people

The world is not threatened by evil people, but by those who allow evil to take place.

Children will draw pictures with everything in them...houses and trees and people and animals...and the sun AND the moon.  Grown-up says, "That's a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn't right."  But the child is right!  The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.

The green economy should not just be about reclaiming throw-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not just be about recycling things to give them a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance.

Keep from prying into other people's affairs, for such prying gives occasion for slander, judgment, and other grievous sins. Why do you need to be concerned about others? Know and examine your own self.

"Sometimes God allows a relative or fellow worker to cause us problems in order to exercise our patience and humbleness; however, instead of being grateful for the chance God gives us, we react and refused to be cured.  It is like refusing to pay the doctor who is giving us a shot when we are ill."

Father Paisios Eznepides (+1994)

You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you.  You have to go to them sometimes.

There are as many loves as there are people.

For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines, a world of textures, tastes and sounds other than those that we have engineered, there can be no question of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves – to the green uttering forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page in inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that lace us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs – letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.

To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization.