and then there are days when the simple act of breathing
leaves you exhausted. it seems easier to give up on this life.
the thought of disappearing brings you peace. for so long i
was lost in a place where there was no sun. where there grew
no flowers. but every once in a while out of the darkness
something i loved would emerge and bring me to life again.
witnessing a starry sky. the lightness of laughing with old
friends. a reader who told me the poems had saved their life.
yet there i was struggling to save my own. my darlings.
living is difficult. it is difficult for everybody. and it is at that
moment when living feels like crawling through a pin-sized
hole. that we must resist the urge of succumbing to bad
memories. refuse to bow before bad months or bad years.
cause our eyes are starving to feast on this world. there are
so many turquoise bodies of water left for us to dive in. there
is family. blood or chosen. the possibility of falling in love.
with people and places. hills high as the moon. valleys that
roll into new worlds. and road trips. i find it deeply
important to accept that we are not the masters of this place.
we are her visitors. and like guests let’s enjoy this place like
a garden. let us treat it with a gentle hand. so the ones after
us can experience it too. let’s find our own sun. grow our
own flowers. the universe delivered us with the light and the
seeds. we might not hear it at times but the music is always
on. it just needs to be turned louder. for as long as there is
breath in our lungs—we must keep dancing.
Sayfa 240Kitabı okudu
The alliance with Pakistan, sealed with a handshake by George W. Bush, is hardly an outlier. Take the impossible-to-satirize situation with a major organ of American foreign policy that enjoys longstanding, bi-partisan support: foreign aid. Where do $28-odd-billion go every year? To countries where many, many people view us as an “enemy.” The Pew Global Attitudes Survey queried more than 325,000 people in 60 countries that receive U.S. aid. It asked whether they saw America as more of a “partner,” or more of an “enemy” (or neither). The countries with the highest percentage of respondents who viewed us as an “enemy” were also among those receiv-ing significant amounts of U.S.-backed aid: the Palestinian territories (76 percent of respondents saw us as an “enemy”), Pakistan (64 percent), Turkey (49 percent), Lebanon (46 percent), Venezuela (39 percent).
So, yes, we are the world’s mightiest nation, but we serve as a global ATM for people hostile to us and our interests. We spend years chasing down Osama Bin Laden and fighting his minions in Afghanistan, while at the same time we support Pakistan’s jihadist-enabling regime. Look broadly and deeply at American foreign policy, and you will find it crowded with many more instances of the same depressing theme. When considered as a whole, American foreign policy does not add up to a whole. It is a bewildering mish-mash of diverging, inconsistent goals. It lacks a unifying, guiding principle.
Sayfa 170
The two circuits begin in the same place, but the desire circuit ends in a part of the brain that triggers excitement and enthusiasm, while the control circuit goes to the frontal lobes, a part of the brain that specializes in logical thinking.
In this way, both circuits give us the capacity to consider “phantoms”—things that don’t physically exist. For desire dopamine, those phantoms are things we wish to have but don’t have right now—things we want in the future. For control dopamine, the phantoms are the building blocks of imagination and creative thought: ideas, plans, theories, abstract concepts such as mathematics and beauty, and worlds yet to be.
Architecture does not make us inhabit worlds of mere fabrication and fantasy; it articulates the experience of our being-in the-world and strengthens our sense of reality and self.
Sayfa 12 - The sense of self, strengthened by art and architecture, also permits us to engage fully in the mental dimensions of dream, imagination and desire.
What do you hear when you hear the word feminism? It is a word that fills me with hope, with energy. It brings to mind loud acts of refusal and rebellion as well as the quiet ways we might have of not holding on to things that diminish us. It brings to mind women who have stood up, spoken back, risked lives, homes, relationships in the struggle for more bearable worlds. It brings to mind books written, tattered and worn, books that gave words to something, a feeling, a sense of an injustice, books that, in giving us words, gave us the strength to go on. Feminism: how we pick each other up. So much history in a word; so much it too has picked up.
