If We Wish To Stop

It's No Wonder We Don't Defend The Land Where We Live. We Don't Live Here. We Live In Television Programs And Movies And Books And With Celebrities And In Heaven And By Rules And Laws And Abstractions Created By People Far Away And We Live Anywhere And Everywhere Except In Our Particular Bodies On This Particular Land At This Particular Moment In These Particular Circumstances.

When Dams Were Erected On The Columbia, Salmon Battered Themselves Against The Concrete, Trying To Return Home. I Expect No Less From Us. We Too Must Hurl Ourselves Against And Through The Literal And Metaphorical Concrete That Contains And Constrains Us, That Keeps Us From Talking About What Is Most Important To Us, That Keeps Us From Living The Way Our Bones Know We Can, That Bars Us From Our Home. It Only Takes One Person To Bring Down A Dam.

I Think It's Very Important For Us To Start To Build A Culture Of Resistance, Because What We're Doing Isn't Working, Clearly.

A Language Older Than Words

But What, Precisely, Is Hope? At A Talk I Gave Last Spring, Someone Asked Me To Define It. I Turned The Question Back On The Audience, And Here’s The Definition We All Came Up With: Hope Is A Longing For A Future Condition Over Which You Have No Agency; It Means You Are Essentially Powerless.