Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving
“…and my whole being is aching for a green, silent spot…”
— Kahlil Gibran, in a letter to Mary Haskell, from Beloved Prophet: The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, and her private journal
hooks likes to talk about “seasons of life,” and help her students learn to make choices that are not absolute—I am a this or a that forever—but that go along with the season. So, what would bell hooks like to do with her next season, this season of balancing and appreciating the earth? “I would like to spend more time than I already am helping individuals resolve the difficulties in their lives through love,” she says. “I would like to bring the work of mindfulness and awareness to everyday struggles. The most important field of activism, particularly for black people, is mental health. Activism does not need to be some kind of organized ‘against’ protest. When my students say they want to change the world, I espouse an inward to outward movement. If you feel that you can’t do shit about your own reality, how can you really think you could change the world? And guess what? When you’re fucked-up and you lead the revolution, you are probably going to get a pretty fucked-up revolution.”
hooks loves houses. She likes to renovate them and make them beautiful, and when it comes to summing up what she’s about, that’s the image she chooses. “For a house to be truly beautiful it has to have a strong foundation,” she says. “For us, that means finding the ground of our being, the place where we discover ourselves. Our foundation of self-invention does not preclude community. In genuine community there is lots of difference. We all make our contribution from a place of difference, not sameness. It is difficult to find the place where difference can exist in a context of harmony, where it is not necessary to dominate, but that is our foundation, the ground of our being. It’s where we start.”
“If you will grant me one vivid morning, I can chain it to me for fifty years.”
— William Stafford, from Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems, eds. Vincent Wixon and Paul Merchant (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014)
I love this clip