remember the women in the bookstore that night, and their questions about survival rates that I could not answer then. And certainly not now. Even in the bleak Swiss winter, the grounds of the Lukas Klinik are very beautiful. Much care has been given by the builders to the different shades of winter scenery, so there is a play of light and dark that hits the eye from the room’s windows as well as from the beds. My private room is good-sized, spacious by american hospital standards. It is one of the few single rooms with a private bath, and they are usually for very sick or very rich people. I think the administration was not sure which category I fit into when I called from New York. Even when it is not sunny, the room is light because everything in it is light. Not white, except for the bedsheets, but very light. Even the furniture is solid hand-hewn blond wood, made in one of the sheltered workshops run in conjunction with an anthroposophic school for developmentally handicapped people. The Rudolf Steiner schools have had great success in the area of special education.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  “Of course you won’t tell her she’s adopted,” many people said at the time she was born, most of these people the age of my parents, a generation, like that of Diana’s parents, for which adoption remained obscurely shameful, a secret to be kept at any cost. “You couldn’t possibly tell her.” Of course we could possibly tell her. In fact we had already told her. L’adoptada, m’ija. There was never any question of not telling her. What were the alternatives? Lie to her? Leave it to her agent to take her to lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel? Before too many years passed I would write about her adoption, John would write about her adoption, Quintana herself would agree to be one of the children interviewed for a book by the photographer Jill Krementz called How It Feels to Be Adopted. Over those years we had received periodic communications from women who had seen these mentions of her adoption and believed her to be their own lost daughter, women who had themselves given up infants for adoption and were now haunted by the possibility that this child about whom they had read could be that missing child. This beautiful child, this perfect child. Qué hermosa, qué chula. We responded to each of these communications, we followed up, we explained how the facts did not coincide, the dates did not tally, why the perfect child could not be theirs. We considered our role fulfilled, the case closed. Still. The recommended choice narrative did not end, as I had imagined it would (hoped it would, dreamed it would), with the perfect child placed on the table between us for lunch at The Bistro (Sidney Korshak’s corner banquette, the blue-and-white dotted organdy dress) on the hot day in September 1966 when the adoption became final. Thirty-two years later, in 1998, on a Saturday morning when she was alone in her apartment and vulnerable to whatever bad or good news arrived at her door, the perfect child received a Federal Express letter from a young woman who convincingly identified herself as her sister, her full sister, one of two younger children later born, although we had not before known this, to Quintana’s natural mother and father. At the time of Quintana’s birth the natural mother and father had not yet been married. At a point after her birth they married, had the two further children, Quintana’s full sister and brother, and then divorced. According to the letter from the young woman who identified herself as Quintana’s sister, the mother and sister lived now in Dallas. The brother, from whom the mother was estranged, lived in another city in Texas. The father, who had remarried and fathered another child, lived in Florida. The sister, who had learned from her mother only a few weeks before that Quintana existed, had determined immediately, against the initial instincts of her mother, to locate her. She had resorted to the internet.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I had no idea one could feel so badly when being “decompressed” in the airlock, but I took Anderson’s advice and got into the open as soon as I could, and by the time I had walked home in the evening and changed, I felt strong again, but the headache didn’t leave me entirely and the earache came back every now and then and to this day a slight deafness reminds me of that spell of work under water. I went into Central Park for half an hour; the first pretty girl I met reminded me of Jessie: in one week I’d be free to see her and tell her I was making good and she’d keep her promise, I felt sure; the mere hope led me to fairyland. Meanwhile nothing could take away the proud consciousness that with my five dollars I had earned two weeks’ living in a day: a month’s work would make me safe for a year. When I returned I told the Mulligans I must pay for my board, said “I’d feel better, if you’ll let me” and finally they consented, though Mrs. Mulligan thought three dollars a week too much. I was glad when it was settled and went to bed early to have a good sleep. For three or four days things went fairly well with me but on the fifth or sixth day we came on a spring of water or “gusher” and were wet to the waist before the air pressure could be increased to cope with it. As a consequence a dreadful pain shot through both my ears: I put my hands to them tight and sat still a little while. Fortunately the shift was almost over and Anderson came with me to the horse-car. “You’d better knock off”, he said, “I’ve known ’em go deaf from it.” The pain had been appalling but it was slowly diminishing and I was resolved not to give in. “Could I get a day off?” I asked Anderson: he nodded, “of course: you’re the best in the shift, the best I’ve ever seen, a great little pony.” Mrs. Mulligan saw at once something was wrong and made me try her household remedy—a roasted onion cut in two and clapped tight on each ear with a flannel bandage. It acted like magic: in ten minutes I was free of pain: then she poured in a little warm sweet oil and in an hour I was walking in the Park as usual. Still the fear of deafness was on me and I was very glad when Anderson told me he had complained to the Boss and we were to get an extra thousand feet of pure air. It would make a great difference, Anderson said, and he was right, but the improvement was not sufficient.[1]

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  For Black women, learning to consciously extend ourselves to each other and to call upon each other’s strengths is a life-saving strategy. In the best of circumstances surrounding our lives, it requires an enormous amount of mutual, consistent support for us to be emotionally able to look straight into the face of the powers aligned against us and still do our work with joy. It takes determination and practice. Black women who survive have a head start in learning how to be open and self-protective at the same time. One secret is to ask as many people as possible for help, depending on all of them and on none of them at the same time. Some will help, others cannot. For the time being. Another secret is to find some particular thing your soul craves for nourishment—a different religion, a quiet spot, a dance class—and satisfy it. That satisfaction does not have to be costly or difficult. Only a need that is recognized, articulated, and answered. There is an important difference between openness and naiveté. Not everyone has good intentions nor means me well. I remind myself I do not need to change these people, only recognize who they are. November 17, 1986 New York City How has everyday living changed for me with the advent of a second cancer? I move through a terrible and invigorating savor of now—a visceral awareness of the passage of time, with its nightmare and its energy. No more long-term loans, extended payments, twenty-year plans. Pay my debts. Call the tickets in, the charges, the emotional IOUs. Now is the time, if ever, once and for all, to alter the patterns of isolation. Remember that nice lady down the street whose son you used to cross at the light and who was always saying, “Now if there’s ever anything I can do for you, just let me know.” Well, her boy’s got strong muscles and the lawn needs mowing. I am not ashamed to let my friends know I need their collective spirit—not to make me live forever, but rather to help me move through the life I have. But I refuse to spend the rest of that life mourning what I do not have. If living as a poet—living on the front lines—has ever had meaning, it has meaning now. Living a self-conscious life, vulnerability as armor. I spend time every day meditating upon my physical self in battle, visualizing the actual war going on inside my body. As I move through the other parts of each day, that battle often merges with particular external campaigns, both political and personal. The devastations of apartheid in South Africa and racial murder in Howard Beach feel as critical to me as cancer.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I could not tie my shoes, I could not button a sweater or clip my hair off my face, the simplest acts of fastening and unfastening were now beyond me. I could no longer catch a ball. I mention the ball only because (I do not in fact normally catch balls during the course of the day) the single accurate description I would hear or read of these symptoms I was just then beginning to experience was that provided by a professional tennis player, James Blake, who, after a season of considerable stress—he had fractured a vertebra in his neck before the French Open and by the time he was healing his father was dying—woke one morning in his early twenties with similar symptoms. “Instantly, I realized just how many things were wrong,” he later wrote, in Breaking Back: How I Lost Everything and Won Back My Life, about his initial attempt to return to what had been his life. “Not only was my balance off, but my vision was messed up as well—I had a hard time tracking the ball from Brian’s and Evan’s rackets to my own. I could see them hit it, I’d sort of lose it for a moment, then suddenly it would register much closer to me. This was especially disconcerting because neither Brian nor Evan hit anywhere near as hard as the average tour player.” He tries to run right for a shot, and finds that his coordination has gone wherever his vision went. He tries to volley, just hit a few balls, and finds that the balls now hit him. He asks the neurotologist to whom he has been referred at Yale–New Haven how long he should expect these symptoms to last. “At least three months,” the neurotologist says. “Or it could take four years.” This is not what the professional tennis player wants to hear, nor is it what I want to hear. Still. I maintain faith (another word for momentum) that my own symptoms, which have continued to recur in slightly altered incarnations and have so far lasted closer to four years than to three months, will improve, lessen, even resolve. I do what I can to encourage this resolution, I follow instructions. I regularly report to Sixtieth and Madison for physical therapy. I keep the freezer stocked with Maison du Chocolat vanilla ice cream. I collect encouraging news, even focus on it. For example: James Blake has since returned to the tour. I fix on this fact. Meanwhile, like Ntozake Shange, I memorize my child’s face.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  How was I to get free? Where should I go? What should I do? One day in an illustrated paper in ’68, I read of the discovery of the diamonds in the Cape, and then of the opening of the Diamond fields. That prospect tempted me and I read all I could about South Africa, but one day I found that the cheapest passage to the Cape cost fifteen pounds and I despaired. Shortly afterwards I read that a steerage passage to New York could be had for five pounds; that amount seemed to me possible to get; for there was a prize of ten pounds for books to be given to the second in the Mathematical scholarship exam that would take place in the summer: I thought I could win that, and I set myself to study Mathematics harder than ever. The result was—but I shall tell the result in its proper place. Meanwhile I began reading about America and soon learned of the buffalo and Indians on the Great Plains and a myriad entrancing romantic pictures opened to my boyish imagining. I wanted to see the world and I had grown to dislike England; its snobbery, though I had caught the disease, was loathsome and worse still, its spirit of sordid self-interest. The rich boys were favored by all the Masters, even by Stackpole; I was disgusted with English life as I saw it. Yet there were good elements in it which I could not but see, which I shall try to indicate later. Towards the middle of this winter term it was announced that at Midsummer, besides a scene from a play of Plautus to be given in Latin, the trial scene of “The Merchant of Venice” would also be played—of course, by boys of the Fifth and Sixth form only, and rehearsals immediately began. Naturally I took out “The Merchant of Venice” from the school library and in one day knew it by heart. I could learn good poetry by a single careful reading: bad poetry or prose was much harder. Nothing in the play appealed to me except Shylock and the first time I heard Fawcett of the Sixth recite the part, I couldn’t help grinning: he repeated the most passionate speeches like a lesson in a singsong, monotonous voice. For days I went about spouting Shylock’s defiance and one day, as luck would have it, Stackpole heard me. We had become great friends: I had done all Algebra with him and was now devouring trigonometry, resolved to do Conic Sections afterwards, and then the Calculus. Already there was only one boy who was my superior and he was Captain of the Sixth, Gordon, a big fellow of over seventeen, who intended to go to Cambridge with the eighty Pound Mathematical Scholarship that summer.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Objection 3: Further, every finite thing can, by continual increase, attain to the quantity of another finite thing however much greater, unless the amount of its increase be ever less and less. Thus the Philosopher states (Phys. iii, 6) that if we divide a line into an indefinite number of parts, and take these parts away and add them indefinitely to another line, we shall never arrive at any definite quantity resulting from those two lines, viz. the one from which we subtracted and the one to which we added what was subtracted. But this does not occur in the case in point: because there is no need for the second increase of charity to be less than the first, since rather is it probable that it would be equal or greater. As, therefore, the charity of the blessed is something finite, if the charity of the wayfarer can increase indefinitely, it would follow that the charity of the way can equal the charity of heaven; which is absurd. Therefore the wayfarer’s charity cannot increase indefinitely. On the contrary, The Apostle says (Phil. 3:12): “Not as though I had already attained, or were already perfect; but I follow after, if I may, by any means apprehend,” on which words a gloss says: “Even if he has made great progress, let none of the faithful say: ‘Enough.’ For whosoever says this, leaves the road before coming to his destination.” Therefore the wayfarer’s charity can ever increase more and more. I answer that, A term to the increase of a form may be fixed in three ways: first by reason of the form itself having a fixed measure, and when this has been reached it is no longer possible to go any further in that form, but if any further advance is made, another form is attained. And example of this is paleness, the bounds of which may, by continual alteration, be passed, either so that whiteness ensues, or so that blackness results. Secondly, on the part of the agent, whose power does not extend to a further increase of the form in its subject. Thirdly, on the part of the subject, which is not capable of ulterior perfection. Now, in none of these ways, is a limit imposed to the increase of man’s charity, while he is in the state of the wayfarer. For charity itself considered as such has no limit to its increase, since it is a participation of the infinite charity which is the Holy Ghost. In like manner the cause of the increase of charity, viz. God, is possessed of infinite power. Furthermore, on the part of its subject, no limit to this increase can be determined, because whenever charity increases, there is a corresponding increased ability to receive a further increase. It is therefore evident that it is not possible to fix any limits to the increase of charity in this life.