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In A Broken World

Scott Russell Sanders On Resisting Despair

When I feel so much grief over the woundedness and brokenness of the world that I lose the power or the desire to go on, I turn to members of my family for consolation. Another thing that moves me out of a state of grief is beauty, in all its forms: in nature, in the face of someone you love, in music, in language, in scientific formulas, and in images of remote constellations beamed down from the Hubble space telescope. Beauty reminds me that all the grief, all the loss, all the sadness that is terribly meaningful to me, personally, is just a dust mote in the grand scheme of things. It’s tiny, ephemeral.

Talking To Trees

A doctor, so angry at the inconvenience of being called in to suture a suicidal prisoner’s wrists, said, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t do that again,” and sewed him up without anesthetic. That doctor was employed by the state to cut medical costs. He still is.

Sunbeams

The Middle Ages hangs over history’s belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size forty-eight shorts forever.

Tom Robbins

Sunbeams

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go — if there are no doors or windows — he walks through a wall.

Bernard Malamud

Love, Work, Hope

For the novelty of it, I had agreed to work construction for a day with my brother Neil. I was kneeling on a roof, driving a nail into a piece of plywood, but after each hit, the nail went crooked and fell out. I began to get discouraged. Neil, standing nearby, instructed me to “pound harder.” So I did, but I still couldn’t drive it straight. My shoulders collapsed, and I wriggled in babyish frustration. Neil took two steps toward me, kissed me directly below my right ear, and knocked the nail in with one swing. And I thought, I want a man like that.

Ursa Minor

Nobody could remember a time when there had been so many bears in the valley, not even the old-timers who had lived there all of their lives. It was early fall, and the weather was turning. We’d had the worst summer of fires in many years, and endured our ninth year of drought. In the high country of Idaho, the berry bushes were brown, and the streams had dried up. Hungry and facing the prospect of winter, the bears began moving down into the valleys.

Foot Soldier

The Long Walk For Justice And Peace — A Conversation With Satish Kumar

The central realization that pulled me away from monkhood was that there is no escaping from life; the spirit has to be practiced in the everyday world, and not outside of it. The world is beautiful — the earth, the land, the people — and you have to accept even pain and suffering as part of that beauty. That realization threw me into the social, political, economic, cultural arena. It convinced me that wholeness of life is paramount.

Dry Roots

The wheat is starting to turn, flashes of deep gold streaking through all that tall, waving green. Before we moved to Colorado, I used to think wheat grew golden yellow, like in all the photos I’d seen. I suspect most city folk think that. They don’t realize that wheat grows up green and living and then dies, and that’s when it becomes useful.

Incidents And Dreams

We ought to be glad for change. You want to tip your hat to anything that slits open the seams of your life, even just a sliver’s width, allowing for the possibility of minor rearrangement. You want to bow and curtsy, even if you cannot give the thing a name.

Sunbeams

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart