“In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, becomes uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings.”  --Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, p. 176)

“What’s important to us remains the same. It’s that inside stuff: the need for love and acceptance, and getting to know yourself and your place in the world.”  --Judy Blume

We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a “narrative,” and that this narrative is us, our identities.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask “what is his story — his real, inmost story?” — for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us — through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique...

To be ourselves we must have ourselves — possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

--Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

“The deaf don't believe in silence. Silence is the invention of the hearing.”  --Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

"The first time we begin to listen to the cries of those whose strength has been silenced is the first time we refuse to be deafened by dictatorship."  --Prentiss Cooper, “Therefore We Refuse to Listen to the Poets”: Plato, Kaminsky, College Radio, and the Radical Act of Listening to Poetry in a Cynical Republic"

https://medium.com/student-contest-winners/therefore-we-refuse-to-listen-to-the-poets-plato-kaminsky-college-radio-and-the-radical-act-1e92464526a7  (last accessed 12-25-25)

“Silence = violence” 

“Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.”  --Ilya Kaminsky

Enemy love is not a strategy. It’s a formation path that most of us resist until life makes it unavoidable…

Enemy love is less about converting our enemies and more about refusing to let hatred convert us.

It disarms us.

It interrupts our drift toward fear, cynicism, and contempt.

It keeps us human…

Enemy love doesn’t pretend harmful systems are harmless.

It doesn’t excuse abuse, silence truth, or shrink from confrontation.

It simply insists that we can resist injustice without losing our souls.

In this moment, this polarized, bruised, anxious moment, enemy love is not optional. 

It is the narrow path by which we keep our hearts from hardening into the very thing we’re trying to resist.

Friends, the world doesn’t need more enemies.

It needs more people courageous enough to stay tender.

It needs more people who practice the dangerous, disruptive, unreasonably hopeful work of loving those who don’t love us back.

Not to win. But to become more whole.

--Jer Swigart, “Enemy Love Is Not a Strategy,” Dec 11, 2025.

https://hopefulalternative.substack.com/p/enemy-love-is-not-a-strategy  (Accessed 12-23-25)

 

"Once you perceive what lies beneath the surface, once you glimpse the truth behind the polite illusion, you are faced with a terrible choice: do you speak or do you remain silent?

If you speak, you disturb the dream. If you remain silent you disturb your soul.

This is not a simple dilemma. It's an ancient tension between truth and belonging, between authenticity and acceptance. When you speak, when you dare to name what others deny, you risk being cast out—and not always gently."

—Alan Watts

“They murdered folks in Alabama, they shot Medgar in the back.

Did you say that wasn’t proper, did you stand out on the track?

You were quiet just like mice. Now, you say that we’re not nice.”

— “It isn’t nice,” civil rights movement song 

"I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

"Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."  --Oliver Sacks