“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Wendell Berry in Openings: Poems by Wendell Berry

“If we want our actions to add to the building of a new culture even while resolving the issue at hand, we should not hesitate to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing, to anyone who will listen. The point is not that they’ll immediately ‘get it’: the point is that this is how paradigms change: through repetition that slowly builds up and becomes the new normal.”

Michael Nagler, The Third Harmony