Your words are the greatest power you have. The words you choose and their use establish the life you experience.
One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory. . . Powerful and profoundly moving.
Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.
In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.
We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in.
I wonder what my father saw in his most secret sight of the right life. It's my guess he wanted to live out his life surrounded by friends and children and fertile fields of his own designing. I tihnk he wanted to die believing he had been in one the creation of a good sweet place. Those old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a far away place where decent people could escape the wreckage of the old world and start over. Come to me, the dream whispers, and you can have one more chance.
I want to think I deserve what I get. I don't want to consider how vastly I am overly rewarded. I don't want to consider the injustices around me. I don't want any encounters with the disenfranchised. I want to say it's not my fault. But it is, it's yours and mine, and ours. We'd better figure out ways to spread some equity around if we want to go on living in a society that is at least semi-functional. It's a fundamental responsibility, to ourselves.
Towards the end of Coexist, we had a couple of short tours where, although we were on the road together, we weren't speaking very much. We were there to do a job, and once the show was done we'd go our separate ways to our hotel rooms. Those were some of my unhappiest moments. Stepping offstage and, within an hour, being in a hotel room alone is the most crazy feeling. I don't know how to really explain it. I felt just lost and confused. It's anticlimactic and you just feel really lonely.
Some sang too that Thror and Thrain would come back one day and gold would flow in rivers, through the mountain-gates, and all that land would be filled with new song and new laughter. But this pleasant legend did not much affect their daily business.
The Circle had been less than thrilled by its choice, but we'd finally come to terms. As in, they were no longer trying to play Whac-A-Mole with my head. Only now they seemed to think they had the right to make sure that nobody else did, either. That was a problem, because the vampires felt the same way and the Senate didn't share well.
Smile at each other. Smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other- it doesn't matter who it is- and that will help to grow up in greater love for each other.