2015 DieWiseAManifestoforSanityandSo

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Subject Headings: Grief, Loss, Death, Palliative Care, Cult of the Individual.

Notes

Cited By

Quotes

Abstract

“When your focus is on how you feel about things in the world then the things of the world slip from view, your little boat of learning things for what they are are swamped by the swells of how you feel about them. With hard work and with learning, the things of the world are still somehow out there, waiting for you to know about them, no matter how you feel. They survive how you feel about them and they are there before and after the storms of your feelings roar through and abate. Feelings aren't much of a compass to go by.”

“Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born.”

“Grief is not a feeling it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you, we are not on the receiving end of grief we are on the practising end of grief.”

“Dying is active. Dying is not what happens to you. Dying is what you do. Dying”

“We should be able to tell the difference between dying and being killed.”

“The horror of slavery is this: You can sit beside a slave, you can speak the same language, even obey the same laws. You can eat the same food. You both can weep and love your children and miss your dead. But you are a human being, and he or she is not. Slaves are property, and human beings are property holders. The power of slavery to corrupt a person’s capacity to know themselves as worthy, as belonging in the world, as made by the Makers of Life, is beyond reckoning, and this is comparable only to its power to corrode the ability of slave owners or of those who live off the avails of historical slavery to honor their ancestors or to know themselves as coming from honorable people. It is the undoing of humanity, nothing less, as we are about to see. It is the ushering in of oblivion.”

“Anthropologists who study the wretched consequence of conquest, language loss, and ethnic cleansing say that it only takes two generations of rupture to sever the chord binding people to their ancestors and their ability to be at Home.”

“Specifically it means learning the ways that place has of being itself: This is what I mean by obedience. It means having an enduring recognition and knowledge of a specific place and finding your clan identity in that endurance. And there is something more, something unsuspected and fundamental that the doctor’s question has been leading us to. Being at home in a given place means recognizing the rocks, the plants, the winds, and the waters and stars of that place in your own body, and your body in the rocks, the plants, the winds, and the waters and stars of that place. It means more than having memories associated with a given place. It means learning again how you and those you love and admire, in every physical, metabolic, chemical, mythical, and spiritual sense it can be meant, are made of the things that make the place you belong to. That is the alchemy of belonging. This is where home comes from.”

“of why we are born, what our life means, why we die as we do. The right to control our own death, tragically, is all that our Religion of Self has left us.”

“There are no great answers, you could say, but only great questions made greater when their answerers are nobly defeated by the awe and mystery of the way things are.”

“The realization and the humbling power of knowing that life is not a human thing could go a long way toward making us human.”

“Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have. Hopeless is the collapse of that refusal, and it looks a lot like depression”

“The Old Hurt. A noble thing, highly prized, the root of all functioning ritual. And that hurt is something no Celt would dream of being without, it’s the very weft and weave of true culture. It’s nothing to do with clinging to grievance, rather wearing certain hard-earned melancholies like a cloak. To those with eyes to behold it, it’s the essential markings of an elder. And we are drowning in its deficit. After twenty years of initiatory work in the wilds of Snowdonia, I recognize its cadence immediately. Its gorgeous and unusual scent.”

References

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 AuthorvolumeDate ValuetitletypejournaltitleUrldoinoteyear
2015 DieWiseAManifestoforSanityandSoS. JenkinsonDie Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul2015