Despair Is Easy, Or At Least Low

They Are All Beasts Of Burden In A Sense, ' Thoreau Once Remarked Of Animals, 'made To Carry Some Portion Of Our Thoughts.' Animals Are The Old Language Of The Imagination; One Of The Ten Thousand Tragedies Of Their Disappearance Would Be A Silencing Of This Speech.

Walking Shares With Making And Working That Crucial Element Of Engagement Of The Body And The Mind With The World, Of Knowing The World Through The Body And The Body Through The World.

There's Enough Food In This World. There's Enough Housing In This World. There's Enough Shelter In This World. There's Enough Clothing In This World. There's Enough Teachers, There's Enough Universities For Everybody's Needs To Be Met, And The Reasons They Aren't Is Not Because Of Lack Of Resources. It's Because Of Distribution, And That's The Politics Of Hate, Which Is Why This Is A Movement Against That. It's A Politics Of Love.

What's Your Story? It's All In The Telling. Stories Are Compasses And Architecture; We Navigate By Them, And To Be Without A Story Is To Be Lost In The Vastness Of World That Spreads In All Directions Like Arctic Tundra Or Sea Ice. To Love Someone Is To Put Yourself In Their Place, We Say, Which Is To Put Yourself In Their Story, Or Figure Out How To Tell Yourself Their Story. Which Means That A Place Is A Story, And Stories Are Geography, And Empathy Is First Of All An Act Of Imagination, A Storyteller's Art, And Then A Way Of Traveling From Here To There.

Getting Lost Was Not A Matter Of Geography So Much As Identity, A Passionate Desire, Even An Urgent Need, To Become No One And Anyone, To Shake Off The Shackles That Remind You Who You Are, Who Others Think You Are.