a growing heap of gifts
a short offering from Rebecca Solnit
The world you live in is not a given; much of what is best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties. Count those gifts among your growing heap.
Rebecca Solnit, The Sky's The Limit
The link above is to her essay by the same name written nearly ten years ago, when we were leaving 2012 to 2013 and some major windows to stop the racial, gendered, and class effects of the climate crisis were bearing down. This essay is about hope, and the fruits of what living a life that looks out for one’s neighbor and world reward us with.
It is also about how, in Solnit’s words, the end reward of many of these battles looks like nothing. It’s the land that isn’t destroyed. The Black communities that aren’t asked to bear the medical risks of being in a climate-poor area. The children who do not get poisoned.
Today is a good day to think about what you love. And what you might be willing to do to keep it. It’s time, in the words of Wendell Berry, to perhaps lose our minds so that no one finds us, and tricks us into the kind of complacency and lack of care that kills.