We need to desire, not fear, the future.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

from a longer poem by Mary Oliver

Here we stand at the beginning of another year, an open book in front of us. We think we know most of  what it holds. After all, we are elderly, we have seen it before. And yet. Isn't it terrible that the only utopia we can offer the younger generation is the prevention of a catastrophe. Pretending all is well we wrap our world in absorbent cotton that leaves out everything that contradicts it. 

We need to remain sober, patient people who do not despair in the face of the worst horrors and do not get excited about every stupidity. And we have to want to win. We need the best strategy, the best people, the best policies, we need all our strength, resistance energy and must not shy away from getting our fingers dirty.

There is hardly a group that has as much influence on world history as the indifferent. And the remarkable thing is that nobody speaks of them. Their passivity has made the most radical upheavals possible. The indifferent accept everything as it comes. They are neither in favour nor against.

The indifferent are almost more dangerous than  ideologues because they are difficult to predict and just as difficult to track down when they disappear after a disaster they have caused.  It is often said that the indifferent make it easy for themselves by looking the other way when things become inhumane and then playing the innocent lamb afterwards. But as an indifferent, you have to make an extreme effort to repress and fight against all the humanity within you that has not yet died off.

Being committed is not synonymous with a dangerous, pleasureless life, quite the opposite. It is a dynamic life in which boredom has no place, the brain is always active and the antennae become sensitive to a better future, which helps not to destroy the present, the mother of the future. We all know those moments when we want to say: As an individual you can't do anything anyway, and anyway I can't see through it any more...?! These are excuses. Of course the situation is confusing, and anyone who gets involved can also fail. But this risk,  is simply part of it.

Rafik Shami

 

These days, I don’t imagine a different planet; I imagine what ours could look like if we collectively acknowledged its loss. To clock what is gone is to clock all we can still save. A world where we are mad, but we’re working out of love.

Erica Berry

 

If we save the world, a big old hypothetical ‘if’, what was the reason that we did that? If we did it because of fear, what happens when the fear is gone? But if we save the world because of wonder, wonder persists after the danger is gone. We’ll be more likely to protect future generations again and again afterwards.

Dara McAnulty

   

 One of the few things I have learned in the short time I have been alive is the reliability of patience.

Devin Kelly

 

It needs to energize us with a rage
that roars unchecked through the blood
and bring us begging to our knees;
this planet is the only place we have to live,
this one small foothold
we need to fall in love with it again.

See it exotic and wonderful,
pick up the loose stitches, tether ourselves
even tighter to the sky, perfume the wind
with the smell of lust, pour ourselves
into the sea. We must take root
in the aquamarines, the greens, and endless
violet sunsets living at the end of love.

from a longer poem by Jean O'Brien