Category: Art and Culture

 

 

There are those people in your life who you have yet to meet, whose words reached out to you from worn pages of a friend’s book you found as an interesting note on the floor. The words that rang through your Self like the gong of a bell echoing off the rocks of your foundation.  So that nothing else will ever sound quite the same. Their printed voice changed the songs you sing and the levels that you hear. Sometimes, in the purest of luck, you get to meet this person. You get to ask them how they are doing today. You get to listen to their voice speak like music playing notes right off the page and you get to sit down and ask them questions. If I were you, or maybe, if you were me… That person would be, Derrick Jensen and this, is the luckiest of days.

“We have a need for enchantment that is as deep and devoted as our need for food and water.”
― Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

“Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.”
― Derrick Jensen

“In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absurdity as normal, or to not see it at all. Each new child has his eyes torn out so he will not see, his ears removed so he will not hear, his tongue ripped out so he will not speak, his mind juiced so he will not think, and his nerves scraped so he will not feel. Then he is released into a world broken in two: others, like himself, and those to be used. He will never realize that he still has all of his senses, if only he will use them. If you mention to him that he still has ears, he will not hear you. If he hears, he will not think. Perhaps most dangerously of all, if he thinks he will not feel. And so on, again.”
― Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

“I had broken the most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong.”
― Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

“So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.”
― Derrick Jensen, What We Leave Behind

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