#cult

Growth is an unavoidable part of life. Whether we mean for it to happen or not, our bodies continually nourish and regenerate themselves, our minds continually learn and expand, and our lives continually evolve. We have the power to craft our growth the way a landscaper crafts a majestic garden, or we can leave it to chance, allowing it to unfold wild as the weeds that spread across a vacant lot. ↗

— Scott Edmund Miller

#growth #life

People from context cultures tend to view personal bonds and informal agreements as far more binding than any formal contract. People from content cultures don't believe the deal is finalized until everyone has signed on the dotted line. And therein lies the potential for conflict. ↗

— Carol Kinsey Goman

#promises #words #science

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#despair #difficulty #fear #optimism #poetry

Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges the context of human work. Contexts become wrong by being too small - too small, that is, to contain the scientist or the farmer or the farm family or the local ecosystem or the local community - and this is crucial. ↗

— Wendell Berry

#community #context #husbandry #family

Nothing in this world compares to the comfort and security of having someone just hold your hand. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#difficulties #grief #hardships #holding-hands #life

Today, if you pay a[n US] dollar for a pound of apples in the supermarketm only about six cents covers the farmwork used to get it there; (...) ↗

— Tracie McMillan

#food #systemic-devaluation-of-labour #food

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...]. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#culture #literature #culture

They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda's family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures. ↗

— Thomas McGuane

#pleasures #pop-culture #popular-culture #family

Commercial agriculture can survive within pluralistic American society, as we know it - if the farm is rebuilt on some of the values with which it is popularly associated: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community. To sustain itself, commercial agriculture will have to reorganize its social and economic structure as well as its technological base and production methods in a way that reinforces these values. ↗

— Marty Strange

#community #farming #family

And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107). ↗

— Cornel West

#democracy #poverty #race #life