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Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing
Sy Safransky's Notebook
March 2003
Middle age has been awkward, like adolescence, something to get through. Like a teenager walking out the door for the first time with his father’s car keys, I’m learning what it’s like to be old.
Quotations
Sunbeams
When, at some point in our lives, we meet a real tragedy — which could happen to any one of us — we can react in two ways. Obviously, we can lose hope, let ourselves slip into discouragement, into alcohol, drugs, and unending sadness. Or else we can wake ourselves up, discover in ourselves an energy that was hidden there, and act with more clarity, more force.
The Sun Interview
Louder Than Words
Starhawk On Street Activism And Global Justice
It’s always a good time to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. There is a future clearly laid out for us in which decision-making power belongs to those who have the money, and their decisions will support short-term profit value, making every other human and natural value subordinate to it. We will have less and less freedom, less and less of the services we need to sustain life and community, less and less of all the things people really care about and love.
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Cure We Wait For
But there is no time for mind games: chemo and radiation, both necessary, my doctor insists. I leave his office in a daze, knowing that cancer is an enemy to fear, yet not wanting to be afraid of anything. I wonder how deep inside me the answers to my pending decisions are buried. Part of me knows that the cure goes beyond what their weapons can touch, that I must search for it from the inside out.
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Yes, You Are a Revolutionary!
Most people say, “I am not a revolutionary. I am merely a liberal,” or, “I am not a revolutionary. I am just a Republican.” Nonsense. Anyone can be a revolutionary. Just follow these simple steps.
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Webs Of Power
Notes From The Global Uprising
We have been blockading all day in a giant spider web: an intersection entirely surrounded by webs of yarn that effectively prevent movement into the street. The intersection is held by a cluster from Asheville, North Carolina, that includes many labor-union members. We are blockading arm in arm with the ecofeminist Teamsters. In front of the police barricade, a group of protesters are “locked down”: sitting in a line with their arms chained together.
Fiction
Don’t Come Crying Home To Me
Dying looks a lot like being born, I think standing over him, my fingers resting gently on his broad back. The contractions come in waves. Each time they are more intense, start earlier, last longer. Only now the body itself is the womb you leave behind.
Fiction
Hunger
Boarding school is like purgatory, or prison — being sent away to wait. That’s mainly what I do: wait for time to pass. There are five more hours to supper, and I’m hungry already. I’m up here in an empty classroom, writing in my diary when I’m supposed to be studying, ’cause it’s one week till finals. Three more long weeks, then home, home at last.
